I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Studies Fail to Support Claims of New California Ethnic Studies Requirement
Last fall, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure that could require every California public high school student to take an “ethnic studies” course to graduate, he alluded to two studies commonly cited by advocates to justify the measure, claiming the research shows that ethnic studies courses “boost student achievement over the long run—especially among students of color.” The studies—one from 2017 by Thomas Dee of Stanford University and Emily Penner of University of California, Irvine, the other a follow-up from 2021 by Dee, Penner, and Sade Bonilla of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—purport to show that ninth-grade students who took an ethnic studies course in San Francisco public schools experienced dramatic short-term and long-term academic benefits. The studies also make the stunning claim that the ethnic studies course causes an average increase of 1.4 GPA points, miraculously turning C students into B+ students.
But the experiment on which these conclusions are based is so muddled, and the data reported is so ambiguous, that in fact they support no conclusion, either positive or negative, about the effects of this particular ethnic studies course in these particular schools and times. Indeed, not even the lead author claims that the studies provide a basis for establishing ethnic studies mandates for all students. Nevertheless, a proposal to make ethnic studies a prerequisite for admission to the University of California—currently before the UC Academic Senate—uses the results of both the 2017 and 2021 studies to claim that “by requiring all future UC applicants to take an ethnic studies course, UC can uplift the outcomes of students of color.”
Social science research often generates controversial results, because particular findings can often be legitimately interpreted in multiple ways. This is not the case here. There are well-established, objective methods for evaluating the effects of new programs, and reporting upon and interpreting the results of those evaluations. Those methods were not followed in the Dee-Penner-Bonilla research. The work they present fails many basic tests of scientific method, and it should not have been published as written, much less relied upon in the formulation of public policy.
Below we explain what the study authors did, and how their work is fundamentally flawed along three different dimensions: the way their “experiment” was designed, the way they reported their results, and the interpretation of their results. In each of these areas, the authors made multiple serious errors. Far from demonstrating the value of ethnic studies courses, these studies merely demonstrate how easy it is in our overheated political environment to subvert statistical analyses for political purposes.
In their 2017 study, Dee and Penner made the following headline claim: “Assignment to [an ethnic studies] course increased ninth-grade attendance by 21 percentage points, GPA by 1.4 points, and credits earned by 23.” The authors call these effects “surprisingly large.” (No less audaciously, the 2021 paper claims that being “eligible” for an ethnic studies class—apparently whether or not one actually took it—raised high school graduation rates by 16 to 19 percentage points.) These are the only understatements in their papers. The claimed effects are huge, and go a long way to explain why the papers have had such a large impact. If they were true, they would indeed be powerful arguments for ethnic studies; it is hard to think of any other comparably modest intervention, in the entire education literature, that claims such large and transformative effects. Unfortunately, the effects are not merely greatly overblown—they plausibly do not exist at all. If the ethnic studies intervention had any effect, a much more careful study would be needed to measure them.
In 2010, the San Francisco Unified School System launched an ethnic studies curriculum at five of its 19 high schools. In three of the schools, the course was a yearlong elective taken by about a quarter of the ninth graders. At those schools, eighth graders with GPAs under 2.0 were “assigned” to take the ethnic studies course in ninth grade, but they were allowed to opt out and some 40% of the students did so. Eighth graders with GPAs above 2.0 were not assigned to the ethnic studies course, but they could “opt in,” and a little more than 10% did so, signing up for the ethnic studies course in lieu of their regular social studies course.
How might one have studied the effects of this initiative? In a controlled experiment, a subset of ninth graders at the three high schools would be randomly assigned to either a treatment group that would take the ethnic studies course, or a control group that would take the usual social studies course. Obviously, that isn’t present here. A second-best condition would occur if all students with some characteristic (like an eighth-grade GPA below 2.0) were required to take the ethnic studies course, and students with GPAs above 2.0 were not permitted to take the course. This would permit a natural experiment using GPA as an instrumental running variable: One could compare the outcomes of students just above, and just below, the 2.0 line where the academic strengths of students are arguably comparable, differentiated only by small random effects, making the study “naturally” random. If there were a sharp difference in outcomes on either side of the 2.0 line, one could make a plausible argument that the “treatment” (here, the ethnic studies course) caused the difference. This would be a powerful approach particularly if there were large numbers of students taught by many teachers across many schools taking the ethnic studies class.
In the Dee-Penner-Bonilla research, these conditions are not met. Instead, there are at least three challenges that make any kind of valid experimental inference very difficult, if not impossible.
First, there is internal variation in treatment within the experimental and control groups. As we have noted, the ethnic studies “treatment” did not apply to some students who were below the 2.0 threshold, and did apply to some students who were above the 2.0 threshold. This is problematic in and of itself, but what makes this experiment especially difficult is that there is systematic variation in participation rates within the treatment and control groups. Figure 2 below illustrates the problem. To make matters worse, the rate at which the treatment applied varied within the “experimental” (below 2.0) and “control” (above 2.0) groups in a way that was itself related to GPA. As the reader can see, students in the experimental group were more likely to “opt out” of ethnic studies as their GPA approached 2.0, and students in the control group (above 2.0) were less likely to “opt in” to ethnic studies as their GPA increased. This creates a very messy, hard-to-analyze experiment, where causal effects are difficult to discern.
