tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81864002024-03-19T20:38:03.312+13:00EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL<i>QUIS MAGISTROS IPSOS DOCEBIT?</i>
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Read <a href="http://jonjayray.tripod.com/berg.html">THIS</a> before you spend money on education.
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<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20140626132158/http://moffats.co.uk/community.php">Moffats</a>, What a school should be<br><br>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/BBuCgEN.jpg"> I remember how it was -- JR
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jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.comBlogger6394125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-14302808072990255502024-03-19T20:37:00.002+13:002024-03-19T20:37:12.139+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Berkeley Is a Safe Space for Hate</b><br/>
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Thuggish intimidation of Jewish students and teachers is the new normal as leftist brownshirts topple once-heralded free speech bastion<br/>
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BY DANIEL SOLOMON<br/>
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If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.<br/>
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On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.<br/>
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The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus “Free Palestine” movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which “equity” and “anti-colonialism” act as shields for rank antisemitism.<br/>
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Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a “learning space” that exemplifies “what’s possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community.”<br/>
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The message could not have been clearer: Intimidation and the specter of mob violence carry the day at this institution.<br/>
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On the day of the Hamas pogrom, Makdisi posted a thinly veiled justification of the slaughter: “Just waking up to the news. Go read CLR James, Black Jacobins, on the violence of the oppressed. And then try to ignore the utterly racist double standard of Western politicians and media when it comes to questions of resistance and occupation and international law.” His online verbiage has since become more florid: He has accused Israel of “hunting” Palestinian children “in the name of Anne Frank,” and mocked diaspora Jews as “narcissists” for fretting over their security. He has addressed the crowds that have gathered on campus for “Free Palestine” marches and participated in a slew of events with Bears for Palestine.<br/>
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Since the UC Berkeley Feb. 26 riot, Makdisi has defended the campus malefactors in a flurry of posts on X. Lavishing praise on an op-ed in The Daily Californian that attempted to “contextualize” the incident, he charged the whole brouhaha was no more than an attempt to distract from “the genocide” in Gaza. In a missive dispatched on the same day, he hit out at “the campaign of bullying, intimidation, and narcissistic gaslighting occurring across our campuses … all designed to make sure we don’t talk about Israel’s appalling genocide of Palestinians.”<br/>
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Makdisi had put the light to the touchpaper in our department in the days after the Hamas pogrom. Canceling a mandatory course for first-year Ph.D. students that he taught, he urged the class to attend his “teach-in” (organized with BFP), in which he would “historicize” and “contextualize” the events of Oct. 7. The event was then promoted on our graduate student listserv, on the same email chain as a union organizing session. When I balked at this, pointing out the campus Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter’s vehement defense of the Hamas pogrom, a group organized a letter to the department chair directed at me. “We reject the assertions made, within our very community, that learning the history of Palestine is tantamount to terrorism or terror apologism,” the signatories, numbering about half of the graduate students, wrote. The signatories, who were mounting a defense of their mentor, spiced the letter with the customary accusation of lack of departmental engagement on “white supremacy ... within our community” (that is, those who had deplored the Hamas pogrom), and intoned about our “obligation to listen to the scholars whose research and lived experiences center these issues [Palestine and the Palestinians], and an equal responsibility to ensure that their voices are heard.” Hostage posters in our academic building were soon ripped down by fellow graduate students. Around this time, some members of the department started Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that posted the “Flood Sather Gate” sign.<br/>
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Protesters bang on windows (shortly before the glass was smashed) to disrupt the Ran Bar-Yoshafat event last month<br/>
Protesters bang on windows (shortly before the glass was smashed) to disrupt the Ran Bar-Yoshafat event last month<br/>
NBC VIA YOUTUBE<br/>
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Jewish students’ repeated attempts, over email and in-person, to explain to department administrators and colleagues how these actions were offensive and off-base soon met with escalating ostracism from others and a progressive withdrawal of Jewish students from departmental spaces and events. Antisemitism has battered a Jewish friend out of this department, after the majority of his first-year cohort claimed that “all resistance is justified to anyone with morals.” Another friend told me she would no longer come to our graduate library because “people there want my family dead.” Despite the department’s concern about the situation, administrators have maintained that academic freedom and institutional procedures prevent them from adopting a clear stance against the antisemitism in our midst and the primary instigator thereof. The same administrators have also consistently misrepresented the matter as a question of upholding civility in the course of intense political discord. Jewish students have sometimes felt like we are talking to a brick wall in explaining that this is not the case.<br/>
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SJP’s antisemitic onslaught began on the same day as the Hamas pogrom. On that day, Bears for Palestine released a statement praising its “comrades in blood and arms” for their operations “in the so-called ‘Gaza envelope.’” The same organization then mounted demonstrations at which participants, wearing masks and Palestinian headscarves, clamored to “globalize the intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The demonstrations sometimes spilled over into minor altercations, such as when an SJP member attempted to rip an Israeli flag from a counterprotester’s hands. The protests took place on the university’s main plaza, right next to the academic building where in the fall I was teaching a freshman seminar on Holocaust memory. I was so concerned for my students’ safety that I moved our meetings to the campus Hillel.<br/>
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The university’s response to these events was tepid and laden with false equivalencies. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ acknowledged in early November that “fear is being generated by the rhetoric used at some of the recent protests on campus”—a turn of phrase that was telling in its use of the passive voice and refusal to name names. She mentioned worries about antisemitism, which she nullified in the same breath with a condemnation of the “harassment, threats and doxxing that have targeted our Palestinian students and their supporters.” She even noted that one ought not to equate pro-Palestinian campus protests with support for terrorism (which seems at odds with the declarations of these self-same protesters). Christ closed her statement with a lofty call to honor the institution’s “long-lived and unwavering” dedication to free speech. <i> [For Leftists only]</i><br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/berkeley-safe-space-for-hate">https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/berkeley-safe-space-for-hate</a>
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<b> University ‘Forces’ Journalism Students to Fork Over Tuition Money for Course on ‘Microaggressions,’ Pronouns</b><br/>
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Arizona State University (ASU) forces students to hand over tuition money to take a course that pushes left-wing ideas, according to documents obtained by the Goldwater Institute.<br/>
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The course, titled “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite,” pushes gender ideology onto students, and one requires students to make a public relations plan for a theoretical popstar who uses “they/them” pronouns, according to the Goldwater Institute, a free-market public policy research and litigation organization. The course is required for graduation from several degree programs at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.<br/>
