I remember how it was -- JR
Ohio School District Arms Teachers and Staff: "'Our Schools Will No Longer Be Soft Targets'
In response to concerns about active shooter response times, Ohio’s River Valley Local School District in rural Marion County has adopted a new policy allowing teachers and school staff to be armed.
According to the Marion Star, River Valley joins 22 other Ohio school districts that permit approved staff members to carry weapons on campus.
Superintendent Adam Wickham stated that schools would no longer be “soft targets and unprotected,” noting that most active-shooter events occur in areas designated as “gun-free zones” or with minimal safety measures.
He emphasized the importance of ensuring that their schools will not be soft targets.
Wickham also highlighted the potential for armed staff in rural communities to save lives due to longer response times in the event of an active shooter.
He cited recent school shootings in Nashville, Uvalde, and Parkland as examples of how quicker response times could potentially save lives.
Wickham confirmed that each of the district’s four buildings, including a high school, a middle school, and two elementary schools, would have an armed staff member in addition to the school resource officer on campus from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
While some parents have expressed concerns about the training and selection process, the superintendent noted that the majority of parents appreciate the proactive approach to protecting their children.
Wickham acknowledged that not everyone would support the program, but emphasized that every safety measure, including the use of armed staff, is put in place to ensure the safe return of staff and students to their families each day.
Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 99 on June 13, 2022, allowing school districts across the state to authorize teachers, principals, and other staff to carry guns into classrooms with 24 hours of training.
Despite criticism from some Democrats who argued that the law sent the wrong message following the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, lawmakers fast-tracked the legislation.
Wickham stated that armed staff in the River Valley Local School District would undergo more training than recommended by the state. In 2020, the district required a total of 50 hours of training for armed staff members.
******************************************************
This Christian college is booming as campus enrollment has more than tripled in the last decade
A conservative, Christian college has tripled its enrollment in the last decade by establishing a "new model for higher education" that makes college affordable to all socioeconomic classes, the university president told Fox News.
"When families hear that there's an affordable private Christian university in Phoenix, Arizona, it's very attractive to come and visit," Grand Canyon University president Brian Mueller said. "Core competency, we think, is to understand where the economy is going, where the jobs are going to be, how people can build great careers and how they can do it without taking on large amounts of debt."
Grand Canyon University, a private Christian college in Phoenix, Arizona, founded in 1949, has grown from 7,602 on-campus students in 2012 to 25,350 in 2022, according to a university spokesperson. Online enrollment also doubled in the last decade.
"Every class is another record-breaking class in terms of numbers," Mueller said. "In the next 10 years or less it will grow somewhere around 50,000 students. We have acquired the land and have the building process in place to do that."
In 2008, Mueller joined GCU as their president when the college had only around 1,000 students. Since then, GCU has invested billions into the campus and grown its academic programs from 100 to 300 for on-campus and online students as students flooded in, the university president said. Mueller attributed some of the university's growth to the college building up the campus in a disadvantaged neighborhood, freezing tuition costs and offering generous scholarships.
"We were in a neighborhood that was very, very challenged from a crime perspective, from a poverty perspective," Mueller said. "But we thought we could use this to create a new model for higher education, one that would make it affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans."
GCU, which is located in West Phoenix, offers free tutoring to local K-12 students and provides a full-tuition scholarship program to local high school students that is meant to encourage more low-income, first generation students to go to their college.
The university also launched several local businesses that generate jobs for students and residents.
"When you're able to do that, you're able to fulfill the real goal and objective of higher education, which is to lift all boats," Mueller said.
"Higher education should be a great democratizing force in our country," Mueller told Fox News.
Lower tuition costs have driven student debt down, creating "an environment where socioeconomically we're extremely diverse," Mueller said.
The average GCU student paid $9,200 in tuition before scholarships this past year and about $8,897 for room and board on campus, a university spokesperson told Fox News. In 2022, the college offered $180 million in scholarships. Costs are kept low by employing a small staff to serve both in person and online students.
The numbers run counter to other private universities across the country. Average tuition for private institutions increase 4% in 2022-2023 to $39,723, according to an annual U.S. News and World Report survey.
"We haven't raised tuition for 10 years," Mueller said. "And the average student graduates with less debt than the average state university student."
The average debt level for GCU graduates was $21,557, according to a university spokesperson. In comparison, the debt of college graduates at private institutions averaged $31,820 in 2021, according to a U.S. News and World Report survey of 1,047 colleges.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/christian-college-booming-campus-enrollment-tripled-last-decade
*******************************************************Jews no longer so welcome at the Ivies
At every point in their history the Ivies have revealed what the existing elite values and whom it is willing to welcome into its ranks. Jews benefited from the meritocratic system of elite production that the Ivies administered in the postwar years and are at an apparent disadvantage now that the old system is considered exclusionary, unrepresentative, and otherwise ill-suited to the current needs and values of the people oveerseeing it. The Ivy League now presents conflicting answers as to whether Jews have a place within whatever post-meritocratic national elite the schools understand themselves to be building.
