I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, October 30, 2022
An Entire Generation of Students Left Behind
The consequences of closing schools for roughly two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required many K-12 students nationwide to participate in remote learning, are starting to become apparent. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found a significant decline in student proficiency of both reading and math among students in grade four and grade eight compared to 2019.
After most schools were closed throughout 2020, districts nationwide turned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and their Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Mitigation guidelines to determine when it would be appropriate to reopen schools in 2021. The CDC has a long-standing practice of keeping draft guidance documents confidential, but senior officials within the agency shared the draft with the second largest teacher’s union in the nation- the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). AFT played an unprecedented role in the development of the phased mitigation guidelines that deviates from the CDC’s Evidence-Based Guidelines standards.
According to a damning report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, the result of this CDC-AFT malfeasance was a set of guidelines intended to increase the likelihood of public schools remaining closed to in-person learning.
The actions of the AFT, which led to an increase in remote learning, and a decrease in on-site learning, may have been a contributing factor to the proficiency decline in math and reading among students in most states.
The decline in student proficiency in math amongst both fourth and eight graders, as measured by comparing the 2022 national average score to the 2019 national average score, was the largest declined ever recorded. Twenty-five percent of fourth grade students nationally scored below the NAEP Basic level of competency in math (an increase from nineteen percent in 2019). More substantial, thirty-eight percent of eight grade students nationally scored below the NAEP Basic level of proficiency in math. Although not as drastic, declines in NAEP Basic levels of reading proficiency were also recorded in both forth and eight graders.
Specifically, forty-three states saw a decrease in math proficiency amongst fourth graders, and all 50 states (along with the District of Columbia) saw a decrease in math proficiency amongst eighth graders, respectively. For reading, thirty states recorded a decrease in proficiency amongst fourth graders, and thirty-three states recorded a decrease in proficiency amongst eighth graders (an increase from thirty-one percent in 2019).
Contributing factors to the decline in proficiency during remote learning include: access levels to a computer (desktop, laptop, or tablet) at all times, availability of a quiet place at home that is conducive to focused work, availability of teacher assistance with homework, and, for eight graders, access levels to daily video lessons. As expected, students with higher levels of proficiency had greater access to the abovementioned. The inverse is true for students who demonstrate lower proficiency in test scores. Those students who were already disadvantaged were impacted more substantially.
Given these nationwide declines in student proficiency, and their correlation with increased remote learning during the pandemic, via the law of transitivity, a clear correlation also exists between Biden’s CDC allowing a teacher’s union to edit public health policy and the decline of student proficiency in math and reading.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky served as a direct contact to AFT. According to the House Subcommittee’s findings, she was personally responsible for incorporating the health policy edits from the teachers union. Initially, the Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Mitigation lacked a specific COVID-19 infection rate threshold to trigger school closures, but AFT advocated for a conservative threshold trigger, similar New York Cities’ school closure threshold, which closed schools if the Covid positivity rate exceeded three percent.
An entire cohort of youth is now lacking foundational proficiency in education more than past generations. The teachers union acted against the best interest of students nationwide, educationally speaking. While it’s unclear if their motives were for preserving the personal health of teachers, giving these teachers continued income with less work, a combination of both, or other factors, they never should have been allowed to create public health policy. The move politicized public health and is responsible for a whole generation of under-achievers with increased mental health issues.
The only question is will Congress hold those who allowed politics to override sound policy responsible?
https://dailytorch.com/2022/10/students-struggle-after-teachers-union-interfered/
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Colleges are brain-free zones
All right, so here's this stupid, infuriating, idiotic story, which can only mean it bubbled up from academia. It happened at the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, where a female student was allegedly sexually assaulted during school hours.
Now, that's bad enough, but it gets worse. Students, understandably horrified, demanded increased security on campus. And one anonymous student created a petition that garnered 6000 signatures asking for more security cameras and more stringent ID access passes.
The university quickly responded with an email from the Vice Chancellor of Public Safety and Emergency Management. Remember the old rule? The longer the title, the less they actually do. In the email, the VC promised they would be taking additional actions, and that would include increasing patrols and security shifts, meaning more cops.
Can you guess what happened next? Hint it always happens when common sense runs headfirst into the witless woke. Stupid, destructive outrage. See, the woke are like that drunken moron speeding southbound down a northbound highway, eventually causing destruction of someone else who was doing the right thing.
