I remember how it was -- JR
How one college spends more than $30M on 241 DEI staffers… and the damage it does to kids
DEI is Procrustean. It wants to equalize everyone regardless of any harm that may cause
One day after winning the national college-football championship, the University of Michigan was recognized as a leading competitor in another popular collegiate sport: wasteful diversity, equity and inclusion spending.
Having recently embarked on a new five-year DEI plan, UM is paying more than $30 million to 241 DEI staffers this academic year alone, Mark Perry found in a recent analysis for The College Fix.
That represents an astounding expansion of the school’s already-infamous DEI bureaucracy, which had a mere 142 employees last year.
And the price tag accounts for neither the money spent on programming and office expenses nor the hundreds of other employees who use some of their time to assist with DEI initiatives.
These expenditures are a reckless waste of taxpayer money considering the impact of UM’s last five-year plan.
It cost $85 million, and what did it accomplish?
According to the university’s Black Student Union, “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”
Hispanic and Asian enrollments increased, but black enrollment dropped slightly from 4.3% in 2016 to 3.9% in 2021.
And The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021.”
These results are consistent with findings at other institutions.
A Claremont Institute study of Texas A&M University found that despite an annual DEI budget of $11 million, the percentage of students who felt they belonged at the school dropped significantly from 2015 to 2020: Among whites, the number went from 92% to 82%; among Hispanics, from 88% to 76%.
Among blacks, there was an astonishing drop from 82% to 55%.
At the University of California, Berkeley, whose Division of Equity and Inclusion boasts 152 staffers and a $36 million budget, black undergraduate enrollment dropped from 3% in 2010 to 2% in 2021.
The truth is DEI does not work and frequently makes matters worse.
DEI trainings not only fail to achieve their purposes but often exacerbate grievances and divisions by antagonizing people and teaching them to monitor one another for microaggressions and implicit biases.
DEI often leads to illegal activities too.
The University of Washington recently revealed, for example, its psychology department actively discriminated against faculty candidates based on race, elevating a lower-ranked candidate for a position over others because of a desire to hire a black scholar.
In another case, a former assistant director of Multicultural Student Services at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire recently filed a lawsuit alleging that despite exemplary performance reviews, she was harassed and discriminated against until she resigned simply for being white.
“We don’t want white people in the MSS office,” a student reportedly said during an open house.
Even with the failures and the excesses, Michigan is not the only school ramping up its DEI expenditures.
Another College Fix analysis found that Ohio taxpayers are spending $20.38 million annually on DEI salaries and benefits at UM’s famous rival, Ohio State University, where the number of DEI bureaucrats has grown from 88 in 2018 to 189 in 2023.
Oklahoma’s public universities spent $83.4 million on DEI over the last 10 years.
Florida’s public universities reported spending $34.5 million during the 2022-23 academic year.
The University of Wisconsin was poised to spend $32 million over the next two years.
Why not use all that money to give students a much-needed tuition break? Or why not fund need-based scholarships for promising students instead of giving cash to bureaucrats who are actively damaging our higher-education institutions?
Fortunately, some states are taking action. Florida and Texas passed laws eliminating DEI bureaucracies, and Wisconsin lawmakers recently curbed DEI in the state university system by compelling the board of regents to agree to DEI staff cuts and a hiring freeze.
Many other state systems have ended the use of DEI statements in hiring, recognizing they are used to screen out heterodox thinkers when studies show ideological diversity is beneficial to the search for knowledge, which is a university’s core purpose.
And that points to the greatest cost of DEI: While the financial waste is appalling, the price of expecting everyone on campus to conform to an ideology that undermines free expression and excludes intellectual diversity, two foundational values of the academy, is one we should be unwilling to pay.
*********************************************************
Charter schools have attracted growing number of Black, Hispanic students as parents seek better options
Black and Hispanic families have been flocking to charter schools in recent years, the National Alliance For Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) said on Thursday.
Debbie Veney, who is the senior vice president of communications and marketing of NAPCS and the co-author of the report, said charter schools have made significant gains since 2019, in an interview with Fox News Digital.
"Particularly, Hispanic families and Black families are really big consumers of charter schools," Veney said.
Veney's comments came after the NAPCS revealed last month new data analysis showing charter school enrollment grew 2% while district enrollment plateaued. The report said charter schools enrolled nearly 10 times the number of new students compared to district schools in the previous school year.
Veney added that earlier research about parent satisfaction with school systems showed a tendency of "Black parents, low-income parents, and Hispanic parents" to report that their neighborhood schools "weren't great." "But they just didn't have choices," Veney said.
"You see those polls where they're asking, oh, what do you think? How would you grade public education? Most people say, oh, you know, I think my school around me is pretty good, but Blacks and Hispanics didn't say that. They're like, 'I know my school around me isn't very good.' And we know that they've been looking for options that are better."
Charter schools saw an increase in student enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years in nearly every state, particularly among Hispanic students, as they accounted for half of charter school enrollment growth. Charter school enrollment for Black students also increased since 2019.
