Sunday, March 14, 2021


Biden Wants to Roll Back Title IX Protections for Students Falsely Accused of Sexual Assault

Joe Biden is asking Department of Education officials to examine ways to roll back changes to Title IX enacted by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that gave college students accused of sexual assault some protection from being falsely accused.

There was criticism of the rules, with some women’s groups alleging the rules were preventing women from coming forward to report sexual assault. The rules didn’t prevent anything. They only tried to restore due process to sexual assault cases on campus.

The rules that were amended by DeVos were put in place during the Obama administration.

Fox News:

The Obama-era guidance required universities to probe essentially all complaints of sexual misconduct, no matter how long ago they allegedly occurred. It also further required schools to maintain copious records ahead of possible complaints and strongly discouraged schools from “allowing the parties personally to question or cross-examine each other during the hearing.”

“This is where the Obama administration weaponized the schools because they basically said if we find that you have not acted properly in these situations, we’re gonna remove your federal funding,” Mock said.

DeVos said the previous approach did a “disservice to everyone involved” and “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not pre-determined.”

In America, “innocent until proved guilty” is the standard, not the other way around. And DeVos simply sought to level the playing field.

Her rules still shielded alleged victims from having to come face-to-face with accusers or answer questions personally drafted by the accused. But they offered a new guarantee for accused individuals to ask questions through a representative and to cross-examine other witnesses.

The changes by DeVos required that sexual harassment be defined as both “severe and pervasive” – not one or the other as previously labeled – and schools could be held accountable for mishandling complaints only if they acted with “deliberate indifference.”

Biden’s new education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has been non-committal about how he is going to alter the DeVos rule, and Biden issued an executive order on March 8 that sheds little light on what the new administration is going to do.

JD Supra:

Unfortunately, the order sheds little light on how the Biden administration intends to change Title IX and, as a result, warrants little practical change for schools, colleges, and universities. The order directs the new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, to “consider” suspending, revising, or rescinding the 2020 Title IX rule, but does not actually take any action with respect to the Trump-era rule. Similarly, it directs Cardona to issue “new guidance” interpreting the rules, but does not provide any actual guidance now. Perhaps the most interesting part of the order is language directing Cardona to consider “additional enforcement actions” to enforce the new administration’s position on Title IX.

It’s not simply a matter of repealing DeVos’s Title IX rule and substituting Cardona’s. The DeVos rule is embedded in other Title IX provisions that must also be changed. Some analysts say it will take years for Biden to fully reverse the DeVos rule.

The “Believe all Women” nonsense will once again become the standard. And young men will be falsely accused and have their lives ruined because radicals don’t think women ever lie about sexual violence.

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Aspirations and Reality: Why Do So Few Achieve Their College Goals?

Trigger warning: I am not fully going to answer the question posed in the headline above. But it is one needing answering, so we should do some serious thinking about it.

Let us consider a class of 100 freshmen at an average American high school in the fall of 2011, most of them probably born in 1997 (now 23 years old). If this group were typical of Americans, the overwhelming majority (say 90 of the 100) would graduate from high school, although some would not do so precisely in the expected four years—but for the sake of our example, let’s assume 90 students did graduate in the spring of 2015.

If the group were typical, about 60 of the remaining 90 students would enter college, some at community colleges, but more would attend four year universities pursuing a bachelor’s degree. About 40 % of kids attending four year universities actually graduate from college in the traditional four years—if we stretch things to six years, the proportion approximates 60%. Community college attrition typically is even higher. Therefore, it would be probably be true that at most 24 of the original 100 students would have bachelor’s or even associate degrees by the summer of 2019; if we stretch things to allow for fifth and even six year seniors, we might end up with as many of 36 (60 percent) of the 60 entering college actually graduating by this June.

But merely having a diploma doesn’t guarantee a person a job utilizing the skills associated with college level (as opposed to lesser) training. Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that the “underemployment rate” among college grads (bachelor degree holders) approaches 40 %. These are many individuals who are doing jobs that are typically performed by high school graduates and require no higher level educational skills. Thus if we have 36 of the original 100 students that entered high school actually getting college degrees, only about 22 (a bit over 60%) of them will actually enter into jobs suited to their college training. In some sense, three out of four entering college fail to achieve expectations concerning their education.

That does not mean necessarily that the non-achievers were all “failures” in some sense—many, for example, probably are leading reasonably productive and happy lives with decent jobs and just a high school diploma. But it does also suggest that there are many young Americans having generally unpleasant experiences ending up with their vocational or professional aspirations unrealized, a small portion of those early on based on unsatisfactory high school experiences, but many more thereafter.

