One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn't Work Well, but Diversity Advocates Are Hitting the Accelerator

There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.

This remarkable learning gap of about five grade levels exists today in many if not most K-8 classrooms in the U.S., according to researchers. They say it makes teaching everyone in a classroom extremely difficult and may help explain the poor performance of many public schools.

The gap partly reflects reformers’ decades-long push against grouping students by ability that’s only intensifying now in a renewed clamor for diversity in classrooms. Although much attention has focused on dropping selective admissions at academically competitive public schools, the diversity movement has also rolled back gifted programs and honors classes at more schools, from New York to Seattle.

Even educational experts who support diversity warn that the dismantling of accelerated instruction will likely add to the learning gap problem as advanced students are increasingly tossed into general education classrooms.

The learning gap already exists in big cities, suburbs, and small towns. A 2021 study found that in about 70% of fourth-grade classrooms, student performance varied widely, with pupils placing in four or more different math benchmarks from low to advanced – or from about the second- to sixth-grade levels.

The pandemic lockdowns widened the spread even more. It was particularly harmful to low-income students of color who spent more time in remote instruction and dropped even further behind their white peers, according to a 2022 study.

To learn, students need challenging instruction calibrated just beyond what they already know. But the wider the learning gap in a classroom, the more likely that a teacher won’t provide everyone with appropriate levels of instruction, says Scott Peters, a senior research scientist at school assessment group NWEA who focuses on the achievement gap.

“What schools are doing today is so inefficient and ineffective,” Peters says. “Equity should be about giving every kid what they need to grow. But we are teaching every kid the same thing, despite the big achievement gaps among them, and that’s the definition of inequity.”

For diversity advocates, the priority is integrating classrooms of high-achieving whites and Asians with more blacks and Latinos despite the disparity in skill levels that often exists among these students. They argue that mixed classrooms are essential in a country with a population that’s become much more diverse over the past two decades.

Halley Potter at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, says that while ability grouping almost always produces classrooms skewed by race and class, mixed classrooms create “learning environments that build empathy, reduce racial bias, and prepare students to thrive in a diverse world.”

But what about academic performance? Years of research to find out if mixing students from different economic backgrounds improves the performance of low achievers is “inconclusive,” according to a review of the studies by Sarah Cordes at Temple University.

Several studies suggest that struggling students do see gains in more prosperous schools ‒ but a few studies suggest they don’t. The bigger issue, Cordes points out, is that it’s unclear what’s causing the improved performance: Is it the exposure to high-achieving peers or the family background of the struggling students?

If mixed-ability classrooms work, it’s not reflected in the nation’s report card. The national testing scores of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading showed almost no progress from 2009 to 2019. More telling, the divergence between the high and low performers widened significantly. Scores for the weakest students fell in both subjects and in both grades.

But researchers who say lumping students together isn’t working and it’s time to consider new approaches sometimes face a hostile reception in today’s racially charged fight over public education.

“If you want to be called a racist, go out and say that you're for ability grouping,” says Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University who studies and consults with schools on this issue. “And people will say it to your face. But I’ve spent my career trying to help every kid grow academically, and I think the research says that ability grouping is a better way to do it.”

The learning gap takes shape even before kids enter kindergarten. A 2022 study looked at math and science skills among kindergartners of different races. Researchers found that about 16% of white students and only 4% of blacks and Latinos showed advanced abilities, a spread that they attributed mostly to differences in family income and early educational opportunities for children.

As students move through elementary school, so does the learning gap. In a study of sixth graders, researchers examined math and reading test data from two large and racially diverse urban school districts with more than 22,000 students in the 2014-2015 school year. They found that 59% of math classrooms and 82% of English classrooms had a gap of five or more grade levels.

School reformers have arguably helped to maintain if not widen the gap by dismantling ability grouping practices like tracking, according to Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at Brookings Institution who wrote a book on tracking. This system that typically places students in low-, average- and high-performance classrooms for most of their schooling was the dominant way to organize students in the late 1980s, when it first came under attack by liberal-minded educators and academics. They were inspired by the work of Jeannie Oakes, an educational theorist at UCLA whose research focused on school inequalities and social justice.

While research showed that top students benefited from the high tracks, those in the lower tracks, composed of many black and Latino students, were being neglected. Oakes found that the low tracks were filled with less-experienced teachers, ineffective rote instruction, and unruly behavior that undermined students’ ability to learn.

Reformers succeeded in sharply reducing tracking in English, history, and social science courses across the county, but not in advanced math, according to Loveless. They also rolled back remedial education, in which struggling kids were pulled out of class and placed in groups for special interventions in subjects such as reading.