And so a backlash came from students who claimed the increasing police presence would threaten the safety of students of color. As opposed to, you know, wanna be rapists. You know, I didn't realize Pit was a school for the mentally challenged. What did these students have to do to get admitted? Sketch a turtle or a pirate? I tried that.
So after a sexual assault, some students were more concerned over the presence of police than the presence of a rapist. Of course, this is what happens when the media distorts the odds of police shootings. College kids prefer rapists. Classrooms aren't safe during school, and cops are as popular as a fart in a hot tub. And I know that, done a lot of research in that area.
Which reminds us college campuses are not just gun free zones, they're also brain free zones. So here you got a microcosm of what you're seeing now in every city. Microcosm means a small sample of a bigger problem like Joy Behar’s small toe. That's pretty good. Yes. Could use a laugh. She never fails.
With crime out of control and with so many female victims. Where are the feminists? Why are they so afraid of calling out repeat thugs who viciously brutalize women? Even when attackers are arrested, they're let free immediately and their only punishment is that they're late for their next attack.
Here's the reason -- the female victim is now secondary to the mantra of systemic racism. For a long time, it's been a dogfight for first place on top of the victim totem pole. But sorry, gals. Being considered racially oppressed is the equivalent of drawing a royal flush in poker. No other hand can trump it.
So if you're in the wrong group, you can't be a victim even when you're a victim. And if you complain, of course, you must be racist. In the world of social justice, violent felons can be busted and released without bail in hours because society did it to him and after each senseless attack, as always, the perp’s lengthy rap sheet is longer than a receipt from Walgreens.
Don't dare add any more police because that will hurt feelings. So they can have a safe space from alternate ideas, but not rapists. Using their logic, if you're at an ATM late at night, you're better off if the guy behind you is wearing a ski mask than a cop's hat.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gutfeld-colleges-are-brain-free-zones
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Petticoat tyrants running faculty recruitment in Australian universities
Males need not apply for many university teaching jobs
ANU is not alone with its women-only recruiting. Swarms of other universities are at it too. Australia’s 40-year legal progress towards equal opportunity for males and females is white-anted by these progressive academics (the same ones who aren’t sure who’s a woman in the first place). Their flimsy rationale is to level up the sex ratios in their fields.
How successful are the women-only ads at hoovering up qualified women? Not very, apparently.
In November, the RMIT node [2] of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems provided feedback from its “women-only recruitment round”. This involved 13 women-only jobs and two “First Nations” slots (any gender). Maybe “First Nations” males in academia count as honorary females. Using the insane leftist jargon now blanketing academia, Chief Operations Officer Dr Mary Gray began by announcing how
“Patriarchy and racism are systems that exclude women, people of colour, and those living with disability from accessing the full benefits of the post-industrialised workforce.”
I feel sorry for Dr Gray because her centre rashly set a target of 40 per cent woman researchers by 2026 and now “we are being held accountable to this target by the Australian Research Council.”
Her recruitment exercise included beating away pathetic male optical physicists and engineers, many of whom — desperate for consideration — insisted on applying anyway. Qualified women hung back, needing strokes and reassurance, forcing the recruiters into what Dr Gray called “dozens and dozens of conversations.” In the end they got 311 applicants and filled a meagre five positions with women (37.5% of the advertised jobs). “We consider this an outstanding achievement, especially in the context of 2020!” she wrote, referring to covid issues.
Their attempt to fill an Aboriginal-only optics job at ANU was aborted as just too hard. I guess Aborigines with transformative meta-optical expertise aren’t all that thick on the ground, even in Canberra let alone Wadeye. Dr Gray says that on the challenge of recruiting women
"We appear to be in a position of an ugly compromise between delivering on our scientific objectives and building our diverse workforce. Globally there are enough women, with the right expertise to fill every single postdoctoral position in our Centre! However, Australia has been one of the world’s most locked-down countries globally and, in our disciplines, we are reliant on the international job market. Effectively, the pandemic has reduced the flow of new postdoctoral students and researchers into Australia to a trickle and competition is fierce to obtain women researchers.
The competition is excellent for women, which we applaud … In practice, we have struggled to stick to our gender target in 2021. We must keep proving that it doesn’t have to be research goals versus diversity goals. The big picture objectives of building a diverse workforce for research excellence and the creation of transformative technologies in meta-optics is paramount. Integrity, accountability, and taking steps forward to recruit more women when international travel resumes is a priority for 2022 and 2023."
