I remember how it was -- JR
As More Schools Reopen, CDC Now Says Students Can Sit Just 3 Feet Apart
As more schools around the country move toward reopening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidance Friday, saying that K-12 students may sit 3 feet apart instead of 6 feet—as long as they wear masks.
That’s regardless of whether the children are in “areas of low, moderate, or substantial community transmission” of the COVID-19 virus, the CDC said.
The previous COVID-19 guidelines of 6 feet of social distancing limited how many students some schools could teach in person. Some schools had to remove desks, provide flexible schedules, and seat students one child per row on buses to accommodate those guidelines.
Some schools also had to stop using lockers and remake schedules for when different grades could move through the halls, where maintaining any distance at all can be difficult.
The CDC said it still recommends at least 6 feet of distance between adults in schools and between adults and students.
The agency’s newest guidance comes a week after it said that children as young as 2 years old in day care should wear masks, “even after child care providers and staff are vaccinated” against COVID-19—despite studies showing that children contract the virus at far lower rates compared with adults.
In its March 12 update, the CDC also urged that each child’s toys at day care facilities be kept separate. “Do not share toys with other groups of infants or toddlers, unless they are washed and sanitized before being moved from one group to the other,” it said.
Despite outdoor activities being safer than those indoors, the CDC also said that jungle gyms, swing sets, tricycles, and the like “pose a risk for spreading COVID-19.”
“Stagger your use of playgrounds and play spaces by reducing the group size in the play area at one time or remaining in cohorted groups while sanitizing shared objects and high-touch surfaces between groups,” the CDC said, adding that children should be separated—using fences, if necessary—into smaller groups.
The March 12 guidance conflicted in at least one respect with the CDC’s prior statements about vaccines. The CDC had said previously that all vaccines available in the United States are “highly effective at preventing COVID-19,” while the later report said that even if an adult is vaccinated, he or she would still need to wear a mask.
The CDC has told Americans “that vaccines are ‘efficacious and effective’ against ‘asymptomatic infection’ and that they ‘substantially reduce’ transmission risk,” said Doug Badger, a visiting fellow in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation with expertise in public health.
“Cases among preschool children are rare, serious cases are rarer still, and studies show that children under 10 are unlikely to infect family members,” Badger said. “The risk of transmission is not zero, but it is low.”
“Applying severe restrictions to immunized people poses a greater public health risk—that people will refuse vaccinations,” he said
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Surveillance State Schoolrooms
Los Angeles schools have a plan for detailed tracking of all students and teachers.
Just when one might think a union-controlled school system couldn’t get more arrogant and demanding — after keeping the overwhelming majority of students out of schools for over a year — the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) proves one wrong. As a condition of reopening its schools on April 9, each student will be required to have a COVID tracking app called Daily Pass, which will be scanned each day before students can enter the classroom.
This in a state that doesn’t require ID for voting.
“Sort of like the golden ticket in ‘Willy Wonka,’ everyone with this pass can easily get into a school building,” LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner stated during his weekly update on February 22.
Willy Wonka? Try George Orwell, as the level of intrusiveness is breathtaking. The app, developed with support from Microsoft, generates a unique quick response (QR) code for each student and staff member. When an individual arrives on campus, his or her QR code is scanned by a district school-site leader, who takes the individual’s temperature. Provided the individual tests negative for coronavirus, shows no symptoms, and has a temperature under 100 degrees, he or she is authorized to enter a specific LAUSD location — for that day only.
And since a section on the Daily Pass portal also pressures students and staffers to get vaccinated, it will be used to register and schedule appointments, track the stock of vaccines, perform check-in and data capture at the time of those appointments, identify and sort high-risk individuals, and offer waitlists to low-risk individuals along with dashboards to view data. Anonymous data from the app will also be shared by several Los Angeles Unified research and healthcare collaborators, including Anthem Blue Cross, Cedars Sinai, Healthnet, Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Johns Hopkins University, ostensibly as an effort to create the safest school environment possible.
“The Daily Pass sets the highest standard possible for school safety,” Beutner boasts. “MERV-13 upgraded air filters in every school, COVID testing for all students and staff at least every week and now the Daily Pass — Los Angeles Unified is proud to lead the nation in creating the safest possible school environment.”
Yet despite it all, students will still be required to wear masks, socially distance, undergo regular temperature checks, and endure additional screening and surveillance — because the Daily Pass will not catch people who are asymptomatic carriers of the virus. Nonetheless, these and other requirements developed by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) were released by the district in a document titled “COVID-19 and Reopening In-Person Instruction Framework & Public Health Guidance for K-12 Schools in California, 2020-2021 School Year.”