Since then, the opposition to tracking has expanded into a broader movement that has toppled other forms of ability grouping in several cities.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/23/one-size-fits-all_education_doesnt_work_very_well_and_diversity_advocates_are_hitting_the_accelerator_882844.html

***********************************************

Texas A&M University Displays the Destructive Results of Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Programs

One of the great ironies in contemporary college systems is how rampantly anti-intellectual they have become over the course of the last generation or so. Cerebral rigor, open-mindedness, and challenging information have long been underpinning aspects of university life. These days, those same elements are regarded as threats on too many campuses. More troubling is the inability of some schools to apply common sense while looking at the concrete results of a failed experiment.

This takes us to College Station, Texas. Texas A&M University has been leaning heavily into the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives that have been mushrooming across the country at universities and corporations. These social engineering programs are claimed to be set up to make the opportunity and acceptance of minorities more widespread, while critics have maintained these are more like opportunities to exact social revenge and pave the way for activism to gain more power. At TAMU, the critics are being proven correct.

Try to imagine that a social program designed to aid the people was shown to instead be exacerbating the problem being addressed, such as a food bank that was found to have created more malnourishment with recipients or if Alcoholics Anonymous led to more getting locked into alcoholism. There would be calls to suspend the program.

Professor Scott Yenor, writing for The Martin Center, exposes how years of DEI enforcement at A&M have not led to improved conditions and better campus life for the allegedly target student groups. Instead, it is seen that what has been accomplished is a lowered satisfaction level across the board. And yet, in the face of this blatant failure of the DEI programs, the college looks over these results and declares that even more DEI enforcement is needed.

"TAMU has sought to build a DEI university since the late 1990s, when former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was its president. Efforts accelerated with TAMU's 2010 Report on Diversity, which announced a two-pronged revolution in equity and inclusive climate. Important incentives were put in place for university units and colleges that adopted aggressive equity measures and efforts to measure and improve the campus climate."

The college has conducted studies of the student body since these DEI measures were implemented, and it shows that respondents indicate the opposite has occurred. Instead of improving the climate among students on campus, they have come to feel less satisfied with their experience. Over just five years, all major ethnic groups showed significant drops in their perception of being part of the TAMU experience.

We have seen DEI methods intended to diminish "white privilege" and make opportunities more available to minorities. Just last week, we saw a Florida university had a DEI program that established a scholarship for which whites were not eligible. These methods, however, are shown to have the opposite effect.

While the chart above shows diminished results for all racial groups, whites experienced the lowest drop, while staggeringly, blacks over that small five-year window saw a drop of nearly 30%. Barely half of all black students at TAMU felt inclusiveness at the school, where inclusion was the primary thrust of the DEI program.

A likely cause for some of that result is the DEI push to show POC students the areas where they are supposed to feel exclusionary efforts. Whether it is exposing students to something they previously never felt or experienced or reclassifying things to show an imbalanced result for others, it appears possible that the feeling of exclusion was manufactured. Instead of opening up opportunities, the DEI program instead highlighted claims of systemic oppression, and this further divided the campus rather than fostering inclusivity.

What other explanation can be concluded when you have DEI programs set up to target POC students and make their campus experience richer, and instead, the result is more end up feeling as if they do not belong? It is clear the DEI initiative was a failure. But at TAMU, they are not looking to bring an end to this failing effort; amazingly, these results are instead seen as a reason to ramp up the program.

"The diversity commissars at TAMU, however, were in no mood to reexamine their priors in the face of these survey results. Instead, they focused on the newly-emerged racial chasm between whites and blacks. TAMU's 2020 State of Diversity Report recommended a lot more. Seizing on the new chasm, the report announced a frontal assault on the systemically racist TAMU community."

This is how race hustlers usually operate. They do not highlight successes that are easily pointed out. Instead, when their divisive tactics create a deeper racial chasm, they claim that it is proof they are needed for further time spent repairing the damage. Pay no mind that they added to the damage rather than healed anything.

This is a grifter's hustle, offering a solution to a problem they have created. That colleges play into this is disturbing, and that universities claiming to be institutions of higher learning cannot learn from the most basic level of lessons is as troubling a sign of our future that exists. The evidence is clear, and the scam is obvious, but these high-minded thinkers give in to their base emotional responses.

https://townhall.com/columnists/bradslager/2023/02/22/texas-a-and-m-university-displays-the-destructive-results-of-diversity-equality-and-inclusion-programs-n2619856

*************************************************

Biased reading list for Australian High School students

Of the five Australians who have won the Booker Prize, which one is on the NSW HSC English set text list? Of course you knew it was Aravind Diga whose novel White Tiger won in 2008. The other four winners of the Booker have yet to make it on to the racist NSW HSC reading list. Why DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little), Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark) and Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988, A True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001) are not on the list is worth considering.