All this women-only monopolisation might be lawful, but it doesn’t pass the pub test. The legislative loophole was designed, according to the Human Rights Commission, for helping groups “who face, or have faced, entrenched discrimination so they can have similar access to opportunities as others in the community.” ANU-wise, there aren’t a lot of women, women-identifiers and LGBTQIA+s with space-optic ambitions now sleeping rough in Petrie Plaza after being cruelly knocked back for space jobs. Probably young women just don’t care about space-optics, and gravitate instead to school-teaching, law, health careers or Virgilian poetics.
There’s no university push to encourage males into female-dominated sectors, let alone go the whole hog and offer male-only student admissions and male-only faculty positions. More on that aspect shortly.
You might be wondering how the female-only ads square with equal opportunity – considering that they give males zero opportunity. Well, all the various Acts have permitted exemptions or “special measures”, originally intended for women’s refuge staffers or corsetiers and the like. They were uncontroversial despite their broad wording.
For example, the Federal Sex Discrimination Act has a get-out clause (7D) saying an employer “may take special measures for the purpose of achieving substantive equality between men and women” and between, for example, “women who are breastfeeding and people who are not breastfeeding.” [Disclosure of interest: I am among the “people who are not breastfeeding”].
The Victorian Act equivalent, similarly, says (S12) “special measures” are “for the purpose of promoting or realising substantive equality for members of a group with a particular attribute.”
From 2015 the universities began using the loophole for their women-only ads. Initially, there were doubts in legal circles that they’d get away with it. Employers in Victoria invoking the “special measures” in effect got a letter of comfort from Victoria’s Equal (sic) Opportunity and Human [i.e. Female] Rights Commission as follows:
“A university may identify an inequality – that women are under-represented in its academic workforce within a particular faculty. The causes of the under-representation may include a lack of female candidates for positions, a lack of female academic staff to act as role models, unconscious bias in recruitment practices or other societal and organisational-specific factors.”
The Australian Human Rights Commission defined “identified positions” , e.g. for women only, as helping “people who experience disadvantage to access equal opportunity in employment.” In fact, a woman associate professor ensconced in a useless gender studies department suffers no disadvantage over not being in a STEM area. The women-only push is coming from employers who feel disadvantaged by having too many blokes around. No bragging rights there. The Victorian commission in a case study actually rules out a co-ed high school offering an academic scholarship for girls under 14, on the basis that such girls don’t have any disadvantage and the school is really just doing a marketing exercise to attract girl students.[3]
Note that the Victorian HR Commission has shown no interest that in Victoria in 2019, male students were only 24% in university school-education courses (27% nationally), 27% in health (26%), and 31% in “Society and Culture” (34%), according to data from the federal Department of Education. In the hot-button field of “natural and physical sciences”, women students are well represented nationally at 51%. Conversely, they’re slightly under-represented in management/commerce (46%) and architecture (41%), and greatly under-represented in IT (19%), and engineering (18%).
Overall, universities have become bastions for female students. For domestic (non-overseas) undergrad and post-grad students (total 1.086m in 2019), the ratio is 59% females to 41% males. Yet universities continue to cosset female students with “women’s centres” and other privileges not offered to males.
In pre-school teaching, males nationally comprise a near-invisible 2% versus females’ 98%, according to last year’s census.[4]
WA sports a mere 27 men pre-school teachers vs 3507 women; NSW and Victoria combined muster a mere 448 men pre-school teachers vs 16,768 women. Not much of that oh-so-necessary “diversity and inclusion” there. But imagine the clamour from feminists if a pre-school tried to correct these gross imbalances via “men-only” recruitment ads. Indeed, men seeking pre-school and primary teaching roles would have a valid case of discrimination, given the general unfounded fear that they might sexually abuse children. (Another reason they’re opting out is that the only other male employee is often just the gardener). In school teaching, the lack of male teachers is not only concerning but deteriorates annually. Overall, males have slipped in 50 years from 41.3% to barely 28%. ABS 2021 data show that male primary teachers were 20.2% in 2006, decreasing annually to a mere 18.0% last year. In secondary teaching, males have slipped from 43.4% in 2006 to 38.8% last year.
Universities advertising for women-only and gender-diverse-only positions will soon be the new normal. Move along, nothing to see here. You “cis males” can just suck it up. The petticoat tyrants are on the march!
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-universities/2022/10/take-your-xy-chromosomes-and-begone/
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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