I remember how it was -- JR
Downplaying Academic Excellence in Med School Admissions
For some time now it has been true that many blacks avoid black doctors because they don't trust the qualifications of black doctors. That will now accelerate
America’s top medical schools, worried they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.
Of course, the universities won’t admit what they are doing – and certainly not why. All they will say is that their new standards add “equity” and “lived experience.” Unfortunately, adding those factors inevitably lessens the weight given to others.
The harsh reality is medical schools are downplaying academic achievement and MCAT scores, which give the best evidence of how well students are prepared for medical school. The MCAT is specifically tailored for that purpose. In addition to a section on critical reasoning (similar to the SATs), it examines students on biology and biochemistry, organic chemistry, the physics of living systems, and the biological and psychological foundations of behavior. It’s easy to see how those relate directly to higher education in medical science. Yet med schools want to downplay them and add inherently subjective criteria like “lived experience.”
Med schools are especially eager to get rid of the MCATs. After years of evaluating admissions folders, they know they cannot meet their goals for minority enrollment if they retain their near-total emphasis on academic qualifications. They know, too, that standardized tests and grades leave a statistical trail. They want to kick dust over that trail before the Supreme Court’s expected ruling against affirmative action. They fear the statistics will show marked differences in admission rates for individuals from different groups who have similar scores and GPAs. That’s not a wild guess. Admission teams know the evidence from years of experience.
But dropping the tests, or making them optional, presents a thorny PR problem. Schools fear they would sink below competitors in national rankings, which include MCAT scores. So, they are doing what undergraduate colleges have already done. They are colluding. By withdrawing jointly from US News and World Report rankings, they hope to soften the blow to each one’s prestige. (It’s an interesting question whether this collusion violates anti-trust laws, as their collusion about scholarship awards did.)
What medical schools call “equity” and “lived experience” are code words for discrimination by racial category. They are using this word fog to cloud over four crucial but uncomfortable facts. First, today’s standardized tests are actually fair and unbiased. Medical schools don’t deny that. They know test makers have spent fortunes over the past half century to scrub their tests of any racial, cultural, or ethnic bias. Second, medical schools aren’t claiming the tests are poor predictors of performance. They can’t.
Third, they know criteria like “equity” and “lived experience” are inherently subjective and opaque to outsiders. That’s their magic potion for admissions officers. These education bureaucrats are following the advice Humpty Dumpty gave in “Alice in Wonderland.” Alice asks him, “Must a name mean something?” And Humpty replies, “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Humpty Dumpty would be enthralled with code words like “lived experience” and “equity.” They mean exactly what Humpty and admissions officers choose them to mean – neither more nor less.
Finally, by emphasizing non-academic “experience,” these schools are downplaying the reality that their applicants have already graduated college, most likely as science majors. That academic background is the most important “lived experience” for graduate study in any rigorous field, including medicine.
To implement the bias they prefer and do it secretly, medical schools are counting on public ignorance and apathy. When patients believe any subgroup of doctors has systematically higher or lower qualifications, they will take that into account. They do the same thing in choosing lawyers, dentists, accountants, and other professionals.
That may be unfair to any individual practitioner, but it’s inevitable. That’s because ordinary patients (or consumers) have no direct way of judging professional competence. They can only look for indirect (and imperfect) signs of a good doctor. Did she go to a top medical school, for instance, or practice at a teaching hospital? If they think it is harder for an outstanding Chinese-American undergraduate to gain admittance, they will reasonably guess she’s a better student and a more-qualified doctor. They may be wrong about that particular doctor, but it’s a sensible guess.
There’s a general – and inescapable – point here. When admissions, hiring, or promotion are influenced, either positively or negatively, because of group membership, when outsiders know that and cannot measure quality directly, they will see that “group membership” as a telltale sign of ability.
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‘School Choice’ and Homeschool Families Must Fight Together
President Reagan once famously quipped, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Indeed, those of us on the right are rightly skeptical of government schemes to inject its tentacles into private life, and some have raised good-faith questions about the risks of bringing “public funding” (and the strings attached to it) into private education.
But Reagan himself knew that empowering parents reduced the threat of government influence over our nation’s children, and he proposed in 1985 to allow parents to redirect up to $600 of what taxpayers would have otherwise spent via existing programs on a child in a public school and instead use it for that child’s private education. Just like today, Reagan’s faith in school choice programs horrified—and terrified—those on the left who believe our children should be molded chiefly by the state, not parents.
For years since, a small portion of American families have been able to direct their own children’s education through values-based private school or by directly homeschooling their own kids. Some have done so with help from the current patchwork of school choice programs, and others by fully bearing the financial burden themselves. But now, states across the country stand poised to break down the financial barriers holding back millions of families from doing likewise, while also obliterating the current penalty levied against private and home-educating families who not only dutifully pay taxes to support other children, but then also bear the full financial burden again to provide for their own.
Indeed, education savings account (ESA) programs are now blossoming in conservative friendly states such as Florida, Arizona, and West Virginia—even as union-backed leftists fight tooth and nail to suppress them in progressive bastions such as California, Illinois, and New York.
Some fear that accepting ESA funds will empower the left to hijack their control of their children’s education. This fear should not be taken lightly. But neither should it blind nor paralyze our judgment.
There is no doubt that with or without ESA legislation, parents and lawmakers will always have to remain vigilant to defend the integrity of private and home-based education. But as California has shown with the likes of its recently enacted legislation, SB 107—threatening the custody of any parent nationwide who does not support radical gender theory when it comes to their own children—families will never be “safe” from the ambitions of the left simply because they ask to be left alone. Indeed, the threat to families directing the upbringing of their children exists not because of programs like ESAs, but in spite of them.
Indeed, it is tempting to some on our side to embrace the status quo out of concern that in the future, leftist lawmakers would try to burden ESA-type programs with damaging regulations. But that status quo means stranding more than 90% of our nation’s kids in a system where groups like the National Education Association (NEA) are actively seeking to inculcate the next generation in state-sponsored leftwing ideologies. This generational monopoly presents a far greater risk to the future of the nation and to the liberties of our children than a hypothetical battle down the line to preserve the victories we will have won for school choice and private education in the meantime.
The more families and schools that are involved in nonpublic education (which will be boosted significantly by programs like an ESA), the larger the constituency of voices to speak out and defend families against future attempts to undermine private or home-based learning. Already, for instance, the hugely successful public Great Hearts charter network responded to Arizona’s ESA expansion by launching religiously affiliated “Christos” campuses.
We must not join with the unions and prematurely impose our own civilizational defeat. Rather, as homeschool parents themselves have written at length, we must re-center families and amplify the voice and power of parents who wish to educate their own children free of bureaucratic interference or undo financial strain.
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Parents and Education
Parents will be held responsible by God for their children’s education, says the Bible. This was a view shared by the majority of America’s founders.
But today there is a great defiance against this on the part of many in our educational establishment. Many leaders in the educational system seem to think they know better than the parents as to what should and should not be taught.
FoxNews.com reports (3/4/23): “A Colorado elementary school’s private emails show secret plans to defy parents’ wishes on transitioning their child's gender.”
Recently, a Fairfax (Virginia) County parent, Neeley McCallister noted: “As parents, it is our primary duty to protect our children and preserve their innocence…Unfortunately, there is a toxic movement infiltrating our schools that is more interested in pushing a political agenda rather than teaching…our children the subjects we were taught in school: math, reading, science, history.”
McCallister made these remarks during hearings to promote a bill in the new U.S. House of Representatives, under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The new bill seeks to assert parental rights when it comes to what is taught in the schools.
This is right and good. Centuries ago America made great strides in becoming a “city on a hill” in part because of the great education so many citizens received. Initially it was based on the Bible and resulted in astounding levels of literacy.
As James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, observed, “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
The first Congress under the Constitution that gave us the First Amendment also passed a law that ensured that each state to be added to the new nation should be committed to education. If the American experiment were to work, it could only do so if the people could read and write for themselves. So on August 4, 1789, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance.
This important document said in Article III: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” This was in a day when “Religion” meant Christianity of one stripe or another.
Even Thomas Jefferson, who departed from Christian orthodoxy later in life, at least indirectly allowed the Bible and Isaac Watts’ hymnals to be used to teach reading at two schools for which he served as president of the board of trustees. Isaac Watts was a great writer of classic Christian songs, including “Joy to the World,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Jesus Shall Reign."
However, in the last few decades, there has arisen an anti-God tenor in the schools. Last week, Foxnews.com reported on a story out of the Phoenix area, where a school board rejected hiring teachers from a Christian college because these teachers were deemed “not safe”: “An Arizona school board member wearing cat ears during a meeting said she would oppose having a contract with a Christian university over the religious and Biblical beliefs they espouse.”
Another board member concurred with her, as he decried the university for “teaching with a Biblical lens." The board agreed with the anti-Christian ban.
The school board says in effect, “Teachers needed. Biblical Christians need not apply.” This sort of discrimination is clearly unconstitutional. But is it what parents want?
We all have a lens, a worldview. It was a Biblical worldview, a “Biblical lens,” that made us the most free and prosperous nation. But if the Left had their way, only those with godless values should be teaching our children---with little or no significant input from the parents.
Americanwirenews.com noted a similar example of anti-Christian bias at work in the schools. A public school teacher in Washington state said we need to keep the schoolchildren safe from their “Christo-fascist parents.”
Some parents teach their children to follow the Bible---the way Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan learned their values. “Horrors,” say many in the education establishment today, trying to separate parents from their children’s education.
Thankfully, the new Congress is fighting back, as noted. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich writes, “Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans have given the American people an opportunity to dramatically strengthen the role of parents in the education of their children.”
The preamble to The Parents Bill of Rights Act declares: “Parents have a God-given right to make decisions for their children. Unfortunately, many school districts have been ignoring the wishes of parents while special interest groups try to criminalize free speech.”
The preamble adds, “This list of rights will make clear to parents what their rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are.”
Perhaps Rep. Elise Stefanik says it all: “Parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education, and they have a right to know what is going on inside their child’s classroom.” Hear, hear.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jerrynewcombe/2023/03/09/parents-and-education-n2620379
***********************************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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