I remember how it was -- JR
North Carolina Families Win With Passage of Universal Education Choice Eligibility
And North Carolina makes nine. After a transformative year in which lawmakers in more than a dozen states either created new learning options for children in K-12 schools or expanded existing opportunities, North Carolina officials adopted a budget that includes a provision making their state the ninth in the U.S. that empowers all families with the ability to choose how and where their children learn.
Tar Heel legislators expanded the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program to allow every child in North Carolina—some 1.4 million students—to apply for a private-school scholarship. Scholarship award amounts will be staggered based on family income, with students from low-income families receiving the largest amounts: Students eligible for federal school meals will receive vouchers worth the full portion of the child’s state funding from the state education formula, and the awards continue along a sliding scale for children from middle- and upper-income families.
Notably, families have other private-school scholarship opportunities that can be combined with the Opportunity Scholarships. Children with special needs can apply for education savings accounts, which allow parents to customize their student’s education by purchasing textbooks, paying for education therapy and more. Under the Opportunity Scholarship’s new provisions, a child with special needs who was using an ESA but did not qualify for a scholarship will be able to access both.
The ability to combine ESAs and scholarships in this way is an important feature. According to research, a sizeable share—64 percent—of ESA parents use their child’s account for more than one item or service, which means access to a scholarship will help them afford private school tuition and additional services critical to their child’s success.
Children from persistently failing schools who also have special needs often need more than the services offered during a traditional school day. These students benefit from personal tutors and other learning options such as online classes. In fact, my report produced by the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina explains that parents have already been using a combination of accounts and scholarships, though the number of accounts awarded each year is strictly limited by law.
This year, lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Utah created new education savings account or account-style options for children, while Florida and Ohio officials expanded existing private learning opportunities to all children in their states.
These inclusive accounts and scholarships are necessary in more places today because, in some locales, every child is failing. Researchers have found that in 13 assigned schools in Baltimore, Maryland, a grand total of zero students scored proficient in math. Nearly 75 percent of students at these schools scored at the lowest possible level.
Baltimore may be an extreme case, but nationwide, students in almost every urban school system that participated in the nation’s report card scored lower in fourth and eighth grade math in 2022 than in 2019, (scores for a small handful of districts were unchanged). Two North Carolina school districts, Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Guilford County were among those that posted lower scores on these latest assessments.
It is only fitting that when every child is struggling to succeed in assigned schools that lawmakers would make every child eligible to find help somewhere els
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As Families Take to Charter Schools, Cities and Their Teacher Unions Throw Up Obstacles
A vote by the Los Angeles board of education vote last month to ban charter schools from sharing space at 300 district campuses is the latest big-city attack against alternatives to struggling traditional public schools.
With the strong support of United Teachers Los Angeles, school board members say the ban will protect black and Latino students from the disruption and harm that occurs when charters are placed in buildings used by other public schools. But charter advocates reject the board’s reasoning. Far from hurting disadvantaged students, charters in LA and other cities have established an outstanding track record in accelerating their academic performance compared with traditional schools, according to researchers.
Behind the battle in Los Angeles is a fierce competition for students and the funding that accompanies them. Urban districts are continuing to lose enrollment as families leave cities for the suburbs or other states – a broad trend that also effects charter enrollment, to a lesser degree. As more charters earn a reputation for excellence, particularly in major cities, they have become one of the favorite destinations for exiles from traditional schools.
The threat posed by charters – privately run schools that aim to bring innovation to public education – helps explain why districts and teachers unions are putting more obstacles in their path to expansion. In Los Angeles, the ban on co-locations has long been on the agenda of the teachers union and could affect 11,000 students at charters that share a campus, says Myrna Castrejon, president of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), which hasn’t ruled out a lawsuit against the district.
“It is supposed to be a shared resource,” Castrejon says. “But there's constant pressure locally to divide the community, as in these buildings are for district students and not for charter students.”
President Biden, a staunch ally of unions, has emboldened charter opponents. Each year the administration has declined to push for an increase in the $440 million Charter School Programs, which provides vital federal funding for facilities so charters can expand. It also attempted to restrict access to the money, sparking a fight with charter advocates.
Biden’s cold shoulder marks a departure from the support of every president going back to Bill Clinton, says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which advocates for more ambitious standards in public education. “The Biden administration has been hostile to charter schools,” Petrilli says. “Unions have so much power over the Democratic Party and that’s making it more difficult.”
While charter expansion has ground to a halt in many urban centers where the movement first took root, a new frontier of growth has emerged. In southern and western states, charters are chalking up big enrollment gains as city dwellers flock to these areas.
All told, charter enrollment likely grew in the 2022-23 school year, continuing a pattern of incremental expansion, according to an estimate by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), which plans to release enrollment data for last year in November. In the prior three years during the pandemic, enrollment jumped 7% to about 3.7 million students while district public schools lost 3.5% of students.
Enrollment jumped 7% to about 3.7 million students while district public schools lost 3.5% of students, according to this study. The trend was clear among minorities including blacks and Hispanics.
In vying for students, urban charters have one hard-earned advantage over traditional schools: academic achievement.
Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has been tracking charter performance for 15 years in the biggest ongoing study of its kind. After the initial CREDO report in 2009 found that charters on average underperformed traditional schools, suggesting they were a failing experiment in innovation, a second evaluation in 2013 showed improvement.
In June, the most recent assessment of charters, which included schools in 31 states, grabbed the attention of educators. It revealed for the first time that students in charters on average have been advancing in reading and math faster than their peers in traditional schools. Charter students got the equivalent of 16 more days of learning in English and six additional days in math in a school year from 2015 to 2019.
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Australia: What's Gone Wrong With Arts Degrees?
What David Daintree remembers below is very similar to what I remember when I did my Arts degree in the '60s. And my regrets about what has been lost nowadays are similar. I wrote something similar to his comments in 2015
“If you had your time over again, would you do an arts degree?” That’s the question my wife put to me, and it got me thinking. It wasn’t easy to answer.
I really loved my degree in the late 60s and early 70s. It was such a joy to read what I wanted to read across such a wide range of topics.
Sure, there was a syllabus to follow and some of the material you’d prefer to avoid if you had your druthers, but there was also that feeling that disciplined and structured study was a good thing and that mental training was no less important than physical exercise.
It wasn’t just externally imposed discipline, either: true, your teachers chose the contents of your courses, but it was your choice to accept their challenge and enrol.
But things are different now. Arts faculties in universities throughout the world have strayed into the crazy world of identity. Gender and race now define us, and there’s almost no escaping from a focus on certain big-ticket issues such as Colour (black lives matter, colonialism), Gender (toxic masculinity, women’s studies), Sex (choose your own), Politics (left good, right very, very bad).
United, in partnership with this identity focus, is the post-modernist notion that rejects hierarchies of any kind. Shakespeare is not intrinsically better than Mickey Mouse, rap is as good as anything Mozart wrote (he was a white male, after all, even if he didn’t make old age), and stone-age art is right up there with Michelangelo.
These two modes of thinking (and I use the term pretty loosely) make a dangerous combination. Dangerous, that is, if you think that the major achievements of world culture have no special value and that our greatest literary and scientific achievements as a human race are of negligible worth.
Then and Now
I recall that as undergrads doing English I, we were expected to read the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (in Middle English, too, not in translation), four Shakespeare plays, a range of novels by authors male and female from Fielding and Richardson up to the mid-20th century, and a good selection of poetry from across the range, though focusing on the romantics.
In later years, the gaps were filled in: more Shakespeare (of course), Milton, the metaphysical poets, Pope and Dryden, and lots more novels. It was a wonderful spread.
The idea was that after three years, you would have sampled and tested for yourself the lofty peaks of English literature and many of the less exalted but important foothills as well.
Nowadays, you can do three years of undergraduate English without more than a glance at Shakespeare and the others who were once thought great. You can specialise before you can generalise. You can even do a degree in Music in some universities now without it being thought necessary to read Western notation.
In general, this deplorable tendency to deny greatness and exalt mediocrity has so far been limited to the arts faculties.
If your goal is to read Medicine or Engineering, then universities are still the best or the only places to go, though we are now starting to hear stories of architecture departments focusing on indigenous design, whatever that can mean, and Law faculties de-emphasising the study of jurisprudence and the philosophical underpinnings of law.
How many law students nowadays, I wonder, would appreciate the Christian basis of the Common Law?
I had the very good fortune to serve for several years as president of Sydney’s Campion College, Australia’s first dedicated liberal arts college.
Campion offered only one bachelor’s degree at that time, focusing on what was described as the “core” subjects—literature, history, philosophy, and theology. There were few choices within the degree—all students studied all four subjects diachronically.
This meant that Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Tacitus were studied at depth in year one; the second year focused on the Middle Ages, third year centred on the moderns. I thought and still think that it was the best arts degree in the country.
By contrast, art students at mainstream universities are embarrassed by the awesomely wide choice of subjects—but how do they choose? There are so many options now, some tightly focused on women’s issues, race relations, or colonialism. Some apparently frivolous, such as rock music studies (I guess somebody has to do them) or tourism.
Are these worthy of a university? Or is it that universities have to offer them to educate or entertain throngs of people who have been told that everyone is entitled to a university degree in something or other?
Choosing more or less randomly from disparate subjects means that the broad overview is impossible unless one has the wit or is very well advised to choose wisely.
Usually, there is often no connectivity or context. History units are studied in isolation. How can you understand Australian history without a background in British history? How can you understand British History without some reckoning with Greece and Rome? How can you do any of these things without first learning to read, write, and think?
The big lie is that standards haven’t dropped. They have.
In a world obsessed with false notions of “equality”, there are now too many sociologists and criminologists and far too few apprentices and tradies to do the real work of running the country.
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson once said that the arts faculties of the mega-universities are no longer fit for purpose. He thought that the humane arts would survive and thrive only in small organisations, such as the liberal arts colleges, specialised institutes, and “classical” high schools that are now springing up all over the world. Every little bit counts.
I treasure a remark of Edmund Burke: “No man ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-gone-wrong-with-arts-degrees-5485769
******************************************************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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