There is also a cartoon video promoting the app. It opens with a child character, Racquel Ramirez, who is fearful about returning to school. “Mom, I’m scared about going back to school,” she says. “I don’t wanna get sick and I don’t wanna get you and Dad sick.” The Daily Pass is then introduced as the solution for “safely going back to school,” and Racquel is shown happily scanning her QR code entrance ticket to enter.. At the end, viewers see Racquel completing her first day back at school and reuniting with her father. “Dad, I have to admit, I was scared at first but then I felt so safe,” she says. “It was so good to be back. Thanks for keeping me safe. I love you so much.”
Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense, believes parents should be concerned. “If data is the new gold, then LAUSD’s new Daily Pass is providing a lot of gold to Microsoft and other institutions,” she said, adding that LAUSD is “compromising the students’ privacy and freedom of movement,” as well as segregating children based on unreliable testing. She warns, “Parents should be asking a million questions and demanding answers.”
They should, but they probably won’t. Whether it is fear of challenging authority, relief at no longer having to keep their children at home, or simply a willingness to travel the path of least resistance, it is far more likely parents will simply abide what amounts to grooming their own children for a totalitarian level of surveillance that government and its Big Tech collaborators are increasingly willing to impose.
“We are moving into a total surveillance state and an entire generation of young people are acquiescing to the police state,” asserts constitutional law attorney John Whitehead. “Privacy as we know it will be deleted and no one will be overlooked.”
He also believes parents should stand against this and demand separate accommodations for those who don’t want their children under constant surveillance. “The government can accomplish many things with a ‘compelling state interest and a pandemic is just that,” Whitehead explained. “But the school needs to provide an alternative for parents who do not want their children to participate in these measures — whether it’s a virtual learning option or a separate building.”
The bigger picture here is hard to miss. The European Union and United Kingdom plan to issue digital “green passes” to serve as vaccination certificates. Tech giants are, of course, seizing the opportunity to help.
If those become widespread, will Americans who are required to show up for work in person eventually be subjected to the same requirements? How about those wishing to go to sporting or entertainment events?
How about those simply shopping for food?
Does anyone still remember the progressive furor surrounding Arizona’s efforts to pass a law allowing local police to ask for the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally? The law was characterized as a “show me your papers” debacle that would ultimately lead to systematic racial profiling.
Nine years later, many of those same progressives are apparently OK with far more intrusive systemic data-mining of Americans, which in this particular case consists of all students 13 years of age and older and all LAUSD employees.
Unless something dramatic occurs, it’s becoming clear that the Baby Boomers will be the last American generation to experience genuine privacy. And while the Age of the Internet is laudable in many respects, the as-yet-unfathomable extrapolations arising from younger generations inured to the tragedy of losing it have yet to be fully realized. Already we are seeing rampant narcissism, historically unprecedented levels of fragility, and de facto addiction to electronic devices. For younger Americans, cyberspace is rapidly becoming more important than life in the real world, even as they leave a trail of social media digital breadcrumbs that enables a burgeoning Cancel Culture.
One capable of ruining the life of anyone who posted an “intemperate” comment, even if that comment is decades old.
For all intents and purposes, LAUSD students and employees are lab rats, with all the attendant scrutiny and data compilation fully intended, all based on keeping people safe from a virus. And when that virus is effectively eradicated?
As George Orwell put it in 1984, “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/78566-surveillance-state-schoolrooms-2021-03-22
************************************Reassessing the College Wage Premium Payoff
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts within the higher education policy space were projecting that four-year colleges could face a loss of up to 20 percent in fall enrollment. While these predictions never materialized, the political infatuation with college enrollment figures is not a new phenomenon.
Barack Obama proclaimed the orthodox view of college in 2009: Sending every young person to college is necessary to both promote equity and maintain US competitiveness in the world. Under this view, more federal investment to push high school graduates into college is a “human capital investment” that leads to higher lifetime earnings.
However, little research has focused on what effect the higher price and debt burdens of college have had on college wage premiums and job opportunities for graduates.
Studies that observe the college wage premium (the ratio of wages that college graduates make in comparison with high school graduates) find that college graduate earnings significantly outpaced those of high school graduates in the 1980s and 1990s, but have largely stagnated since the turn of the century.
The significance of this stagnation in the college wage premium over the past 15 years is important because this emerging pattern may complicate the orthodox view of college leading to higher lifetime earnings. Over the same 15-year period, the cost of college has grown by more than 50 percent.
That divergence between cost and earnings highlights the importance of choosing a high-earnings-ratio major when enrolling in college (or pursuing an advanced degree) to reap the largest returns on a college investment.
As wage premiums have stagnated, about a quarter of students studying for a four-year degree don’t graduate. Those students are burdened with large debt repayments and a lower wage premium—many of them will be financially worse off over their lifetime than high school graduates without postsecondary education. One 2016 NBER study notes that “Although higher education may be financially advantageous on average, the flattening of returns as costs have continued to rise suggests that college may be an unfavorable financial investment for rising numbers of individuals.”
