Sunday, November 20, 2022



Law School Accrediting Panel Votes to Make LSAT Optional

Legal education tends to be demanding so letting in people who are unlikely to cope with it is to set up a lot of people for disappointment and failure. It is quite simply cruel

An American Bar Association panel voted Friday to drop a requirement that law school applicants take the LSAT or another standardized admissions test, amid debate about whether the tests help or hurt diversity in admissions.

The accrediting council, made up of lawyers, professors and administrators, voted 15-1 at its meeting to eliminate the requirement of a “valid and reliable admission test” for hopeful law students. The panel sought public comment on the proposal in May, after an ABA committee recommended the elimination of the testing requirement.

Individual law schools are still free to require a test. The policy change will take effect beginning for students applying in fall 2025.

The LSAT, or Law School Admission Test, tests analytical reasoning, logic and reading comprehension, and is considered a predictor of success in law school. The ABA last year allowed law schools to consider the Graduate Record Examination, or the GRE, in addition to the LSAT.

Public comments over eliminating the testing requirement have been polarized, largely around the issue of diversity. The legal profession has long been criticized for a lack of women and people of color in its top ranks, and the panel’s debate comes as schools are bracing for a decision from the Supreme Court on whether race can be a factor in college admissions.

“In the grand scheme of things, folks of color perform less well on the LSAT than not, and for that reason, I think we are headed in the right direction,” Leo Martinez, an ABA council member and dean emeritus at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said at the meeting. “I am sympathetic that it gives people like me a chance.”

Representatives from the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT, and ETS, a nonprofit education testing service, told the council making testing optional would result in the admission of some law students who are unprepared to succeed, which it said would ultimately hurt the legal profession.

“This proposal will be highly disruptive,” John White, chair of LSAC’s board of trustees, told the council. “The change won’t be worth it, and we won’t get the diversity we are looking for.”

“I find the argument that the test is necessary to save diversity in legal education is bizarre,” said council member Craig Boise, dean of Syracuse University College of Law.

The panel also questioned why law schools shouldn’t be aligned with other graduate programs that don’t require tests.

A range of law professors and prospective law students urged the ABA to eliminate the testing requirement in public comments submitted before the vote.

In one written comment, Fariha Amin, a full-time worker and mother to a 6-year-old son, said her LSAT scores remain a hurdle to getting into law school. She took tutoring courses, but her scores still weren’t high enough to be admitted, she told the ABA, urging them to eliminate the requirement.

“I would hate to give up on my dream of becoming a family lawyer, just due to not being able to successfully handle this test,” Ms. Amin wrote.

Coalitions of admissions officers and university deans warned of unintended consequences if the testing requirement were dropped.

“We believe that removal of the testing requirement could actually increase the very disparities proponents seek to reduce by increasing the influence of bias in the review process,” Kristin Theis-Alvarez, assistant dean of admissions and financial aid at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said in a submission on behalf of dozens of university officials.

They argued that eliminating the test could lead to an overreliance on grade-point average and other criteria they say could be “infused with bias.”

In a survey of 82 law schools, released this week by Kaplan Inc., 30 said they would be “very likely” to continue to require tests while 37 said they were undecided. Only two schools said they would be very unlikely to continue requiring an admission exam.

John Pierre, chancellor of Southern University Law Center, a historically black university in Baton Rouge, La., in an interview said he supported the ABA change but his university would continue to use the LSAT for prospective students, regardless.

Each school, he said, should make its own choices. “There have been concerns for a number of years that it might not be a factor in determining success,” Mr. Pierre said. “Everyone has to look at their own history.”

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New Conservative School Board Members Fire Superintendent, Ban Critical Race Theory at First Meeting

A group of parents who ousted their school board members in South Carolina wasted no time putting their new powers to use by immediately firing their district superintendent and eliminating any vestige of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their schools, among other moves.

A group of parents who ran for a school board acted at once to fulfill their campaign promises. As soon as the new majority was sworn in to take their place on the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina, they moved.

Within the first two hours of their first meeting upon being sworn in, the board fired school superintendent Deon Jackson, dumped district in-house counsel Tiffany Richardson, banned any part of the CRT curriculum they could find, and launched a committee to evaluate whether certain books in district libraries were age-appropriate, NBC News reported.

The new majority of conservative parents who took over the school board took their seats after a campaign by a group called Moms for Liberty, a group that rose to oppose the left-wing agenda in races across the country ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, joining many outraged parents.

NBC noted that Moms for Liberty endorsed more than 500 school board members across the county, and they achieved an astounding 49 percent success rate.

In South Carolina’s Berkeley County, for instance, Moms for Liberty flipped six board seats and took control of the board’s majority. That allowed them to move quickly to implement their agenda.

Moms for Liberty celebrated the board’s quick action, saying, “six new board members clean house first night on the job.”

The liberal media, such as NBC, were shocked that the district’s “first black superintendent” Jackson was immediately fired. But the board replaced Jackson with Anthony Dixon, who is also black.

Indeed, the new chairman, Mac McQuillin, warned the audience to settle down when they announced the end of Jackson’s job.

“All right, listen up,” McQuillin said during the meeting. “We’re going to be respectful in this meeting. You may not agree with our votes, but I ask that you please be respectful and calm. What kind of example are you setting for our kids, disrupting a meeting like this?”

The previous, more liberal board members also fretted over the firing of Jackson and Richardson.

David Barrow, the ousted board chairman, called the firings a “travesty” and a “political witch hunt,” NBC added.

