I remember how it was -- JR
NYC teachers union holds ‘astonishing’ vote of no confidence against schools official
The city’s powerful teachers union is holding an “astonishing” vote of no confidence against a Department of Education cabinet member who recently came under fire over the apparent ousting of hundreds of early childhood staffers, The Post has learned.
Deputy Chancellor of Early Childhood Education Kara Ahmed has been at the center of the outrage aimed at the division she leads, including over the nearly 400 social workers and instructional coordinators whose jobs are in limbo.
The United Federation of Teachers sent a petition earlier this week to the staffers, who received notices in September that most of their positions would be eliminated, but who have remained on payroll while allowed to look for other gigs within the agency.
“Our school system’s early childhood education program, until recently considered the pre-eminent program of its kind in the country, is being dismantled before our eyes,” UFT chapter leaders Naomi Rodriguez and Raul Garcia wrote to early childhood staffers.
“The staff who built this program are being cast aside, preschool sites are shutting down, and the city’s youngest students are paying the price,” it read.
Memos were also emailed to elementary schools and others who interact with the division on Wednesday.
Ahmed — who reports directly to Schools Chancellor David Banks — is also facing criticism over delayed reimbursements for city-contracted early childhood education programs and an exodus of central staff at the division.
“We cannot let the staff who built this program be cast aside or allow preschool sites to be shut down. Our city’s youngest students deserve better,” said Leroy Barr, secretary of the UFT.
The UFT has held votes of no confidence on individual principals, a spokesperson for the union confirmed — but usually not higher positions. The union has also filed formal complaints about local superintendents, though not votes.
“I have never heard of the UFT having a vote of no-confidence in a deputy chancellor — or anyone at the central office for that matter,” said Eric Nadelstern, a former deputy chancellor of school support and instruction under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who worked at the DOE for 40 years.
Nadelstern frowned on the move against Ahmed, which came ahead of announcements expected later this week from the Department of Education on child care and preschool programs.
“Circulating a petition for a vote of no-confidence on the eve of the department’s release of its early childhood plans seems premature and ill-advised,” he said. “It doesn’t feel as though it’s in the best interests of UFT members to respond in this manner, rather than use a more thoughtful approach to influence policy.”
The DOE has signaled it’s willing to make improvements to the division, though the policy to reassign most instructional coordinators and social workers was introduced under this administration.
“I’ll be on the record saying the system that we inherited was a mess of epic proportions,” Banks told Brooklyn parents at a town hall last week. “It’s all tied together, when I say there’s major challenges,” he added. “It just suffices to say, it’s not something I’m happy with at all… We’re going to make sure results are delivered.”
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The one question from Justice Thomas that exposed the affirmative action myth
Justice Clarence Thomas voiced what we're all thinking. What IS diversity, anyway?
Some of America's elite universities claim to know, as they defend the use of affirmative action in college admissions. But the dishonesty at the heart of their view is painfully obvious.
Their pitifully narrow understanding of diversity has damaged America.
'I've heard the word diversity quite a few times and I don't have a clue what it means,' Thomas said during oral arguments in the Supreme Court on Monday.
'Give us a specific definition of diversity…' he asked Ryan Park, the solicitor representing the University of North Carolina, alongside Harvard University, in their defense of race-conscious admissions programs.
It was a pointed question. Apparently, Park didn't see it coming.
'Racially diverse groups of people . . . perform at a higher level,' Park responded. 'The mechanism there,' he continued, 'is that it reduces groupthink and that people have longer and more sustained disagreement, and that leads to a more efficient outcome.'
Thomas' next cut went deep. 'I guess I don't put too much stock in that,' he replied, 'I've heard similar arguments in favor of segregation, too.'
Thomas is right to be skeptical. He knows firsthand the evils of discrimination based on race, and now he's being asked to endorse them?
Just as America has thrown the discredited 'separate but equal' lie underpinning segregation in the garbage, so should we trash this diversity myth.
The patronizing justification for race-based university admissions is that racial diversity generates diversity of view points, ideologies and ideas on campus.