Diga is on the list and the other four aren’t because of racism. The faceless bureaucrats who set the curriculum are obsessed with ethnicity and give preference to books by non-whites or books by white authors about the problems of non-white people belonging in mainly white societies. It sounds absurd but look at the list. Consider who is on the list of approved texts and, more importantly, who isn’t.

While DBC Pierre’s selection was controversial, there can be no doubt that the books of Flanagan, Carey and Keneally will stand the test of time because of the quality of their writing. In particular Flanagan’s book is recognised as a masterpiece but all three are examples of writing of the highest order and must stand among the best novels ever written by an Australian.

Why then are these brilliant novels not on the NSW HSC reading list? Instead the ideologues who compiled the current farce prefer works such as Swallow the Air by ‘Wiradjuri author’ Tara Winch and Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller or Small Island by Jamaican writer Andrea Levy which are all concerned with the awful way that white people treat black people. The books by Miller and Winch were probably selected because the curriculum specifies that the books studied must include, ‘a range of Australian texts, including texts by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander authors and those that give insights into diverse experiences of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples’. The book by Levy was presumably selected because it shows that the awful way that black people are treated extends across the globe and is not just limited to the racist cesspool which some people call Australia. These books, and the others like them on the reading list, are not bad novels, but neither are they great works of art and it would be interesting to hear from the people who selected them as to why they consistently prefer second-rate novels when there is an abundance of great literature available.

It is not only great Australian writers who are absent from the HSC reading list. We see the same reluctance to include great writers on the list when we consider British and American authors. Any list of the very best of contemporary or recent fiction by northern hemisphere writers must include people such as John Updike, Phillip Roth, Cormack McCarthy and Ian McEwan.

The funniest book about male adolescent sexuality ever written is incontestably Portnoy’s Complaint and perhaps it may be too risqué for a high school audience but The Human Stain and American Pastoral, also by Roth will be read generations from now for an insight into post-World War II America in the same way that we look to Balzac for insight into post-Napoleonic France. Updike’s novels cover the same territory with equally majestic and insightful prose which makes the stuff the HSC students have to digest seem amateurish. Cormack McCarthy’s The Road about the journey of a father and his son across post-apocalyptic America, was probably not written with the NSW HSC syllabus in mind but, if ever a book was written to capture the imagination of an adolescent male, this is it.

There are dozens of writers around the globe whose work offers us great insight into our contemporary world and who demonstrate the power and the beauty of ideas expressed in precise prose. Instead of putting the best of modern writing before HSC students, by focussing on works by non-white writers who are mainly concerned with issues of race, the NSW Board of studies is simply going to leave most HSC students bored with studies.

The decision to promote second-order fiction and to ignore the abundance of contemporary great literature that would capture the imagination of students must produce the same sort of disengagement we see in Chinese students who are required to immerse themselves in the riches of Xi Jinping Thought. The difference is that while Xi Jinping is steadily crushing any form of public dissent, for the moment, in Australia, we still have the ability to produce open debate about the relationship between ideology and power. The furore over the establishment of university courses focusing on Western Civilisation is a manifestation of that ideological struggle. The HSC reading list which is a product of the current academic ruling class, and which pushes an ideological barrow not supported by most Australians, is another. Step by step and book by book, the academic Left is chipping away at the legitimacy of the ideas that have shaped the modern world.

According to US academic Ambereen Dadabhoy, ‘Shakespeare is implicated in the hostility and violence, the currency of racism, experienced by those “of dark skin”.’ She is not alone. Google ‘Shakespeare and racism’ and hundreds of articles addressing this issue are available. The same applies if we ask Google if Shakespeare was a misogynist or an antisemite. There are hundreds of articles investigating these issues. From my unscientific reading, approximately half come to Shakespeare’s defence and find him not guilty but that still leaves 50 per cent of the people who examine these issues inclined to consider the greatest writer in the English speaking world for the past one thousand years, guilty of at least one of the wokerati’s trio of capital sins.

People in power all too often seem unable to distinguish between racist plays and plays about racism and the higher up the academic hierarchy one goes, the more the ‘experts’ judge the work of Shakespeare against the current race-obsessed intellectual climate rather than in relation to the Elizabethan age in which he wrote.

The idea that Shakespeare was a racist, misogynist or antisemite was rarely considered until recently. But increasingly, The Shrew, The Merchant and Othello are seen less as masterpieces and more as problematic plays unsuitable for study in secondary schools. The madness must be stopped.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/aussie-life-106/ ?

***********************************

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

*******************************