Part of the problem relates to poor information. High school and even college students are not terribly knowledgeable about labor markets, nor even about their probability of college success. Colleges lure kids into programs when they know the probability of academic success is low. High school guidance counselors have been brainwashed by business and political leaders into believing college works for nearly all, and sometimes push students beyond what they realistically can be expected to achieve.

One way to deal with this problem is to get better, more objective information to parents and students. The College Scoreboard of the U.S. Department of Education is a good tool, gaining greater utility each year, but still has some real imperfections.

There is also a perverse incentives problem. The salaries and job security of top college personnel are often dependent on enrollments—tuition fees and enrollment-based state subsidies help pay their salaries. Thus at many schools, high school students are induced to enroll based on blatantly misleading advertising.

One solution to perverse incentives is to make colleges have skin in the game. Specifically, if large numbers of students drop out of school and default or fail to make payments on student loans, the college should share some of the financial liability otherwise falling on taxpayers. Incentivize colleges to lower the attrition rate.

Many kids belong in different kinds of postsecondary training programs, things like coding academies or truck driving school. Pell Grants and state subsidies supporting traditional college education are often biased against other forms of vocational training that is often cheaper and more appropriate to some student needs.

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Government Schools Make Everyone Equally Mediocre

Government schools in America are a national disgrace. Every year, we throw more money into the system and every year we get back mediocre results.

The numbers are especially depressing when you compare how other nations get better outcomes while having significantly lower levels of per-pupil spending.

Given this grim situation, I’m always on the lookout for analysis that can help us figure out how to make things better.

Though some people seemingly want to make things worse.

In an article for the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan reveals how elite private schools have become high-pressure pathways for entrance to elite colleges. It’s a fascinating – and even disturbing – look at the life of people (mostly) in the top-1 percent.

But what grabbed my attention was her conclusion. She accurately observes that government schools do a crappy job, but then suggests that high-performing private schools are the problem.

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item. …We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle. …Public-school education—the specific force that has helped generations of Americans transcend the circumstances of their birth—is profoundly, perhaps irreparably, broken. In my own state of California, only half of public-school students are at grade level in reading, and even fewer are in math. …Shouldn’t the schools that serve poor children be the very best schools we have?

At the risk of understatement, this point of view (the article’s headline in the print edition is “Private Schools Are Indefensible”) is utterly perverse.

If we know that private schools do a better job (and not just the super-elite schools discussed in the article), then the ethical answer should be to get rid of the government school monopoly and adopt a system of school choice so that the children of non-rich families also have an opportunity to get a quality education.

That would be good for kids and it would be good for taxpayers (we’re spending record amounts of money on the failed government school monopoly, so turning that money into vouchers would provide enough funding for families to afford the vast majority of private schools).

But this brings up another issue. What if leftists aren’t just against private education? What if they also object to any sort of system where better students get better outcomes?

Chester Finn of the Hoover Institution wrote a column last November for the Wall Street Journal about the efforts to undermine the tiny handful of high-performing government schools.

Nationwide, selective-admission public schools, also known as “exam schools,” are under attack… Much like elite universities, critics allege, these schools have been admitting far too many whites and Asians and not nearly enough blacks and Latinos. …in New York, …admission…is governed by the eighth-grader’ scores on a specialized admission test. …there’s no denying that they’re full of Asian and white kids, many from low-income and middle-class families. …Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor have recently pushed to make the admissions process more “equitable.” They want to…abolish the entry exam…[i]nstead of repairing the elementary and middle schools attended by poor and minority kids…

Consider another furor in Virginia, over admission to the esteemed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, regularly ranked the country’s top high school by U.S. News. Thomas Jefferson is in such demand that it can accept fewer than 1 in 6 applicants. …The Fairfax County superintendent and board last month moved to abolish the qualification exam…

the remedies being sought in every case are wrongheaded. …School systems…have to face the reality that some kids are smarter and more motivated than others, no matter their color. That’s anathema to “progressive” reformers, who prefer to abolish accelerated classes for high achievers. …The progressive assault on education in the name of equity ends up denying smart kids from every background the kind of education that will assist them to make the most of their abilities.

I’m almost at a loss for words.

For all intents and purposes, our friends on the left would rather have everyone be mediocre than allow some students to succeed.

They don’t want some kids to succeed by attending private school.

They don’t want some kids to succeed by attending so-called exam schools.

They don’t want some kids to succeed by taking accelerated classes.

They don’t want some kids to succeed by attending charter schools.

They don’t want some kid to succeed by being home-schooled.

This hostility to achievement is reprehensible. Part of it is probably motivated by a cynical attempt to appease teacher unions.

And part of it is presumably the ideological belief in equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity, even if the net result is that all students are worse off (the same perverse instinct that leads them to support economic policies that hurt the poor so long as the rich get hurt more).

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Australia: The evidence is clear: direct instruction works

Rather than letting teachers teach, states and territories are delivering social constructivist pedagogies that leave students behind.

By NOEL PEARSON (An Aboriginal leader)

It is now more than 15 years since the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy examined worldwide evidence of the most effective methods for teaching reading. It was headed by the late Professor Ken Rowe, who tragically died in the Marysville bushfire in 2009. Rowe’s panel reported to the then federal education minister Brendan Nelson. It is worth setting out its central recommendation in its entirety:

“The committee recommends that teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required for foundational reading proficiency. Equally, that teachers provide an integrated approach to reading that supports the development of oral language, vocabulary, grammar, reading fluency, comprehension and the literacies of new technologies.”

Since Rowe’s report, the performance of Australian students has continued to decline compared to other school systems around the world. Ours used to be a great system, but we have subsided to merely good, and we are routinely outperformed by many countries that used to be inferior in literacy, numeracy and science.

This decline coincided with ­unprecedented increased investment in school education. While the investment may not have been equitable, nevertheless we cannot say our declining performance is principally a function of funding.

So what happened after the findings of the Rowe inquiry? ­Almost nothing.

Why? Because we have not been able to solve the federal problem in school reform. The commonwealth has the cheque book and the states run the public schools. Attempts to drive reforms the commonwealth government may propose flounder because the states (and now territories) just do their own thing.

Nelson and former prime minister John Howard used commonwealth funding to mandate Australian flag poles on school grounds. But they had no hope of mandating phonics teaching in state schools, let alone the other dimensions of the Rowe inquiry’s recommendations.

So Rowe’s report just gathered dust.

Around the same time as the inquiry, I asked Professor Kevin Wheldall from Macquarie University to come to a small school in Cape York to trial the explicit teaching of reading, using his ­program called Making Up Lost Time in Literacy. This is when I came to understand the reading wars. I was exposed to the visceral ideological war between progressive educators favouring so-called “child centred” education and those favouring “teacher directed” education, of which the teaching of phonics is just one simple but ­famously contentious element.

Like Rowe, I came to see the evidence favoured teachers actually teaching. Fancy that! That teachers should first teach!

Rowe pulled no punches. He once wrote: “Much of what is commonly claimed as ‘effective teaching practice’ … is not grounded in findings from evidence-based research. The prevailing educational philosophy of constructivism (a theory of self-directed learning rather than a theory of teaching) continues to have marked influences on shaping teachers’ interpretations of how they should teach. However, in contrast to teacher-directed methods of teaching, there is strong evidence that exclusive emphasis on constructivist approaches to teaching is not in the best interests of any group of students, and especially those experiencing learning difficulties.”

But my being persuaded by the explicit teaching side of the reading wars was not an ideological matter. Indeed, I had been swept along with their opponents who talked about “the new basics” as opposed to “the old basics”. No, it was the performance of the children that convinced me. I could see children learning once their teachers started teaching.

We started using direct instruction in three schools in the Cape in 2010. At the same time, the Queensland education department started supporting another teacher-directed approach championed by John Fleming, a principal of Haileybury College in Melbourne. Explicit Instruction was becoming reputable in various school districts around the state, including in far north Queensland.

Two years ago, the Grattan Institute’s Peter Goss identified that Queensland achieved superior growth rates to other states from about 2010, the reasons for which Grattan was unable to identify.

My view is the answer lies in the state’s adoption of explicit instruction and certain other measures taken after then premier Anna Bligh acted on the advice of Geoff Masters from the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2009. Essentially, Masters followed Rowe’s prescriptions from five years before.

However, this one instance of a school system adopting sensible recommendations and achieving significant gains soon reversed. Explicit instruction has been steadily dismantled and the Queensland system is sliding back to the old normal.

These systems can’t recognise success and have no clue about preserving and enhancing it in their schools. Principals who worked their backsides off leading improvement look with despair as the department replaces them with principals who promptly change course and dismantle their gains. Great schools go backwards to good, and good schools slide backwards to fair.

In 2015, the Abbott government’s education minister Christopher Pyne took up Rowe’s recommendation, 10 years after it was made, and funded the trial of explicit literacy instruction in remote schools in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The West Australian schools included a group of Catholic schools and state schools.

Three evaluation reports were undertaken for the literacy for remote schools program. A final report was produced in 2019 and was released by now Education Minister Alan Tudge this week.