Second, the samples are very small. Although Dee-Penner-Bonilla highlight that their study involved 1,405 students, the fine print discloses that only 112 of those students had eighth-grade GPAs below 2.0, and only about three-fifths of those students took the ethnic studies class (i.e., around 67 students). Indeed, the majority of the students who took the ethnic studies class were in the supposed “control” group! (Nearly 1,300 of the students in the study had eighth-grade GPAs above 2.0, and about 120 of those students took the ethnic studies course as an elective.) And because so few students and schools were involved, only four teachers taught the courses, so it is hard to disentangle “teacher” effects from “course content” effects.
More here:
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The diversity, equity and inclusion racket
Top diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) employees at major public universities earn massive six-figure salaries for leading initiatives that some experts found to be ineffective and instead enforce a "political orthodoxy."
A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions' top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools' full-time tenured professors.
Four of the colleges justified the DEI leaders' salaries, citing the executives' seniority and the importance of their responsibilities. The University of Illinois did not return a request for comment.
Experts identified these universities as having some of the most bloated DEI staff in the country and said they each rack up millions in costs each year.
Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy, said that while the "ostensible objective" of DEI is to make college campuses more welcoming and inclusive, he doesn't believe that is the purpose of the initiatives.
"Instead, the effective purpose of diversity, equity and inclusion is to create a political orthodoxy and enforce that political orthodoxy, which fundamentally distorts the intellectual and political life on campus," Greene told Fox News.
The five schools shelling out top-shelf salaries to DEI personnel have between 71 and 163 individuals devoted to diversity efforts on campus, according to a study Greene co-authored.
'Lots and lots of tuition dollars'
Greene and James Paul, director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, co-authored a comprehensive study of DEI bureaucracies in higher education. The pair examined 65 universities of the five "power" athletic conferences because the schools "tend to be large, public institutions chosen by many students simply because of geographic proximity," the study said.
"It's becoming almost an all-consuming priority where even large numbers of staff who don't have official responsibilities for DEI – don't have it in their job titles – are nonetheless working on it and see it as one of their top priorities," Greene told Fox News.
Mark Perry, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Michigan, also touched on this notion. He said diversity staff has expanded outside of DEI departments.
"What's happened over the last five to 10 years is its spread out in decentralized ways," Perry told Fox News. "At the University of Michigan, each college, school, or department on campus will have a diversity officer, including the library, the arboretum, school of nursing – the college of engineering at Michigan has about 10" diversity officers.
Greene said it's "shocking," given the large scale of investments, that there is "no evidence to show it's achieving its ostensible purposes of helping improve racial climate, tolerance and welfare of students."
He added that a university with an average DEI staff of 45 people – along with the costs of diversity initiatives – can involve tens of millions of dollars per year. Greene said that's a "severe undercount" since it doesn't include "all of the other efforts made by people who don't have this in their job titles."
Michigan, for instance, devoted $85 million in 2016 to diversity initiatives over a five-year period, the Detroit Free Press reported.
The efforts included a program for incoming freshmen "to help assess and then develop skills for navigating cultural and other differences," enhanced programming for new faculty members on "inclusive teaching methods," programs to recruit and retain a more diverse pool of students, faculty and staff and "an innovation grant program to catalyze new ideas from students, faculty and staff for addressing issues of diversity, equity and inclusion," the Free Press reported.
Although it's difficult to track exactly how much a college spends on salaries for DEI projects, Perry was able to tally the DEI payroll at Michigan.
He said the university injects $15 million in total compensation to DEI bureaucrats, including $11.8 million for payroll and $3.8 million in benefits. He added that universities view expanded DEI efforts as part of their academic mission.
"They're supporting that mission with lots and lots of tuition dollars," Perry said.
"It's become a very expensive part of the university's bureaucracy," he continued. "Faculty have been concerned for a long time about administrative bloat in higher education. When you look at the cost of college over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years, college tuition fees have gone up more than any other consumer product, good or service."
Perry said that the explosion of DEI in administrative bureaucracy "is generating a huge cost to the university and ultimately then the students and their parents and taxpayers."
DEI executives raking it in
Greene's study shows that the University of Michigan has the most DEI personnel out of the universities, with 163 individuals working on such efforts as of 2021.
Robert Sellers, Michigan's vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, is also the highest-paid DEI official from the top 15 colleges on their list, a Fox News review of pay at the universities found.
Michigan's most recent faculty and staff disclosures reveal that Sellers earns an annual salary of nearly $431,000. According to data from the Chronicle of Higher Education, his contract is substantially more than the average salary of Michigan's full-time professors, which sits around $174,000.
"We believe Rob Sellers' pay is appropriate for the executive-level position he fills at U-M and it is in line with the salary of others with similar responsibilities," Rick Fitzgerald, the associate vice president for public affairs at Michigan, told Fox News.