One of the overlooked explanations for a shrinking wage premium is rooted in the education-skills mismatch.
In 2016, a World Economic Forum report found that “in many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”
The future of work will not be about college degrees—increasingly, it will be about skills.
Evidence of the mismatch between education and work skills can be seen by comparing the share of bachelor’s degrees conferred by selected fields of study with the skills businesses are currently looking for. Business survey data reveal that the skills most in demand are those used by electricians, welders, mechanics, engineers, and IT professionals.
In other words, employers are looking for people with training in skills-specific trades. Meanwhile, many students who graduated in 2018 were general-skills majors, including 8 percent studying social sciences, 6 percent studying journalism, 6 percent studying psychology, and 4 percent studying performing arts.
The top-down push to drive up enrollment rates means that more graduates end up in low-skilled jobs earning low wages, while fewer college graduates get good non-college jobs. (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York defines low-wage jobs as those making $25,000 or less, while good jobs are those that pay $45,000 or higher.)
Graduates who are underemployed do not receive relevant or full-time work experience, so they can’t break into their desired field even if a job opens up. This cycle works to perpetuate underemployment further.
Underemployment among recent college graduates has remained high over the past decade, with between 12 percent and 15 percent of recent college graduates working in low-wage jobs.
Though underemployment remains a notable problem among recent graduates, it doesn’t apply to all students equally.
Majors that emphasize general skills (e.g., liberal arts) have a higher prevalence of mismatch than those that emphasize occupation-specific skills (e.g., engineering). STEM majors continue to provide the greatest payoff on students’ investment and the greatest protection against underemployment, but STEM students still only account for about one-fifth of all undergrads.
While some large companies, such as Google, Apple, and IBM have started pilot programs for high school graduates to work and learn on-the-job without going to college, policy changes could better align college programs and labor market demand. Economist Korok Ray has recently argued that universities need to teach relevant industry skills, encourage students to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors, and—above all—embrace risk.
A shift away from the status quo of accreditation would also help. The current accrediting system focuses too heavily on inputs, such as school facilities, equipment, and supplies, while accreditors who certify the ends have largely ignored educational outcomes, such as job suitability, graduate earnings, and employment patterns.
Removing regulations that focus on processes and replacing them with a “chartering model where providers of higher education submit to accountability for outcomes in return for autonomy in developing and running their programs” would compel educators to focus on preparing students for the evolving labor market.
Changes at the K-12 level are needed as well. The Common Core State Standards claim to be about both college and career readiness, but these standards should be re-evaluated in light of a rapidly changing labor market. Unfortunately, the focus been heavily oriented toward college attendance and, by many metrics, has failed to prepare students for work.
Additionally, students should have broader options to pursue vocational education through income-share agreements (ISAs), whereby private investors’ apprenticeship or on-the-job training in exchange for a certain percentage of the student’s future income over a fixed period (e.g., 17 percent over 2 years).
Providing greater legal and regulatory clarity on the status of ISAs would allow for more innovative career training models without putting taxpayers’ money at risk for their potential failures. Such legal clarity would also allow traditional institutions of higher education to adopt ISAs and reduce risk for students, improve available information regarding the value of education, and increase competition between institutions of higher education.
As I concluded in a recent article in Discourse Magazine:
The skills mismatch between college graduates and the labor market is a serious problem. Policymakers need to rethink higher education policies, particularly in relation to the one-size-fits-all federal financial assistance programs, but also in relation to other public provisions aimed at driving up college enrollment rates.
With rapid technological change and an increasingly dynamic and evolving labor market, it is becoming more important for young people to weigh the rising costs of higher education with the stagnating benefits of a traditional college education.
The orthodox top-down approach of increased federal aid and arbitrary enrollment targets will not serve to remedy this problem. Instead, policymakers should approach the issue of stagnation in the college wage premium by better aligning skills with labor market demand.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/03/reassessing-the-college-wage-premium-payoff/
*************************************The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Movement: Tyranny Through Subverting Language
The political left has proven itself to be amazingly incompetent when it comes to governing. Examples abound of nations, states, and cities—even those with tremendous wealth, resources, and other advantages—reduced to nightmare zones of poverty, violence, and corruption. Think of Venezuela, Cuba, California, Detroit, and Baltimore.
Yet, there is one area in which the left excels to a remarkable degree: the attainment of power and advancement of its political aims.
Every year, every month, and every day, somewhere in the nation the left is implementing or proposing some action that will further its agenda. Consider the breakneck speed at which the Biden administration is dismantling its predecessor’s reforms and advancing the “woke” agenda. Instead of concerning itself with how to govern well, the left’s intellectual energies are spent on crafting tactics to exploit the weak spots in our electoral processes, our laws, and our policies. It has a vast array of weapons of its disposal, from Saul Alinsky’s organizing tactics to bureaucratic state encroachments on democracy to the anarchic violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and so forth.