Another member who stayed over from the previous board, Yvonne Bradley, attacked the new majority, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are being fooled by these six. Unbelievable — what the chairman would do. It is so unbelievable how this is going.”

Bradley also blasted the audience for voting for the new majority.

Local liberals also excoriated the new majority for banning CRT, a move that the left-wingers claimed was a sham because there is no CRT curriculum in the school in the first place. They also claimed that a committee to review library books is unnecessary because there are already rules to guide the purchase of books for the schools.

Still, the board united 8-0 to set up a committee to craft guidelines to remove “inappropriate sexual/pornographic content” from the schools after it was determined that teachers, mental health professionals, and librarians would also be part of the committee.

The board in South Carolina’s Berkeley school district, while shocking for how quickly it moved to implement a parent-friendly agenda, is not the only school board to be impacted by Moms for Liberty and other parent groups looking to oust left-wings from positions affecting schools.

In another report, NBC noted that parents in Florida sent at least 25 new school board members to work, along with the support of powerhouse Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And the governor had great success in his school endorsements.

Lindsey Curnutt, a member of DeSantis’ communications department, said in a statement that the governor “led a coalition of parents to establish students-first, parents’ rights school board governance across the state. The DeSantis Education Agenda was on the ballot, and the voters made their voice clear: We want education, not indoctrination.”

Moms for Liberty also waded into Florida’s school board races by endorsing 51 candidates. Twenty-eight of those candidates won, NBC noted. In contrast, the state’s Democratic Party endorsed 30 candidates, but only nine won. And the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist, endorsed seven school board candidates and only three won. Crist also handily lost his race to DeSantis.

Time will tell how effective these new conservative, parent-friendly school board members will be, but whatever the case, it is about time that parents start to pay more attention to the extreme leftism being foisted on our schools in the guise of “education” by these school boards and to begin making inroads to stop it.

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Why Catholic schools didn’t fail at all while public ones did during COVID pandemic

In case you missed it, American education is in free-fall. The National Center for Education Statistics released the first national test scores for fourth- and eighth-graders since before the pandemic, and the news is somehow worse than we could have imagined, with catastrophic learning loss, the largest declines ever recorded and decades of progress wiped out.

But in America’s Catholic schools, the failure and free-fall simply did not happen. In fact, in both math and reading, Catholic scores stayed the same or improved in areas where public schools dramatically declined.

For instance, Catholic students in 8th grade saw a one-point average increase in their reading scores, compared to the three-point drop for public school 8th graders. Scores for 4th-grade math stayed the same for Catholic schools but dropped five points for public schoolers in the same grade.

The losses facing America’s public-school students can’t be overstated — researchers typically consider 10 points as equivalent to a year’s worth of learning, so most of our public-school students have lost months they can’t get back.

Unsurprisingly, the education establishment has been scrambling. They seemed unable to decide whether this disaster affected all states regardless of COVID closures (it didn’t), or whether it was the inevitable result of trying not to spread the virus. A quick look at European schools throughout much of the last few years casts doubt on that idea, but Catholic schools now offer a powerful rebuttal much closer to home.

As Partnership School’s Kathleen Porter-Magee pointed out, if Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest-performing state in the nation. They’d also be the most cost-effective state — by a long shot.

Families pay an average of $5,847 to send their children to Catholic school, compared to the roughly $16,000 public schools receive per pupil — not counting the billions the education establishment received, and then largely did not spend, during the pandemic.

In other words, it could be done. The public school system just decided not to do it.

In retrospect, the outcomes seem obvious. Across the country, most Catholic schools stayed open and kept teaching students, while most public schools closed and offered at best a paltry attempt at actual remote learning.

The decision to stay open and keep teaching students was an extraordinarily bold one. As Porter-Magee recently noted, it was made amid substantial uncertainty and constant rhetoric from teachers’ unions and their allies that reopening schools “was tantamount to murder.”

The fear-mongering rhetoric never came true, of course. And thanks to the brave decisions and hard work of Catholic school leaders across the country, neither did the massive learning loss that plagues public schools today.

Families across the country have rewarded Catholic schools for standing in the gap when it mattered. Catholic-school enrollment is soaring, while public-school enrollment plummets.

After many years of struggles for Catholic schools, with pillars of the community forced to close when they could no longer make ends meet, this is a welcome change. But more must be done.

Despite recent growth, many Catholic schools operate at a financial loss. That’s because the average cost to families doesn’t come close to capturing all the expenses involved. To make up the difference, Catholic schools rely heavily on private donors, diocesan support and endless work of administrators who are dedicated to the mission of Catholic education.

But there is another option to make Catholic education sustainable for another generation: school choice.

In leading school-choice states like Florida, Catholic school enrollment growth was especially strong, and schools have not faced the same types of existential struggles as many in other states regularly do.

When parents can redirect some of their education tax dollars to the schools of their choice, many choose Catholic schools — and many schools no longer face the same financial burdens as before.

School choice offers a solution to ensure that the growth Catholic schools are experiencing now continues into the next generation. As an added bonus, there is compelling evidence that school choice helps public schools as well.

For Catholics, education is core to our identity. As the Catechism says, “Parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This right is fundamental,” and “public authorities have the duty of guaranteeing this parental right and of ensuring concrete conditions for its exercise.”

During the pandemic, leaders across the country proved their dedication to this mission by keeping students learning in historically challenging conditions.

They succeeded where the system failed. As we continue to learn more about the scale of the challenge ahead of us to clean up the disaster of the last few years, lawmakers should pass the types of programs that ensure Catholic schools can remain strong for another generation who will need them.

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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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