"He is both a vice provost with duties well beyond diversity and the university's chief diversity officer," he continued. "As chief diversity officer, he advises the president on universitywide activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion."
Sellers is not alone in his lucrative pay. Other schools with massive staff devoted to DEI initiatives also dish out handsome paychecks to their top equity personnel.
Georgina Dodge, the vice president at the office of diversity and inclusion at the University of Maryland, which employs 71 DEI personnel, makes $358,000 a year, a database of Maryland public employees shows.
The average Maryland full-time professor salary is just over $157,000.
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Australian areas with high rate of school suspensions
Problem children tend to disrupt the schooling of the whole class they are in. And suspending them is usually too little too late. Such problems could be largely avoided if "special schools" were revived but that falls foul of the Leftist compulsion to ignore differences and pretend that all children are equal even when they are not. So troubled students are thrown in with normal students to the detriment of both.
In special schools provision can be made to have professional help available for troubled students, which would give realistic alternatives to suspensions, which usually achieve nothing
In the north-west of NSW, home to some of the state’s most disadvantaged and remote schools, one in 13 students was suspended in the first half of last year. In the north of Sydney, the rate was fewer than one in 100.
New figures from the NSW Department of Education also show suspension rates for students who are Indigenous or have a disability continue to be disproportionately high, with one in 10 Aboriginal students sent home from school in term one in 2021.
Suspensions are at the centre of a fiery debate in NSW education. A plan to make it harder for principals to give them out was delayed this week amid intense opposition from teacher unions and principals’ groups, who argue it will lead to rowdier classrooms.
The new figures – which compares term one data over the past five years, due to the lockdown in the second half of 2021 – show suspensions among secondary students were the highest in five years, with 6.8 per cent of students sent home for continued disobedience or aggressive behaviour.
However, suspensions in primary schools were lower than usual, at 1.1 per cent.
More than 10,000 students received long suspensions for the most serious behavioural issues, and were away for an average 12.2 days. They included 184 students from kindergarten to year 2.
Most were for persistent misbehaviour or physical violence, while 640 were for serious, school-related criminal behaviour, 715 were for possession or use of a suspected illegal substance, and 527 related to weapons.
One in 10 Aboriginal students – who account for 8.6 per cent of enrolments in government schools – was suspended at least once during semester one, a lower rate than previous years. Some 8.4 per cent of students with a disability were suspended.
City schools had lower suspension rates than country ones, ranging from 0.8 per cent of students in Sydney’s north to 2 per cent in the inner city, 2.8 per cent in the west and 3.9 per cent in the south-west.
Country rates ranged from 4.8 per cent in the state’s south-east, Newcastle and the Central Coast, to 6.2 per cent in the north-east and 7.4 per cent in the north-west.
Just 128 students were expelled, a number that has trended down. About half were expelled for misbehaviour, and half for unsatisfactory participation.
Amid concern about the high rates of disadvantaged students suspended, Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has led the development of a new behaviour strategy that halves the length of school suspensions and prevents students being sent home more than three times a year.
The new policy, which had been due to begin next term, also requires principals to give a warning if a student’s behaviour was raising the prospect of suspension. They could only send students home immediately if there was a threat to the safety of others.
Principals and the teachers union said the policy would reduce consequences for poor behaviour in schools. The NSW Teachers Federation passed a resolution calling on schools not to implement it, and called for more resources for staff to deal with complex student needs.
About 500 principals have written to Ms Mitchell opposing the new strategy over the past month.
Ms Mitchell this week said she would delay the implementation of the behaviour strategy until term three, to allow schools – which have been hit hard by COVID-19 and floods this term – more time to prepare.
New rules around restrictive practices, such as seclusion and process to follow if a child becomes violent, will be delayed until the beginning of next year.
“We’re committed to the policy, and we’re not shifting,” Ms Mitchell said. “We want to make sure we implement it well. The other thing we’re wanting to look at [is principals’] concerns about better inter-agency collaboration.”
NSW Teachers Federation vice president Henry Rajendra said the delay was a response to teachers’ opposition.
“Our schools don’t have the necessary staffing to meet the needs of our students, particularly measures to intervene early, so we can provide the maximum support, so they can engage positively throughout the classroom,” he said.
But Louise Kuchel from Square Peg Round Whole – a community of parents advocating for children with disabilities – said the delay was “upsetting and frustrating and not fair”.
“We’re getting really tired of advocating for [students’] rights and being consistently blocked by the union, who we are trying to help by providing them with some strategies to help our kids.”
One mother, who wanted to remain anonymous to protect her children, said her children’s public school’s understanding of disability had improved with a new principal.
One son, now eight, who has autism, was suspended four times, triggering such deep anxiety about school that she decided to teach him at home.
Another son – who is on a six-month waiting list for a diagnosis and who struggles to leave his parents – has been given warnings rather than suspensions for his behaviour. “If a student with attachment issues gets to spend more time with his parents [through suspension], he will repeat the behaviour and make the situation worse,” the mother said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
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://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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