American Jews—at least the wealthy and relatively liberal ones who cluster in the Northeast—achieved their present status through a mid-to-late-20th-century credentialing system that tried and failed to exclude them. From the 1920s until the early 1960s, Yale’s administration implemented a series of secret admissions rules that had the effect of keeping the Jewish percentage of the student body at a consistent 10%. “They publicly said, and said it to themselves: We are not discriminating against Jews per se. We’re just trying to set up criteria so that the Jews we bring in will be the right kind of Jews,” said Daniel Oren, a psychologist and author of a book about the history of Jews at Yale. Harvard officially admitted to having a quota system in the early 1920s. In research for a 2017 senior thesis on the history of Jews at Dartmouth, Sandor Farkas found evidence that the school’s quotas on Jewish admissions lasted through the 1960s.
Aspects of the quotas have lingered on—it is harder for just about any student from the Northeast not classified as a racial minority, including Jews, to get into Harvard than it is for one applying from Iowa or Nebraska. But beginning in the mid ’60s, Jews were the primary beneficiaries of a half-century window in which the path to the Ivy League became reasonably straightforward: Excellent grades and a high SAT score could get you into a place like Penn, which had a 41% acceptance rate in 1990. That window is now just about closed. Unlike in the ’90s, the Ivies now solicit a high volume of applicants, and it has become harder to establish variance across the applicant pool than it was in past decades. Deliberate, systematic grade and SAT-score inflation have obliterated any obvious quantitative differences between students who are truly great and those who are merely very good. Earlier this year, Columbia became the first Ivy League school to drop its SAT requirement entirely. With the end of the last comparatively objective means of evaluating applicants, admissions criteria have become “holistic” and hard to even identify.
There is compelling though occasional anecdotal proof that top students are clustering in those schools that do continue to select on merit: 21 of the 25 top finishers in last year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition were MIT students. Such proof isn’t needed though, because the Ivies openly and proudly admit that they are no longer taking the top applicants: “If we wanted to, we could take students who had only perfect GPAs and only perfect board scores and fill a class with them,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber told CBS in 2017, before confirming that “we do take race and ethnicity into account in building a diverse campus.” Harvard is currently the defendant in a Supreme Court case in which the university is arguing for its right to continue assessing applicants based on their ethnic background, anticipated personality traits, and other factors that have little to with the usual notions of academic merit. “Yale will not waver in its commitment to educating a student body whose diversity is a mark of its excellence,” Yale President Peter Solovay wrote in 2020, arguing that Yale retains its status as a top school as a result of its admissions office’s skill at demographic engineering.
In practice, the commitment to diversity, which the Ivies view as part of their larger mission to improve society, is reflected in drop-offs in the white percentage of student bodies. “Jews are de facto discriminated against, even if it’s not based on animus” a nationally renowned mathematician employed at an Ivy League school said of Jewish applicants to top colleges. “The counterargument is that they’re discriminated against the same way any other white person in the Northeast whose parents went to top schools are discriminated against.”
This “discrimination” against Jewish applicants isn’t narrowly the result of affirmative action, at least not in the sense of the redistribution of benefits, like elite university admissions, as a way of rectifying historical wrongdoing. Instead, the muddling of admission standards under the sign of social justice is an expression of a deeper and much older mentality among the Ivy administrations, one that predates affirmative action by decades or even centuries. The Ivy League schools are jealously protective of their self-image as the vanguard of the national elite—a self-appointed purpose that was always the sole determinant of whether Jews or any other demographic group would be admitted in large numbers. The Ivies operate like rentier states whose legitimacy depends on the wise dispersal of a lucrative and diminishing resource. In Ivy League administrations, that resource is prestige.
Toward the middle of the 20th century, after decades of trying and failing to maintain their status as exclusionary clubs for monied Northeastern men, the times called for the prestige-supply of the Ivies to be distributed among the best and most qualified students—male and female, gentile and Jewish—in order for the Ivies to credibly retain their gatekeeping role. Conversely, in the 2020s, another period of social upheaval, excellence has gone out of fashion among an elite whose new watchword is “equity.” Given that Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, harsher and even more significant reductions in already-declining Jewish undergraduate populations at the Ivies would be necessary in order for closely curated student bodies to “look like America.”
In their implementation, the Ivies’ attempts at demographic engineering have little to do with any clear idea of either merit or justice. Indeed, if historical wrongdoing was the core issue, it would be hard to find a group in America that was explicitly targeted for exclusion for longer and to greater effect than Jews, including by the Ivies themselves. Instead, the Ivy student bodies reveal the absurdity of present efforts to equitably distribute prestige in an increasingly unequal society. At Penn, the percentage of Black students barely changed between 2010 and 2016, a time when the Jewish population sharply declined. The percentage of Asians and international students markedly rose—along with the average income of families sending their kids to Penn. “The admissions data allowed Penn to virtue-signal that it was doing something for diversity,” said one source familiar with Jewish life at the school. “But what it really was doing was swapping out wealthy Jews for wealthy Asians.” This was partly enabled through an initiative to prioritize “first generation” college students in admissions. But the university employs a tortured definition of “first generation,” one that allows it to create the illusion of greater equity without risking its academic reputation or its bottom line: At Penn, a “first generation” applicant includes people whose parents earned college degrees outside the United States—the children of nearly anyone who immigrated to the U.S. with a degree, no matter how rich or poor—or who did not “attend a research university with the resources and opportunities a Penn education provides.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ivy-league-exodus
******************************************************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
******************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment