40 years later, our schools are at greater risk

School's out for the summer, so now it is time to examine the state of our education system.

By any objective measure, our school performance is fair or poor for most children. Math scores hit a 20-year low. ACT scores dropped to a 30-year low last year. In dozens of schools throughout the country, not one child is reading or practicing math at grade-level proficiency. Not one!

Some of this poor performance is due to the unforgivable mistake of shutting down our schools during COVID-19 -- despite children being less vulnerable to the virus.
But our schools were in long-term decline before the pandemic.

One of the world's top education scholars, Eric Hanushek, recently issued a report on the 40-year anniversary of the famous federal study published in 1983 called "A Nation at Risk." That study famously warned that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

But tragically, nobody listened or paid attention to the warning. The unions kept pushing for more money with no accountability. Schools were turned into social welfare agencies instead of factories for learning. So they started to pursue both missions -- poorly. In more recent years, educators decided their job was to teach about social justice, climate change radicalism, LGBTQ issues and "systemic racism."

Betsy Devos on falling test scores: 'This is appalling' Video
In many public schools, patriotism and love of country gave way to a "blame America first" narrative. Math, reading and science took a backseat.

But the taxpayer money poured in as if from a firehouse. Hanushek notes that, adjusted for inflation, per-pupil spending since 1960 quadrupled. Since 1980 the funding per student has doubled.

Yet over the past several decades, there isn't much evidence of improvement (if any). In most school districts, the reverse is true.

The feds have kicked in hundreds of billions too. Yet there is virtually no evidence that Uncle Sam's spending has added much value. Mostly it's added more red tape. Test scores haven't budged.

Still, President Joe Biden's plan is to spend hundreds of billions more -- mostly because the teacher unions are the strongest force in the modern Democratic Party. Unions. Not parents.

Finally, after 40 years of failure, parents are taking notice and taking action. The parental choice movement is gaining steam -- especially in red states. Some 13 states in the last two years have added programs to allow education dollars to follow the kids -- that means lower-income parents are provided the funding to send their kids to charter schools, Catholic schools or other alternatives.

This should hopefully provide incentives for the public schools to compete and improve.

One of Hanushek's key conclusions provides some glimmer of hope. He finds "some evidence that spending more money can improve student learning in public schools." But he adds conditionally that the dollars need to be tied to "rewarding performance."

For example, incentivizing teacher excellence through pay for performance and getting rid of bad teachers -- by eliminating or reforming tenure -- can improve schools and throw a lifeline to kids.

Here's the problem: the teacher unions are adamantly opposed to anyone measuring their performance.They can grade the students, but no one dares to grade the teachers.

Back in 1983, the warning was that our schools had slipped into a cesspool of "mediocrity." Here we are over 40 years later, and in too many cities and states, mediocrity would be a vast improvement.

Reforms are coming -- but will they get here soon enough? We certainly can't wait another 40 years.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/40-years-later-our-schools-greater-risk

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Louisiana Expands Education Choice to All

Education freedom is on the march.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday signed legislation making the Pelican State the 16th state in the nation to enact K-12 Education Savings Accounts and the 11th to offer education choice to every K-12 student, following Alabama earlier this year.

The legislation creates the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise—LA GATOR—Scholarships, which families can use to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their kids.

As with other ESA policies, parents can use the LA GATOR Scholarships to pay for private school tuition, textbooks, curricular materials, special-needs therapy, and more.

“The LA Gator Program puts parents in the driver’s seat and gives every child the opportunity for a great education. When parents are committed to the value of their child’s education, government should never get in the way,” said Landry, a Republican. “School choice is now a reality in the state of Louisiana!”

Most students will be eligible for scholarships worth about $5,200 annually, which is just over a third of the average per-pupil spending at Louisiana district schools. Students with special needs and children from low-income families can receive higher scholarship amounts.

The scholarships will initially be limited to students who are switching from a district or charter school, are entering kindergarten, or who are from families earning no more than 250% of the federal poverty level. In the second year, families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty line will be eligible, and in the third year, the scholarships will be open to all K-12 students in Louisiana.

More than a quarter of K-12 students nationwide are currently or soon will be eligible for a publicly funded education choice policy. Including privately funded tax-credit scholarship policies, more than 36% of students nationwide are eligible for a private education choice policy.

The new scholarship policy is an example of how the school choice movement has moved in a more free-market and family-centric direction. Instead of relying on bureaucrats to provide top-down accountability, the new policy trusts parents to provide bottom-up accountability.

The LA GATOR Scholarships will replace the state’s overregulated school voucher program, which produced the nation’s first negative results in a random-assignment study on the effects of a school choice policy on participating students’ academic performance.

“Equalitarian” regulations intended to guarantee access and quality—such as open admissions requirements, price controls, and mandating the state test—backfired by chasing away high-performing private schools.

Fortunately, Louisiana lawmakers have learned from their state’s own mistakes, as well as the success of states such as Arizona and Florida, which have shown that a free-market approach to education does a better job of providing a high degree of access and quality.

The new scholarship policy eschews the harmful regulations of its predecessor.