The NAPCS report found that since 2019, charter schools gained more than 300,000 new students while district public schools lost around 1.5 million students at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public schools haven't rebounded in the past few years.
Veney pointed to how charter schools have more flexibility and control over what happens at the school compared to the public school that operates under a more centralized structure.
"Charter schools have the flexibility to control a lot of things at the site level that a district public school can control, like extra time on task. So, if you've got kids coming into the fifth grade, and they're on a second-grade reading level, maybe 45 minutes of instructional time and reading isn't going to be enough to get them caught up, and the charter school has the ability to be able to jigger with that and to say, well, I want to put more time on tasks--also to have a longer school day," she said.
Veney added that a charter school is free to do "site-based hiring and firing."
A recent Stanford study showed that charter school students outperformed public school peers in reading and math.
Most states restrict parents to schools within their zip code or the school district that presides over their residential area, yet, charter schools allow parents an option to send their kids to a different school. When charter schools are neighbors to public schools, they compete for per-pupil funding as parents are allowed to opt out of sending their child to the neighborhood public school.
Opponents of charter schools say they siphon off funding from traditional public schools, thus decreasing the resources available to increase teachers' salaries, invest in facilities, and recruit more teachers.
Teacher unions often lobby against charter schools and sometimes make an effort to restrict their expansion. More recently, President Biden's Department of Education released new regulations on how charter schools qualify for federal grants, which proponents of charter schools said would make it more difficult to obtain these federal grants.
In August, a coalition of charter schools filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education over the regulations.
"Why would people try to keep people who need access to get education from having it? I would say that it has to be something that is a separate set of interests that are not about kids and not about families," Veney said. "A lot of times adults are more concerned with adult interests, like maintaining structures, like maintaining certain positions, like having budget control, rather than being able to focus in on what families really need."
*************************************************************
‘F’ for Failing to Train Our Future Teachers Properly
The Australian education system is in crisis. It is failing at a most basic level, which is to teach young Australians how to read and write.
All you have to do is look at this year’s NAPLAN results to see how bad things really are in Australian schools.
One-in-three Australian students are not meeting the basic standards of numeracy and literacy. In contrast, just 15 percent of students are exceeding expectations.
The majority of Australia’s Year 9 students use punctuation at a Year 3 level. To put that into perspective, 15-year-old teenagers have the writing ability of 8-year-olds.
And the majority of those teenagers are struggling to be able to put a sentence together, let alone insert a comma or an apostrophe correctly.
As adults, these Australians will struggle to get jobs or manage their finances. It renders them unable to perform simple tasks such as accurately filling out vital forms, following maps, or reading instructions on a packet of medication. An illiterate and innumerate society is a non-functioning society.
These are truly shocking statistics. And it’s not happening because of a lack of funding for schools.
Every single Australian should be asking why, given state and federal governments are throwing more money than ever at the problem, the 2023 NAPLAN results reveal a system in steady decline.
Each year, all levels of government spend around $120 billion on education.
Australians should know that one of the central causes of this decline is what future teachers are being taught during their training at university.
A new report by the Institute of Public Affairs, “Who teaches the teachers?” has found that—instead of being taught how to master core academic curriculum such as reading, writing, mathematics, history, and science—teachers are being trained by their university lecturers to be experts in identity politics, critical race theory, radical gender theory, and sustainability.
The teaching of woke ideology accounts for 31 percent of all teaching subjects, which is equivalent to one-and-a-quarter years of a four-year Bachelor of Education degree. Meanwhile, fewer than 1-in-10 teaching subjects are focused on literacy and numeracy.
Future teachers are spending far more time talking about gender fluidity, climate change, and how racist Australia is, than they are things like phonics, mathematics, and grammar. It is no wonder that young Australians are hopelessly lacking in basic skills but very good at going to protests.
Universities are not only failing to equip teaching graduates with the knowledge and skills required to effectively teach core curriculum subjects, but they have replaced core skills and knowledge with woke ideology and political activism, which in turn produces legions of poorly educated child activists. And it looks like a lot of trainee teachers do not want this either.
Currently, the average completion rate for students in a teaching degree at universities is 50 percent, while the average attrition rate across all courses is 17 percent. Moreover, 20 percent leave the profession in their first three years as a teacher.
The system is clearly failing both trainee teachers and the students they go on to teach. It is a system in urgent need of reform.
Under the federal government’s “back to basics” plan, there will be a new accreditation regime for teaching degrees.
This means that it will be mandatory for universities to instruct trainee teachers in evidence-based reading, writing, arithmetic, and classroom management practices, based on the proven educational science about what works best to promote student learning.
While the “back to basics” concept is a step in the right direction, it will not solve the related problem of teachers being schooled in woke ideology.
As long as these subjects continue to dominate teaching degrees, the nation’s teachers will continue to be ill-prepared for the classroom.
This does a disservice both to them and their future students.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/f-for-failing-to-train-our-future-teachers-properly-5550003
******************************************************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