Apparently, that contributes to the lively exchange of ideas.
Have any of these lawyers been to a college campus lately? They are among the most intolerant places in the country. The truth is that diversity of thought is grotesquely short supply at colleges throughout America, including Harvard.
And an overwhelming number of students are terrified of voicing their opinions, especially if they hold conservative views.
Every year since 2013, the Harvard Crimson has published survey results profiling the incoming freshman class. These reports show that an overwhelming majority of Harvard's incoming students identify as politically and socially progressive.
Of the graduating class of 2025, only 1.4 percent identify as very conservative; only 7.2 percent as somewhat conservative; and only 18.6 percent as moderate. By contrast, 72.4 percent of freshmen identify as predominantly liberal.
Yet this class is the 'the most diverse class in the history of Harvard,'according to the university.
It's a sick joke. The class is diverse in one very narrow and frankly, superficial way – skin color.
Other survey responses drive the point home. Members of the Class of 2025 who supported a candidate in the 2020 presidential election overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden, at 87 percent.
This doesn't sound like viewpoint diversity to me. And without viewpoint diversity as a justification, affirmative action may be a goner.
The Supreme Court's thinking on race-conscious admissions has centered not just on the legality of the policy but on its implications for higher education.
Is Harvard aware of this? Could that be why the Harvard Crimson didn't publish this year's feature on the incoming freshman class nor reply to my inquiry about whether they would do so?
It's a fair question to ask.
Defenders of affirmative action have also long argued that racial diversity would lead to more productive debates.
Pathetically, the opposite has happened.
In 2003, America's first female justice, Sandra Day O'Connor argued that racial and ethnic diversity increased tolerance of differing opinions.
It hasn't.
A 2021 survey of 37,104 students found that more than 80 percent of students reported some self-censorship. It's almost as if students are living in China as opposed to a vibrant campus in America.
Another study showed that 65 percent of college students felt today's 'campus climate prevents people from saying what they believe for fear of offending someone'. Less than half of all college students 'said they were comfortable offering dissenting opinions to ideas shared by other students or the instructor'.
This isn't diversity, it's a bland uniformity.
71 percent of students who identified as Republican 'felt that the campus climate chilled speech'.
How depressing.
American colleges have some nerve to claim that through racial discrimination they're making campus a better place.
The Supreme Court seems likely to strike down the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education next summer. The decision will rely most heavily on legal protections that prohibit racial discrimination.
But it may also have something to say about the faulty premise underlying the practice for all these years.
To answer Justice Thomas' question: true diversity is not skin deep.
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A tertiary tragedy in Australia
Of the assorted areas of life that have deteriorated over the neoliberal era – energy costs, health, and trust in institutions – has there been a greater erosion in esteem than that of higher education? The state of the Australian academy evokes Oscar Wilde’s refrain that’s all that’s now known is ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
This wasn’t always the case. Australia – given our history – has never been an apogee of the intellect. Our Anglo-European inheritance did once furnish us with an estimable academy, but we were one of the first places in the modern world to establish secular universities in the spirit of the Athenian model, and one of the first to offer tertiary education to women.
The establishment of an Australian academy was, as Governor-General Sir Charles Fitzroy remarked upon the founding of The University of Sydney in 1850, a development undertaken for the ‘advancement of…morality, and the promotion of useful knowledge’; an institute erected ‘for the promotion of literature and science’, with entrance not contingent on religion nor social-status, but on ‘the basis of academic merit’, as MP William Wentworth would confirm.
It was a noble intention that would come to fruition as our academy spawned a range of world-renowned figures. Inter alia, the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and entertainer – and Dame Edna herself – Barry Humphries emerged out of The University of Melbourne. While at The University of Sydney, the Kid from Kogarah, Clive James, and acclaimed art critic Robert Hughes were fellow alumni back in the 1950s. Other notable names, like opera singer Dame Nellie Melba and Nobel-prize-winning author Patrick White, were an integral part of our academic and artistic milieu.
The Australian academy – including the CSIRO – was also the site of inventions of major historical importance. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Australian inventions – like Wi-Fi, the bionic ear, or the airplane ‘black box’ – many of the advances and comforts of modern life wouldn’t be with us.
Yet such developments are a far cry from our current academic state. Alongside a decline in public literacy and numeracy – even among teachers – and a deterioration in school performance, as evident in our PISA results, hardly a day goes by without a major malfeasance at one of our tertiary institutions.
As a recent article in The Australian starkly observed, the Australian ‘education experience is just a sham’ with plagiarism and cheating rife. Alongside sector-wide contract cheating, there are now common examples of students who’ve faked their way through their entire degree.
There is a favoured method involving students bypassing university plagiarism software by employing ghostwriters in poor yet English-proficient places like East Africa. As one ghostwriter remarked: ‘I have some students who I have worked for since their first year and I’ve done all the assignments until they graduate.’ Adding that what really worried him was the ‘the medical students who have never done even one assignment since their first day’.
Like our ‘Most Liveable Cities’ crown, our position in the recently-published Times University Rankings is a partial reflection of our institutes and not a more acute gauge of the whole. Indeed, 60 per cent of these rankings are based on the narrow notions of research and citation, while only 30 per cent is given over to the more fundamental practice of teaching.
On top of this are increases in class sizes and a decline in academic standards, with the latter evident in the fall in the use of final exams and the consequent increase in group assignments. That is, assessments designed to help weaker, overwhelmingly foreign, students slide through on the coattails of their more competent classmates.
Universities are now engaged in a sleight-of-hand in which the content remains the same, yet the onus is taken off the individual. For as commentator – and ex-student – Meshel Laurie noted of her university experience: ‘It’s a neat trick: group assessment (with groups allocated by instructors) in courses overloaded with full-fee-paying, non-English speaking students means the English speakers bear the burden of catching the others up, translating the course content for them, and helping them pass.’
Thus – like our cities’ ostensible liveability – our university results are useful fodder for the marketers; but in reality, our universities are the educational equivalents of fast-food outlets whereby an outwardly attractive appearance belies the utter lack of sustenance found within.
Given such sophistry, what has caused this fall from grace? And why it allowed to persist? The sad fact is that in opposition to the crucial role that is still performed by parts of our universities in training our doctors, lawyers, and engineers – vast swathes of the sector are now nothing more than a warehousing program for young and a ‘degree factory’ run along economic lines for favoured interests.
Of these interests, the biggest beneficiary has been the foreign students themselves – particularly those from the developing world. Our top ten source countries are dominated by nations from what was once known as ‘third-world’ with the top three – China, India, and Nepal – comprising well over 50 per cent of our overall annual intake. It is a fact made more acute by the rapid increase in total numbers, with the amount of international students in Australia almost doubling between 2010-20.
Australia has by far the largest per capita presence of foreign students of any place in the world, at over a quarter of our tertiary cohort. Our universities have come to function not as a place of education, but as a means to a first-world wage and living conditions, and an indirect route to permanent residency: with a sizeable minority of ‘students’ (around 16 per cent) obtaining residency after their studies.
This trend is further reinforced by the vast numbers who don’t obtain residency, but who nevertheless stay on in one form or another: with ‘more international students than ever…remaining in Australia for up to four years on graduate work visas following their studies’. The figure is made worse by the non-negligible number who – both here and in the UK – simply overstay their visas and remain here illegally.
A cynical interpretation could be that these things don’t really matter, as long as such incidents remain isolated and the integrity of the academy remains. Yet unsurprisingly, the entrance of a raft of non-native students into a nation’s tertiary-education sector, often with little knowledge of its history, culture or customs – or even its language of instruction – has not proven salutary.
English language requirements are often forged and pre-university preparatory courses are little substitute for years of immersion in the ideas and idiom of instruction. Some students even regress in their English the longer they are here, rarely leaving their first language enclaves of their home and place of work.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/a-tertiary-tragedy
***********************************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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