Evaluators from the University of Melbourne confirm the program was successful in achieving its objectives: to lift literacy of students through explicit instruction in schools, and to develop the teaching skills of teachers.

The organisation I chair, Good to Great Schools Australia, published an article with The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education setting out the growth rates achieved between NAPLAN tests taken by students in Year 3 in 2015 and Year 5 in 2017. And students in Year 3 in 2016 and those same students in 2018.

When you compare the achievement of these student cohorts with other schools around the country at a single point in time, such as the annual NAPLAN results, they are far behind. Because this is where you find kids from remote schools — way behind their mainstream peers.

The question for evaluation is: how far did these students grow over the period of the literacy ­intervention? This is where the numbers become impressive. When provided with an effective intervention, these students who are often many years behind their grade level start to show growth rates that are above other student cohorts, including mainstream ­cohorts, especially when schools commit to rigorous implementation and school systems give them strong support. Optimum results occur when time on instruction is protected, teacher turnover is minimised to the best that circumstances allow, school leadership is retained and succession does not involve a new principal coming in and dismantling the program.

In reading, schools involved in the program from 2015 to 2017 ­averaged 124 per cent growth, while the average growth for comparable ages was 19 per cent and 34 per cent for Australian and very remote Indigenous schools respectively. In grammar and punctuation, schools involved in the program in the same period grew 180 per cent, while growth for Australian schools was 15 per cent, and for very remote Indigenous schools it was 28 per cent.

Kids in these severely disadvantaged schools are way behind the race when they start, and they are not given the means to move forward. In fact, the gap gets larger over the course of their “schooling” years. I say “schooling” because what these kids get does not resemble any kind of decent definition of proper schooling.

But explicit, teacher-led instruction in reading, as well as maths and science, can get them moving forward. But you need school systems to agree on one thing: to follow the findings of the Rowe inquiry on what works with the teaching of literacy.

There is no such agreement in our federation. The states and territories are still predominantly delivering social constructivist peda­gogies, to the disadvantage of the nation’s most vulnerable students.

When the Abbott government’s program started in 2015, the Country Liberal Party government embraced it in the Northern Territory and announced in the second year that positive results were showing up in remote schools using direct instruction. Then the government changed, and the new Labor government began to withdraw schools and refused to provide achievement data from their schools as previously agreed by their CLP predecessors. The final evaluation was not provided with the Northern Territory reading data, except for one school. Why?

I have learned that relatively advantaged students, such as those from Catholic schools in Western Australia, end up benefiting from effective literacy approaches whereas students from the most disadvantaged Indigenous schools do not, because the level of ideological resistance to effective teaching in public education is debilitating. The poor therefore suffer and have no way of breaking out of their social and economic disadvantage without effective schooling.

Evaluations are a mixed bag, and this one is no exception. The positive impact on student learning is confirmed, as is the impact on teacher capabilities. However, the academics can’t help themselves, and they betray their ­academic predisposition towards constructivism rather than teacher-directed learning.

The evaluators devote more time on an obscure academic from Durham University, a Professor Davis whose four-page article they reference is just a diatribe against the very notion of ­evidence-based teaching. More heed is paid to Davis than to John Hattie’s landmark meta-analyses in his 2009 book Visible Learning, which sets out the large evidence base for direct instruction. Why would evaluators cavil with the well-established international ­evidence in the context of the evaluation of a small sample like these schools?

More bizarre is their referencing of Yong Zhou, an American academic whose entire thesis is this: direct instruction may improve test scores but there are negative side-effects such as the impact on student creativity and critique. No evidence of these side-effects is given, and anyone familiar with this horse excrement will know that the creativity and critique argument was alleged against direct instruction more than 50 years ago.

The evaluators are effectively saying, yes our job is to evaluate planet earth, but we will also pay heed to the flat earthers. Most troubling, however, is the assumption that what works for children from many diverse cultural, socio-economic and learning disability backgrounds, somehow doesn’t apply to Indigenous learners. This is an insidious fallacy that has no foundation in any evidence that I’ve ever heard about. The starting point to any approach to educational policy must be that Indigenous children have the same cognitive learning mechanisms and capabilities as other human learners. What is effective instruction for Hispanic migrant children in Texas or middle-class students in a Jewish school in Sydney is ­effective for Indigenous kids. Contexts must be taken into account, but this implication that Indigenous learners are different is a ­disgracefully wrong assumption perpetuated by these evaluators.

The new federal minister is well aware of this policy history. He and I talked about Rowe and the challenges facing Australian school education ever since he first came from Harvard to work in Cape York 20 years ago. He is now in the driving seat.

Can he make the school education federation work for all of Australia’s children?

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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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