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“The journalism school at Arizona State forces students to take a course advising them that benign statements—such as ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job’—are offensive ‘microaggressions’ that make people feel unwelcome. This course also requires students to develop a public relations plan for a nonbinary pop star who uses ‘they/them’ pronouns. This course shows how universities use graduation requirements to force students to sit through lectures in progressive dogmas that add little or nothing to their education,” Timothy K. Minella, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.<br/>
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The course “emphasizes the importance of diversity, inclusion, equity and civility to ensure all Cronkite students feel represented, valued and supported” and “offers training and awareness on cultural sensitivities, civil discourse, bias awareness and diversity initiatives,” according to the online description of the class. The class also “empowers students” to approach reporting “with a multicultural perspective.”<br/>
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Over 400 students were required to take the course in the fall 2023 semester, according to the Goldwater Institute. The course is required for the completion of bachelors degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication, Sports Journalism and Digital Audiences at ASU, according to several university webpages.<br/>
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One course document says that the statement “America is a melting pot” is an example of a “microaggression,” which is a minor insult believed to be unconsciously driven, according to the Goldwater Institute. Statements such as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” or “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” imply “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder,” according to the document.<br/>
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Another reading required as a course assignment defines “cisgender privilege” as being able to “access gender-exclusive spaces (e.g., a space or activity for women) and not be excluded due to your trans status,” according to Goldwater’s report. The reading does not appear to be associated with the university and is housed on a website titled, “its pronounced metrosexual.”<br/>
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Colleges around the U.S. have implemented similar classes pushing the tenets of gender ideology and critical race theory.<br/>
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Princeton University made headlines in 2022 after adding “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization” to the school’s catalog. Wesleyan University offered one course in the 2023-2024 school year, titled “Queer Russia,” which offers students an overview of how queer people have influenced Russian culture.<br/>
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The University of Chicago offered one class titled “Queering God,” which questions if God is queer and how queerness is related to the idea of God. “What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam?” the course description reads.<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/university-forces-journalism-students-tuition-money-course-microaggressions-pronouns/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/university-forces-journalism-students-tuition-money-course-microaggressions-pronouns/</a>
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<b> Every school in NSW to offer gifted education programs</b><br/>
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<i> I am all in favour of this. It will be a great help to many students in crummy State schools. It is probably not important to really high IQ students, however. They will do well in any system. I did not go to school at all for my Senior exam. I just taught myself all in one year. Others in my IQ bracket should probably do the same</i><br/>
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High potential and gifted education will be rolled out in every public school in the state under a new plan to challenge the students who are not reaching their full potential.<br/>
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Such programs were available in only half of the state’s public schools, Education Minister Prue Car told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Schools Summit on Thursday, but fixing that would depend on tackling the state’s teacher shortage.<br/>
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She said teachers had been “gaslit” by the previous government into thinking there was not a crisis in the sector.<br/>
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“Parents deserve to see high potential and gifted education inside the doors of every local school,” Car said.<br/>
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“Parents want confidence that regardless of their choice of school, that the learning environment will bring out the best in their child.<br/>
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“Our vision is that in NSW, high potential and gifted education will be delivered in every public school, in a high-quality offering, in a way that is valued by students, parents and teachers alike.”<br/>
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Under the plan, public schools will identify high potential students across four domains: intellectual, creative, social-emotional and physical.<br/>
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A 2021 policy was supposed to make gifted education training available at all schools to ensure gifted students were extended even if they did not attend a selective school or opportunity class. However, only half of the state’s schools have the programs in place.<br/>
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University of NSW researcher Professor Jae Jung said the extent to which the current gifted program was being taken up was highly variable.<br/>
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The Sydney schools that have surged past 3000 students<br/>
“There needs to be a follow-up process and assessment to understand to what extent it is being implemented,” he said.<br/>
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“One way to ensure gifted education practices are implemented is to guarantee all teachers have gifted education training at the pre-service teacher training level. There also needs to be a mandatory requirement that gifted education programs are available in all schools.”<br/>
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Gifted education can take different forms including grade skipping, gifted classes and curriculum differentiation within the regular classroom, Jung said.<br/>
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Car told the summit the challenges the public school system had faced, such as a lack of staff or resources, had left some communities wanting their schools to deliver more gifted education programs.<br/>
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She said teachers felt “gaslit” by those supposed to support them, and that their challenging experiences in the classroom were being dismissed.<br/>
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“They were told there was no shortage. That it was a beat-up,” Car said.<br/>
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A research review by the NSW Department of Education previously found gifted children comprised the top 10 per cent of students, but up to 40 per cent of them were under-achieving.<br/>
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If at least 10 per cent of students are gifted, 80,000 students in NSW public schools have high potential.<br/>
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It found that without help to turn their promise into achievement, the students might never achieve their potential.<br/>
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Car also announced at the summit that she had asked the NSW Education Standards Authority to conduct a review into professional development requirements for teachers and whether they were preventing them for undertaking learning that met their individual needs.<br/>
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“I asked that NESA consider the administrative burden for teachers … as well as the professionalism of teachers in being able to identify their own professional learning priorities,” she said.<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/every-school-in-nsw-to-offer-gifted-education-programs-20240313-p5fc94.html">https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/every-school-in-nsw-to-offer-gifted-education-programs-20240313-p5fc94.html</a>
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My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
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<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
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<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
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<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
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jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-39040391820810889502024-03-18T22:27:00.003+13:002024-03-18T22:27:56.102+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Sydney University will recruit hundreds of new teaching-focused academics in what it says is a bid to improve student experience and place a higher value on teaching in higher education.