Louisiana’s embrace of universal school choice also shows the success of efforts by conservatives to channel parents’ frustrations over “woke” ideology in traditional public schools into public support for policies that empower parents to choose schools that align with their values.

“Our people seek government that reflects their values,” said Landry during his Jan. 8 inauguration. “They demand that our children be afforded an education that reflects those wholesome principles, and not an indoctrination behind their mother’s back.”

The same week that the Louisiana Legislature gave the green light to the LA GATOR Scholarships, it also approved legislation curbing the ability of “woke” teachers to indoctrinate students in radical gender ideology behind parents’ backs.

Similar to Given Name Act policies in other states, Louisiana’s HB 121 would prohibit public school employees, including teachers, from referring to children by pronouns that are inconsistent with their sex, or any name other than the student’s legal name or common derivatives thereof.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/19/louisiana-expands-education-choice-all/

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War College: How a Berkeley Professor Inspired and Engineered Anti-Israel Protests/b>

Echoing the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Professor Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley lecturer, told his fellow Muslims: “The Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews.”

At the Santa Clara conference sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, Bazian exhorted the crowd: “They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’ And that’s in the Hadith [the sayings and deeds of Muhammad] about this. This is a future battle before the Day of Judgment.”

Bazian’s threatening prophecy from 1999 might be lost to history but for the central role he has been playing in the anti-Israel protests that have erupted at college campuses. Two groups he helped create, Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, have been instrumental in organizing the demonstrations. In recent months he has visited the encampments from coast to coast, exhorting students to condemn Israel for launching counterstrikes in Gaza after marauding Hamas terrorists attacked and slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis in October and took hundreds of others captive, including several Americans. Bazian has urged students to call on administrators and national leaders to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza, whom he claims are victims of a “genocide” carried out by the Israeli government.

Although many opponents of Israel’s war against Hamas deny that their movement is tied to antisemitism, critics say Bazian’s deep involvement in the protests and his long history of inflammatory rhetoric against the Jewish people puts that claim in doubt. “The campus unrest is being driven by people with a very troubling past,” said Jon Schanzer, a former U.S. Treasury counterterrorism official. “They’re trying to legitimize Hamas.”

Drawing on a wide array of public records, RealClearInvestigations found that Bazian has been agitating against Jews and Israel on college campuses for decades. His 1999 exhortation of Holy War between Muslims and Jews was part of a larger pattern of words and deeds in which he sought to radicalize young Americans against the Jewish people. Bazian’s history – and the top place he holds in the ongoing turmoil – also reveal the key role he’s long planned for America’s institutions of higher learning to play in mainstreaming and spreading ideas that many people consider hateful.

A Palestinian immigrant, Bazian was born in the West Bank town of Nablus and attended high school in Jordan. He graduated from San Francisco State University and then moved to Berkeley, where he chairs the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.

Upon arriving at Berkeley in 1993, Bazian helped start the first college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine – whose national organization says it supports more than 350 “Palestinian solidarity organizations.” In 2006, he co-founded its umbrella organization, American Muslims for Palestine. “We support campus activism through Students for Justice in Palestine,” AMP states on its website.

“AMP is directly involved in the campus chaos,” Schanzer said, by helping coordinate protests at colleges where its SJP outposts operate. AMP provides funding and guidance for the chapters for, among other things, holding anti-Israel “teach-ins,” erecting pro-Palestinian tables, crafting media “talking points,” and creating flyers and placards for the campus encampments and occupations that demonize Israel and sanitize Hamas atrocities as “resistance.”

As AMP’s chairman, Bazian has visited several encampments, including at the University of Pennsylvania, San Diego State University, UC-San Diego, University of San Francisco and UC-Berkeley, where his acolytes have set up a “Gaza Solidarity Camp.” RCI’s review of videos posted on social media of his encampment talks reveals he’s instructed students not to be “nice” while protesting, because he said being polite won’t get the attention of college administrators or President Biden, whom he demands divest from Israel and pressure Israel to withdraw from Gaza.

Meanwhile, his organization, which employs a full-time campus outreach coordinator, is under both federal and state investigation for ties to Hamas, and is also a defendant in a major new lawsuit brought by survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.

A Richardson, Texas-based lawyer representing Bazian and AMP did not reply to requests for comment. After also reaching out to Bazian directly, RCI’s messages went unanswered. Bazian has a history of seeming to endorse, or even call for, violence, and then denying doing so. In 2004, while Hamas was leading a deadly resistance, or “intifada,” in Israel that included suicide bombers, Bazian reportedly called for an “intifada” inside America while addressing a largely Muslim crowd at an anti-Iraq war rally.

“Are you angry? Are you angry?! Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine,” Bazian shouted. “How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

“They’re going to say [I’m] some Palestinian being radical – well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet,” he added. “It’s about time we have an intifada in this country!”

He later claimed his remarks were meant to incite only a “political intifada” inside this country, not violent revolt. Last month, while rallying protestors at a University of San Francisco encampment, Bazian again called for “intifada,” asking students, “Can you all say intifada?”

“Intifada!” protesters shouted back.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/06/19/war_college_how_a_berkeley_professor_inspired_and_engineered_anti-israel_protests_1038619.html?mc_cid=60a4cec909&mc_eid=012a6b3e32

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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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