One of the left’s most successful tactics is the manipulation of language. The meaning of words is gradually but deliberately changed to alter perceptions and to enable large policy and cultural changes to occur without much notice.
Academia is especially vulnerable to such linguistic subterfuge, and in the past year, many universities have greatly advanced the radical agenda through “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies. To most people who still understand those three words according to their traditional meanings, such policies sound benign or enlightening; many would be open to basing guidelines on them.
However, in the lexicon of today’s left-leaning academic bureaucracies, those words—taken individually or together—have new, specific meanings with a sinister bent.
The traditional definition of “diversity” generally means some sort of variation within a population. But it has undergone several transitions in recent times. First, it has been given a normative spin with connotations of goodness—“diversity is our strength,” for example—that Americans have largely accepted. But more recently, a second twist has occurred: The word “diversity” is now used as a descriptor for preferred demographic groups. An all-black gathering is considered to be diverse, while an all-white gathering is not. “Diverse” can even be used to describe an individual if they belong to the right demographic, a meaning that is completely incongruous and seems to be a contradiction of the word’s original definition.
“Equity” is perhaps the most troubling of the three terms. A Minding the Campus article discusses the etymology of the word; a close synonym of its historical meaning is “fairness.” And we’re all for fairness. But fairness, without context or further elaboration, is an elusive concept. Which version of fairness is meant? Is it based on pure meritocracy? Or maybe a sliding scale that mixes merit with indications of compassion and empathy? Or outright equality of outcomes?
According to the Minding the Campus article, “in the last several decades, and certainly in the last 5-10 years, the term equity has been stretched and twisted” into “a weapon to bludgeon our modern society into denying even the most basic differences between human beings.”
It now means that protected classes of people must have proportionate representation—or better—since “the mere fact that achievement gaps exist” between different demographic groups “is taken as proof that there is some inequity that must be remedied.” Those who use the word equity in this fashion invariably claim that the inequity is not due to the actions of individuals, but due to systemic bias, and that the structure of society or of an institution must undergo drastic changes to eliminate this bias.
Inclusion—once an innocent term intended to mean that all are permitted to attain membership in a group according to that group’s rules—now implies proportionate representation, even if the traditional standards for membership must be relaxed or altered to achieve such representation. Furthermore, it must be remembered that to include somebody in a group with a fixed capacity is to exclude somebody else who would otherwise be included.
When it comes to college admissions or hiring, exclusion of deserving individuals is indeed part of the “inclusion” equation.
But, when these three words are combined to form a policy of employment or institutional conduct today, they carry a meaning far beyond their individual meanings. Together they express an ideological agenda intended to produce equalized outcomes among all demographic groups, to include preferred people and deny those out of favor with the political elite, and to take power from one group and give it to others.
This failure to defend our rights comes from a naïve ignorance of the left’s intentions, or from a lack of will to confront such determined opposition for personal security.
Whenever such policies are put in place—especially if mandatory—they produce additional consequences such as group intimidation, an oppressive workplace environment, and the stifling of free expression. This is especially troubling at institutions of higher education, where standards based on merit and the freedom to pursue truth and to exchange ideas are paramount.
DEI training programs and standards for hiring and promotion are proliferating rapidly throughout academia. Some major universities that have adopted DEI mandates in faculty hiring and promotion are the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Furthermore, while proponents of the ideology behind the DEI push are creating political litmus tests for employment, coursework, and other facets of higher education, the political majority stands around in stupefaction and confusion.
At times, this failure to defend our rights comes from a naïve ignorance of the left’s intentions, or from a lack of will to confront such determined opposition for personal security. But even when the will to push back exists, many governance structures seem poorly constructed to counter the perpetual, incessant, incremental assault on liberty that has been occurring for many decades. For example, it appears at first glance that many of these DEI standards would be unable to stand up to legal challenges.
However, winning such court cases may not prove easy. For one, the DEI supporters appear to have found a “sweet spot” in the legal framework: finding plaintiffs who can prove they have been denied employment or promotion for failure to demonstrate sufficient compliance with DEI mandates will be difficult, and without such plaintiffs, court challenges may lack the standing.
There is also a perverse brilliance in the misleading language used to craft these obviously politicized and one-sided policies, since plaintiffs would first need to prove that the language signifies a political agenda and not merely noncontroversial principles of fairness—no mean feat in a courtroom. Were the policies described in accurate terms, using traditional definitions, the courts would likely stop them post-haste.
In the University of North Carolina system, various campuses have announced DEI training programs and initiatives that are deeply troubling. The second and third parts of this essay will explore several of them in detail.
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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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