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<i> This is just more dumbing down of education. Getting research published is the guarantee that the teacher's knowledge is at cutting-edge level. Take that away and a teacher might have no expertise to share. The students might just as well read the latest book on the subject. I did a lot of research in my academic career and I always had a LOT to say in the classroom that was not in the books</i><br/>
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Vice chancellor Mark Scott said the roles would carve out a new career path for teaching specialists in academia, allowing them to fill some of the most senior roles at the university.<br/>
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However, some are unhappy about the plan, suggesting it creates two tiers of academics by removing a focus on research.<br/>
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The university will on Monday launch an international campaign to recruit more than 150 tenured academics after an initial appointment of internal applicants across 55 new roles.<br/>
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The teaching-focused positions will be for every career stage, from lecturers to full professors and senior leadership roles across a broad range of disciplines.<br/>
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Scott said for students the key engagement with the university is around what happens in the classroom, not in the research lab.<br/>
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“Our most brilliant teachers should be as famous and revered in the institution as our most brilliant researchers are today,” he said.<br/>
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“I have a view that we owe every student a transformational experience here at the university.<br/>
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“They’re paying higher fees than students have ever paid in this country.<br/>
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“So to prioritise appropriately teaching and learning as important as we do research - that’s what we need to do. I think that’s what the great global universities do.”<br/>
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Teaching-focused academic roles are controversial among many academics who see the roles as career-limiting and involving intense workloads.<br/>
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The jobs came about as part of protracted EBA negotiations with staff which concluded last year. The university agreed to introduce 330 new permanent academic roles to reduce casualisation of the workforce but 220 of those were to be teaching-only positions.<br/>
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It contrasts with the existing deal for academics which guarantees they spend 40 per cent of their time on research, 40 per cent on teaching and 20 per cent community engagement.<br/>
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English and linguistics academic Nick Riemer, the university’s National Tertiary Education Union branch president, said there was a clear effort from senior management to break the teaching and research nexus.<br/>
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“There should be more academic jobs at the university because at the moment it has an overreliance on casualisation and that just involves outright exploitation,” he said.<br/>
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“But we are very seriously concerned that university management seems intent on separating teaching and research, which are academic functions which intrinsically belong together.<br/>
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“If you’re not researching in your fields you’re passing on doctrine.”<br/>
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Riemer said the education-focused roles that exist at the university were subject to high levels of overwork.<br/>
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“And there’s every reason to think uni management see teaching focus roles as just a cheap way of getting staff to do a lot of teaching without giving them the time for the research they need to do to stay up to date,” he said.<br/>
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But Scott said teaching at higher education level had been undervalued, and the roles would create viable career options for teaching specialists.<br/>
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“We’re creating a career pathway that says to the very top end of the professoriate, people who are teaching experts can have a career pathway to the very top,” he said.<br/>
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One of the first internal recruits for the roles, Louis Taborda, senior lecturer in project management, said he chose teaching because he saw it as a noble cause.<br/>
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He began his career as a high-school maths and computer science teacher, then worked as an IT consultant before moving to academia.<br/>
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“I felt right at the beginning that getting into teaching was something that was noble, pure and unadulterated,” he said.<br/>
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“It’s absolutely a pleasure to watch students grow.”<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/why-hundreds-of-new-uni-teaching-jobs-are-generating-controversy-20240315-p5fcpp.html">https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/why-hundreds-of-new-uni-teaching-jobs-are-generating-controversy-20240315-p5fcpp.html</a>
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<b> US colleges bring back standardized testing after finding test-optional policies hurt minority students</b><br/>
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<i> Testing gives bright kids from poor backgrounds the opportunity to shine -- which is a large part of the reason why they were originally introduced</i><br/>
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Universities across the United States are reinstating requirements for undergraduate applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores after previously claiming that standardized tests raised concerns about inequality in higher education.<br/>
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University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas) professor and associate dean David D. Schein told Fox News Digital that standardized testing is merely designed to give schools one central index on which to compare students. He said while good grades and extracurricular activities are considered, having a reference source independent of geography is essential.<br/>
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Schein suggested that competition for students has increased because of the downward birth curve and increasing costs. Therefore, dropping testing requirements may have been viewed as a way to increase the applicant pool.<br/>
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He also blamed the elimination of standardized testing on a narrative circulating in academia that some minority students do not do as well as White and Asian students because of poor schooling or cultural bias in the test.<br/>
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"Frankly, I found this narrative racist and offensive on its face," Schein said. "That is because it could be interpreted as ‘certain minorities were too stupid to do well on these demanding standardized tests.’ I have always rejected this narrative. Further, schools should still have the data but can make decisions based on the many factors considered in admissions, not just the SAT."<br/>
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The University of Texas at Austin announced on Monday they would once again require applicants to submit test scores beginning August 1 and claimed their test-optional approach over the last four years made it difficult to place students in programs they were best suited for.<br/>
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"We looked at our students and found that, in many ways, they weren't faring as well," U.T. President Dr. Jay Hartzell told The New York Times.<br/>
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The university added that due to the plethora of 4.0 high school GPAs, the standardized test requirement is a "proven differentiator" that serves the best interests of the applicant and UT.<br/>
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Many universities dropped the testing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some prestigious institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University, reinstated their admissions process requirements.<br/>
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Schools have said the tests allow them to identify promising students who might otherwise have been overlooked — students from schools that don't offer advanced coursework or extracurriculars and whose teachers may be stretched too thin to write glowing letters of recommendation.<br/>
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Dartmouth College was the first Ivy League school to reinstate standardized testing requirements in February, writing, "Nearly four years later, having studied the role of testing in our admissions process… we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve — not detract from — our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus."<br/>
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Christopher Rim, the CEO and founder of Command Education (a private Ivy League and elite college consultancy), told Fox News Digital that many colleges created test-optional policies based on the assumption that standardized testing has historically disadvantaged students of color.<br/>
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However, a study cited in Dartmouth's reinstatement announcement noted that test scores help admissions departments interpret transcripts from high schools about which Dartmouth has less information and identify high-achieving, less-advantaged students.<br/>
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"Researchers found that test-optional policies unintentionally created a barrier for less advantaged students due to the fact that such students often opted against submitting their scores, even when those scores would benefit their application and demonstrate their preparedness for Dartmouth's rigorous curriculum," Rim said.<br/>
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"Additionally, it placed greater emphasis on elements of the application (such as GPA and course rigor) that disadvantaged students may struggle with more due to lack of opportunity or support at underfunded public schools," he added.<br/>
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Rim said that while there is no "perfectly equitable" way to evaluate all applications, reincorporating standardized testing alongside other factors, such as extracurriculars, honors courses and essays, will pave the way for a "more fair admissions process."<br/>
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Soon after Dartmouth publicized its decision, Yale University announced it would abandon its test-optional policy for 2025 admissions applicants. The institution said not including the tests shifted attention to other aspects of the application, which disadvantaged certain students.<br/>
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"Test scores provide one consistent and reliable bit of data among the countless other indicators, factors, and contextual considerations we incorporate into our thoughtful whole-person review process," the school said.<br/>
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Brown University is the latest Ivy League institution set to return to standardized testing requirements for first-year students. The policy will begin with the class of 2029.<br/>
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A report from the Brown Ad Hoc Committee on Admissions Policies noted, "The committee was concerned that some students from less advantaged backgrounds are choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy when doing so would actually increase their chances of being admitted."<br/>
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Brown determined that higher test scores were correlated with higher grades at the university and suggested there are "unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access."<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/us-colleges-bring-back-standardized-testing-finding-test-optional-policies-hurt-minority-students">https://www.foxnews.com/media/us-colleges-bring-back-standardized-testing-finding-test-optional-policies-hurt-minority-students</a>
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<b> Australia: Home Schooling Must Be Consistent With official Curriculum</b><br/>
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<i> The syllabus is so wishy-washy that no problems should arise</i><br/>
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The Queensland government has introduced legislation in parliament mandating that home education is consistent with the Australian government’s curriculum.<br/>
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This comes amid an almost tripling of students who are been homeschooled in the state since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.<br/>
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Education Minister Di Farmer introduced the Education (General Provisions) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 on March 6, which includes amendments related to homeschooling.<br/>
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Under the proposed changes, students who are schooled at home are required to follow the government’s syllabus for senior subjects.<br/>
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The minister noted that more than 10,000 students are currently registered for homeschooling in Queensland.<br/>
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Ms. Farmer said that given these higher numbers, it is “more important than ever” that students are undertaking a high-quality program.<br/>
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In addition, she highlighted that the legislation provides “safeguards for student wellbeing.”<br/>
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“The bill requires a summary of the educational program to be provided at the time of application for home education registration to ensure the child or young person has immediate access to a high-quality program and removes the separate time-limited provisional registration application,” Ms. Farmer told parliament.<br/>
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“This will provide a single and simplified home education registration process with appropriate oversight by the department.<br/>
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“Further, the bill removes the need for a certificate of registration and associated obligations, to reduce an unnecessary regulatory burden for parents. Instead, parents will continue to receive a written notice, as they do now, setting out evidence of registration and any conditions on registration.”<br/>
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Ms. Farmer said the bill establishes a “new guiding principle” emphasising that home education “should be in the best interests of the child or young person.”<br/>
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“This must take into account the child’s safety, well-being, and access to a high-quality education. This amendment was included in the bill after public consultation on home education amendments was completed,” Ms. Farmer said.<br/>
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“Using a guiding principle which makes explicit that a child or young person’s best interests must be central to the significant choice of home education is something I am confident Queensland families and home educators will support.”<br/>
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Home Education Australia spokesperson Samantha Bryan raised concerns with AAP that the mandate may lead to more parents taking home education underground.<br/>
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Ms. Bryan also told the publication most families registered with the Home Education Unit are succeeding with homeschooling, even if they are not following the national curriculum.<br/>
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“If children are already receiving a high-quality education, if the system’s not broken, why are we trying to allegedly fix it,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
Ms. Bryan suggested a dual enrolment option allowing families to combine part-time homeschooling with part-time school attendance.<br/>
<br/>
“Families are making great sacrifices because they desperately love and care about the wellbeing of their child,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
“Some of these families would love to put their kids back in school so I think a dual enrolment option—part-time home education, part-time school— would be great.”<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/home-schooling-must-be-consistent-with-australian-curriculum-new-laws-5603182">https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/home-schooling-must-be-consistent-with-australian-curriculum-new-laws-5603182</a>
</p>
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<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-75297995477680500452024-03-17T23:19:00.003+13:002024-03-17T23:20:55.739+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Australia: Authoritarianism lives in the mind of a Leftist teacher</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> Brendan McDougall (below) teaches in a government school in country Victoria. He realizes that some parents are prepared to make considerable efforts to ensure that their children get a good education while others are prepared simply to accept what the government offers. He deduces rightly that, no matter the system there will always be at least some people who seek privately-funded education in order to give their children more than the government offers. He wants to stop them doing that. He wants to forbid private education altogether. He would approve of the old Soviet system.<br/>
<br/>
That is a distinctly radical proposal from a distinctly radical website and one with no chance of adoption so why does Brendan argue that? His argument is actually realistic in some ways. He thinks that having private schools diverts resources that might otherwise go to government schools and he wants more resources for government schools. Private schools get all the best teachers, for instance.<br/>
<br/>
What he overlooks is that the existing system greatly expands the share of national resouces that goes into education. Private schools attract private money, which adds to what the government spends on education. He is actually advocating for LESS money to be spent on education<br/>
<br/>
He cannot be unaware of that. It is just Leftist envy that is heaving in his breast. He is aware that many private school users "are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group" and he hates it. He just cannot bear the thought of other people doing well for themelves and feeling happy about it. Their happiness makes him unhappy. He must be miserable a lot of the time.<br/>
<br/>
We can be thankful that there are not enough like him to be influential. When Mark Latham was leading the Labour party, he suffered a crashing electoral defeat after just a mild threat to Federal funding to private schools. Around 40% of Australian teenagers go to private schools so that is a huge voting bloc to threaten.<br/>
<br/>
In case it is of any interest, I went to a small country State school in Queensland and sent my son to a regional Catholic school. Both schools were rather good, I think</i><br/>
<br/><br>
Australia’s public schools are in crisis.<br/>
<br/>
Teachers nationwide have been shouting about this for more than a decade. There are no teachers. Our students are falling behind internationally. Many kids are depressed and school refusal is through the roof. It’s become so dire that even Education Minister Jason Clare agrees.<br/>
<br/>
Over the past decade, right-wing responses have been to blame the teachers or claim there are too many soft skills being taught. Those advocating in the media for school reform have tended to argue about the funding disparity between public and private schools, and the fact our schools are many percentage points away from meeting the school resourcing standard.<br/>
<br/>
These arguments ignore the reality that our current system values the education of some young Australians more than others — and the numbers obfuscate and distract from the true rot in the sector: class segregation.<br/>
<br/>
We have one of the most robust private education sectors in the world, and it’s hard to argue, especially following a recent Four Corners investigation into allegations of harassment and discrimination at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, that this is doing our society any good.<br/>
<br/>
Private schools don’t need tweaks or reforming; they need to be abolished.<br/>
<br/>
No teachers, no resources<br/>
<br/>
Our teachers are overworked, overwhelmed, burnt out and undervalued — and the numbers often cited are egregious. In New South Wales and Western Australia, shortages of more than 2,000 teachers were reported at the end of 2023. In Victoria, 800 jobs remained unfilled across the state when students returned from the summer (now reduced to 795 at the time of writing, including 14 principals).<br/>
<br/>
This shortage is being felt across the board, but the pain is sharpest at schools in our most vulnerable communities, such as mine, where six teachers have returned from retirement this year and we still have seven unfilled full-time jobs, with no applicants in sight.<br/>
<br/>
In the decade following the 2012 Gonksi review — which assessed school funding and depicted a system characterised by alarmingly declining test scores and increasing educational inequality — funding of private schools has increased at twice the rate of public. Not only did the review’s warnings go unheeded, but successive governments have worked in tandem to accelerate the trend. In Victoria and NSW in 2021, five elite private schools spent more on new facilities than governments spent on 3,372 public schools combined.<br/>
<br/>
These numbers are shameful, but while they liven up discussions in staff rooms, they’re not effective at creating change. There are deeper issues at play. For every cartoonishly posh school in Kew or Bellevue Hill charging well over $30,000 tuition a year, there are five or more smaller, lower-fee private schools that cost $5,000 a year that compete for teachers and students across Australia’s less affluent areas.<br/>
<br/>
These schools are often as materially scruffy as the fee-free public school down the road, with similar performances in metrics like NAPLAN and ATAR. Despite this, parents flock to these independent private schools in droves, with enrolments ticking up 14.1% over the past five years, while enrolments at Catholic private schools increased by 4.8% in the same period. Yet despite recent cost of living pressures, enrolments in public schools only grew by a measly 0.7% over the past five years, well below the average growth for all schools of 3.5%.<br/>
<br/>
Paying for a peer group<br/>
<br/>
We are certainly not getting richer, particularly those of us young enough to have kids starting school for the first time, so why might cash-strapped parents be willing to spend an ever-increasing portion of their disposable income on a product that isn’t measurably “better”?<br/>
<br/>
One reason is that private schools have marketing departments, but a more potent force is that middle-class parents in Australia consider privately educating their children a cultural norm.<br/>
<br/>
Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, and we have one of the highest percentages of private-school-educated young people in the world — 36%, with an increase of 4 percentage points over the past 20 years. In a country like the United States, where there are roiling debates about school choice and rampant social inequality, only 10% of students attended private schools as of 2022-23.<br/>
<br/>
In Australia, enough parents send their kids to private schools that to do otherwise can feel inadequate or negligent. Parents care about their kids and they don’t want them to miss out, so they work two jobs and send their kids to private school so they can relax knowing they did everything they could.<br/>
<br/>
In doing this, however, they inoculate themselves against needing to care about what happens to those who can’t afford what they can. They tap out, and if a third of our families tap out of public education, there becomes little political will left to make our public schools work. This is compounded by the fact that it’s the wealthier, powerful third — the parents who are also doctors and bankers and lawyers and politicians — who leave the public system first.<br/>
<br/>
This means that in Australia we have two education systems — one for everyone, and one for the students whose parents believe that the one for everyone isn’t good enough. These latter children spend their formative years only associating with people like them, with limited mixing across class lines. Parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t necessarily paying for a better education — they are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group.<br/>
<br/>
This has been true for decades. Parents today who attended public schools grew up knowing the state didn’t care about their education, and so it is with today’s young people. They know this in their bones as they walk through the gates. As teachers, we see it in their eyes, but we also see it in our declining PISA scores, our school refusal rates, completion rates, our problems managing behaviour, and the upticks in youth crime statistics. These kids know that their country cares about other children more than them.<br/>
<br/>
Education for all<br/>
<br/>
In a debate about the value of VCE in my Year 12 English class last week, one student asked me if “a 40 here is really worth the same as a 40 at a private school in Melbourne”. The truth is that it’s worth so much more when it’s been fought for so much harder, but there aren’t the structures in place for us to see that.<br/>
<br/>
The rampant, chronic underfunding of our public schools is a blight on our national identity, especially for a country that lionises the idea of a “fair go”. But simply reallocating funding to be more equitable will not address the class segregation corroding Australia’s school system.<br/>
<br/>
So what can we do? Well, we can start by phasing out the federal taxpayer dollars pouring into the coffers of private schools — a minimum of $17.8 billion in 2024. If someone wants to pay for their child to attend a school where they won’t fall in with “the wrong crowd” or the other classist monikers we reserve for poor kids, they can pay for it themselves. We could then invest that money back into our public schools, targeting funding to the communities like mine who need it most.<br/>
<br/>
We could ban the new construction of private schools that are de facto designed to siphon away from the public sector the families who have the resources to invest in their children’s education, robbing their local school of their assistance. A better-resourced public sector could be designed to provide different educational options for different kids, and we could repurpose some of those three-storey performing arts centres into facilities accessible to everyone.<br/>
<br/>
These solutions aren’t easy — they require long-term thinking, values-based politics and bravery. The issue has been ignored for so long that it is entrenched. Decades of underfunding and neglect have made our public schools less competitive and less attractive to middle-class parents. Decades of conversations during school pick-ups and dinner parties have made parents increasingly anxious that their child might get left behind.<br/>
<br/>
Even if we did manage to abolish the grossly inequitable privatised model we currently have, our schools would still be segregated by postcode; by the capacities of parents to pay “top-up fees” to give their local public school an edge. But unless our leaders dare to acknowledge the injustices baked into the system, more kids will leave the public system, more burnt-out public school teachers will leave the profession, and more of our next generation will leave the education system feeling as though it wasn’t designed for kids like them.<br/>
<br/>
If governments, state and federal, are serious about fixing public education, they must consider the radical choice of abolishing the private education sector. Until they do so, they will never truly ensure that our schools are about every child learning, growing and flourishing.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/15/australia-public-school-private-school-funding-class-disparity/">https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/15/australia-public-school-private-school-funding-class-disparity/</a>
</p>
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<b> California State University’s Mandate of Ethnic, Social Justice Studies Driven by Hatred of America</b><br/>
<br/>
Pan-African studies are “the intellectual arm of the revolution,” the unrepentant communist Angela Davis triumphantly told students at California State University, Los Angeles, in a candid moment in 2016. Well, that arm got a lot longer this week.<br/>
<br/>
The entire California State University system just announced Thursday that it was making ethnic and social justice studies mandatory for everyone who wants a degree.<br/>
<br/>
Yes, that means that ethnic and social justice studies will now have pride of place along with English and science as subjects that must be mastered by those brandishing a bachelor’s degree from the vast California system.<br/>
<br/>
Not that ethnic or social justice studies will do one iota to help these young Americans master their fields or become future leaders, which used to be one of the aims of what was formerly called higher education.<br/>
<br/>
No, ethnic and social justice studies are political indoctrination.<br/>
<br/>
Critics would say, hang on, wouldn’t ethnic and social justice studies help Americans get along better in a diverse workforce, body politics, classrooms, etc.? Those critics, of course, would have very little understanding of what actually is taught in ethnic studies or social justice studies.<br/>
<br/>
Ethnic studies teach the members of what in today’s lexicon we call “minorities” (really, any American who belongs to a group that the activists have convinced the bureaucracy to officialize as marginalized) that they have a long list of grievances against the United States, and particularly against whites.<br/>
<br/>
To Americans who have been cordoned off into the groups thought of as belonging to the “oppressor” classes, ethnic and social justice studies classes instruct them to forthwith act submissively, assume the burden of collective guilt for sins in which they have taken no part, listen, not talk, etc.<br/>
<br/>
Who are these oppressor people? It used to be only white male Protestants, but we are seeing the anger turned against white women, who are now dismissed and cruelly disparaged as “Karens,” (anti-racist consultant Robin DiAngelo actually devotes an entire chapter of her bestseller “White Fragility” to “White Women’s Tears”), Jews, and, increasingly, Chinese and Indian Americans.<br/>
<br/>
Why? Well because Chinese and Indian Americans have had the temerity to succeed, which destroys the narrative that we have oppressor and oppressed classes, and individuals cannot do anything about it.<br/>
<br/>
So would anyone want to introduce this witches’ brew into the educational system of anything? Because Angela Davis was right: ethnic studies are a political project.<br/>
<br/>
Ethnic and social justice studies are just one more attempt at demolishing the “hegemonic narrative.” The hegemonic narrative of this country, to those not yet indoctrinated, is the American Way of life. It is the American Dream. It is the promise of liberty and prosperity that has attracted more than 100 million immigrants to our shores in over a century and a half.<br/>
<br/>
That attraction continues to this day. There is a very long line out the door of people seeking to come in and there is no line for people waiting to leave.<br/>
<br/>
As I explain at length in my new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free,” to be published this Tuesday, the hard left wants to strangle this goose that laid the golden egg.<br/>
<br/>
To the hard left, this is not a dream, but a dystopian nightmare of an America that is structurally, systemically and institutionally racist. It is also too individualistic (and at the same time too family-centered), profit-driven, male-ist, etc.<br/>
<br/>
To Davis and the others who understand the political value of ethnic studies, this awful American hegemonic narrative must be replaced with a counter-narrative filled with the aggrieved and the aggressors.<br/>
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That is why every student who will go through the Cal State system will now receive these lessons, and be hugged more tightly by the intellectual arm of the revolution.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/california-state-universitys-mandate-ethnic-social-justice-studies-driven">https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/california-state-universitys-mandate-ethnic-social-justice-studies-driven</a>
</p>
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<b> School choice wins in Texas — and shows other states how it’s done</b><br/>
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The educational-choice movement is a once-in-a-generation political earthquake in America, and politicians in other states should take notice.<br/>
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The Texas House failed in November to pass Gov. Greg Abbott’s school-choice legislation.<br/>
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Twenty-one Republicans joined all Democrats to kill a groundbreaking compromise bill that would have created Texas’ first private school-choice program, sent $7 billion extra to public schools and provided $4,000 raises for public-school teachers and support staff.<br/>
<br/>
But instead of empowering families, defecting Republicans voted against their party platform and their constituents.<br/>
<br/>
It looked like the nation’s largest red state would continue to be a stubborn holdout on education freedom, but Abbott quickly and boldly went on the electoral warpath.<br/>
<br/>
He endorsed primary challengers against those members and ultimately deployed more than $7 million of his own campaign cash to make sure voters knew where they stood.<br/>
<br/>
The results were extraordinary.<br/>
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Of the 16 anti-school-choice incumbents seeking re-election, a stunning six were defeated outright, and another four were pushed into runoffs.<br/>
<br/>
Meanwhile, all five of the seats vacated by retiring members will be filled by pro-school-choice candidates.<br/>
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This change in the whip count represents the largest shift toward school choice in Texas political history.<br/>
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It’s difficult to recall another political event in any other state of this magnitude.<br/>
<br/>
It also settled the score on school choice.<br/>
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On multiple occasions, anti-choice incumbents claimed their constituents are opposed or indifferent to vouchers.<br/>
<br/>
But their actions betrayed the truth.<br/>
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Until election week, those incumbents still ran advertisements digging in on their vote against school choice.<br/>
<br/>
Ousted Rep. Glenn Rogers wrote multiple opinion articles arguing school choice “isn’t conservative.”<br/>
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Rogers lost his seat to a school-choice supporter by a 26-point margin.<br/>
<br/>
As Texas’ most popular political figure, Abbott and his endorsements were hugely important to the electorate.<br/>
<br/>
But the governor wasn’t alone.<br/>
<br/>
In the past three months, our affiliated super PAC, AFC Victory Fund, also spent more than $4 million to make sure voters knew where their representatives stood.<br/>
<br/>
All told, this election will be remembered as one of the most significant events in state-level politics in recent history.<br/>
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Defeating an incumbent lawmaker is the hardest thing to do in politics.<br/>
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By defeating six incumbents and pushing four more to runoffs, Abbott and AFC Victory Fund blew expectations out of the water with a resounding 77% success rate.<br/>
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Coming into this year, no Texas Republican incumbents had lost a March primary re-election bid in the prior two election cycles.<br/>
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Because of school choice, at least six lost in one night.<br/>
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Thanks in part to the hard work of the governor and several other crucial state and national allies, parents have become the strongest interest group in town.<br/>
<br/>
Texas will now have its best opportunity to pass school choice for every family, which would be the largest Day 1 school-choice program in history.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/14/opinion/school-choice-wins-in-texas-and-shows-other-states-how-its-done/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/14/opinion/school-choice-wins-in-texas-and-shows-other-states-how-its-done/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-85322922216899333062024-03-14T20:32:00.003+13:002024-03-14T20:33:09.446+13:00<br>
<b> Virginia College Announces Students Can Major in ‘Cannabis Studies’</b><br/>
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The sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes is illegal in Virginia, not to mention at the federal level. But that hasn’t stopped Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from developing an entire major and minor totally dedicated to training students to participate in the marijuana industry. Students who choose this field of study will graduate with a bachelor of science in cannabis studies. And, no, that’s not a bad joke about students who spend their college years stoned.<br/>
<br/>
When Roanoke College announced the program earlier this year, leaders of the college hailed it for providing education in an area of great need. “I commend the faculty for developing a transdisciplinary academic program that fills a significant educational gap,” said Kathy Wolfe, vice president for academic affairs at Roanoke College.<br/>
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Students who major in cannabis choose from two tracks. First, they can study the “science” of the marijuana industry, which focuses on the “botany, biology, and chemistry” surrounding growing marijuana. Second, they can explore “the social justice and governmental policy around cannabis legislation.” In other words, they can spend their four years of college either growing marijuana or participating in roundtable discussions about the supposed injustice of the prosecution of marijuana-related crimes. As for the former, the college assures that only hemp varieties with 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), or less, will be used. It claims that these plants will “have no psychoactive effects” so as to comply with federal law. (Students will still, according to the college, be “provide[d] … with the scientific training needed to be successful in the industry.”)<br/>
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In order to receive a B.S. in cannabis studies, students can take courses such as “Cannabis and It’s Regulation,” organic chemistry, cell biology, “Cannabis and Race,” “Cannabis and Disabilities,” “Cannabis and Pop Culture,” “Insects and Cannabis,” “Ethnobotany,” “Cannabis and Society,” and “Inequality in Criminal Justice.”<br/>
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The college uses the term “cannabis” rather than marijuana at least partially because it claims the word “marijuana” is “a racially charged term with a checkered past.”<br/>
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The college is quite clear that the major will train students to cash in on the marijuana trade. It advertises to students: “Our program, which is the first of its kind in Virginia, will allow graduates to capitalize on a rapidly growing industry.” Roanoke College receives state funds via the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant, meaning the state of Virginia will be paying to train Virginia students to participate in business activities that are illegal in Virginia. Yet Roanoke claims that its program will benefit the state: “Roanoke College aims to guide the commonwealth to improve understanding and application of knowledge around cannabis.” The college also plans to use federal funding to train students to grow and sell the Schedule I drug.<br/>
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Roanoke College claims that marijuana shows “great promise as a medical remedy,” yet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve its use for the treatment of any condition, and a 2022 study showed that marijuana is totally ineffective for the treatment of pain, depression, or anxiety.<br/>
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Studies have shown that about 30 percent of adults who use marijuana recreationally will develop an addiction to the drug. In addition, 44.7 percent of people who use marijuana move on to other illegal drugs<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://spectator.org/virginia-college-announces-students-can-major-in-cannabis-studies/">https://spectator.org/virginia-college-announces-students-can-major-in-cannabis-studies/</a>
</p>
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<b> Academics Embrace New ‘Deficit Framing’ to Justify Underperforming and Immature Students </b><br/>
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It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.<br/>
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They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.<br/>
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Yet, although some professors view these deficits as problems to be fixed, many in academia have embraced bits of pedagogical fluff intertwined with fashionable DEI that suggest there is something demotivating if not bigoted about acknowledging deficits as deficits and holding students to basic academic or professional standards, while implying bad grades and a lack of maturity on the part of students are simple quirks educators just need to better accept.<br/>
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One such fluffy concept is that of “deficit framing,” sometimes referred to as “deficit thinking” or a “deficit model lens.” As defined by education researcher Chelsea Heinbach in a 2021 interview, deficit thinking is “the belief that there is a prescribed ‘correct’ way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit.”<br/>
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These individuals, she said, are perceived by those engaged in deficit thinking as needing to be fixed or having to “‘try harder’ and ultimately conform to the practices of the dominant culture.”<br/>
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Heinbach went on to advocate for “changing the norm to accommodate others,” suggesting that minority, disabled, first-generation, international, and nontraditional students with responsibilities related to work or family are all harmed by the maintenance of such norms.<br/>
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In 2023, Aaminah Long, a PhD student in higher education and student affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, echoed similar sentiments on a blog hosted on her university’s website.<br/>
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Deficit models, she wrote, “are particularly problematic as they subscribe to the notion that students and their environments are responsible for their failures instead of acknowledging the role of dominant power structures in constructing those environments.”<br/>
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“Instructing from a deficit model lens,” wrote Long, “is especially harmful to marginalized students, overlooking their cultural strengths, diminishing the value of their lived experiences, and invalidating their communities’ sense of agency by assuming that educational institutions are the only ‘valid’ sources of knowledge and rejecting long-standing cultural practices and ways of knowing.”<br/>
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One of Long’s recommendations for instructors to move away from such deficit models was to embrace another fluffy idea and “[f]oster a growth mindset.”<br/>
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In its simplest form, the notion of a growth mindset may be innocuous if not beneficial, as it suggests students should view academic challenges as opportunities for growth and see their intelligence and class performance as things that can be improved with effort.<br/>
<br/>
Yet, in practice, some educators who seek to cultivate a growth mindset in students can take the endeavor to rather absurd places.<br/>
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Stephanie Erickson from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, for example, has decried “[p]olicies such as not accepting late homework, deducting points for late assignments, and not allowing for revisions on large stakes assignments” as these policies “go against a growth mindset” and “implicitly value specific norms surrounding work ethic, time management, and learning approaches.”<br/>
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In practice, such interpretations of a growth mindset merge with another bit of pedagogical fluff known as ungrading, which holds that grades can be demotivating to students and has spurred some professors to do away with due dates, stop penalizing late work, and start allowing students to self-grade.<br/>
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Collectively, when these kinds of fluffy ideas are translated into policy at a university, department, or even just a classroom level, they at best provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for taking unprepared, underperforming, or immature students and moving them along without ensuring they develop the basic academic and professional competencies they lack.<br/>
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At worst, however, the embrace of such pedagogical fluff, given its overlap with DEI, can disincentivize those in academia who notice deficits in their students from acknowledging the problem publicly and penalize those that do thus ensuring obvious deficits in student ability and character remain.<br/>
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For example, in a recent incident at my own academic institution, Northern Illinois University, when philosophy Professor Alicia Finch stated at a faculty senate meeting, “I’m just not convinced they [intro students] know how to do college. And I sometimes think, well, maybe we need a coordinated effort to teach them,” she was inevitably and publicly dressed down by our Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Carol Sumner, for her “deficit framing” of students.<br/>
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“We just had a conversation yesterday at looking at how we’re student-centered and what are we doing for student success,” stated Sumner prior to reading a quote on her phone from a source she didn’t bother to name.<br/>
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“It says,” she began, “‘Using an asset-based approach to student success requires more than the institution simply identifying that the students are having challenges, but explores the ways to which structural and systemic issues impair and derail student success. It does not position the issues or challenges being due to deficits within the individual students.’”<br/>
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Sumner suggested “practices, policies and pedagogies” that focus on fixing student deficits, actually “reinforce colonialism, subjugation and the inferiority of minoritized students.”<br/>
<br/>
She then went on to “reposition” Finch’s question as “How are we as institutions identifying the challenges and structures that we put in place where students are not successful.”<br/>
<br/>
In other words, there isn’t a problem with students entering college grossly unprepared. The problem is college is too challenging. Those that say otherwise are colonizing subjugators.<br/>
<br/>
Anyone who seriously might want to address student deficits should think twice. And the students that enter college unable to handle lengthy texts, basic vocabulary, or rudimentary algebra may very well graduate that way.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/academics-embrace-new-deficit-framing-to-justify-underperforming-and-immature-students-analysis/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/academics-embrace-new-deficit-framing-to-justify-underperforming-and-immature-students-analysis/</a>
</p>
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<b> Why abolishing boys schools is an act of woke madness</b><br/>
<br/>
Greg Sheridan<br/>
<br/>
The campaign to abolish single-sex schools, especially boys schools, is a sign of the madness of ideology and the badness of groupthink.<br/>
<br/>
It reflects the dreary, dull, lifeless, joyless, small “S” Stalinist bureaucratic conformity that progressive ideology routinely attempts to impose. It’s a rush to insanity, where pressure will come on every successful boys school to become coeducational.<br/>
<br/>
Let’s state the obvious. Boys schools, girls schools and co-ed schools can all be extremely good, mediocre or terrible. It’s a good thing for our educational environment, and for countless families and students, that different types of schools flourish.<br/>
<br/>
Gender Equality Advocate Michelle May says. “The argument is that currently it is not done on merit,” Ms May said. “It’s still very much a boys club. “As long as we’ve got More<br/>
It seems a pity that some boys schools with long, good traditions now feel obliged to go co-ed. They may be feeling cultural pressure.<br/>
<br/>
Let me confess. I spent the majority of my schooling at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney that was for boys only. It was a great school, with wide socio-economic and racial diversity, and certainly taught its students respect for women and girls, and respect for everyone.<br/>
<br/>
It wasn’t an exclusively male environment. There were female teachers, librarians, admin staff, mothers in the tuck shop. To be rude, much less sexist, towards any of these would have been unthinkable and would have earned draconian punishment.<br/>
<br/>
The contemporary debate is too ideological. If a particular school has a behaviour problem, that needs to be fixed. Abolishing boys schools generally would be wretched iconoclastic vandalism.<br/>
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In the Financial Review last week an anonymous business executive called for ending single-sex schools and said boys schools should stop trying to make “men” out of their students.<br/>
<br/>
How weird is this? What is it that boys are supposed to become if not men? Giraffes? Oranges?<br/>
<br/>
The piece reflects the confused and counter-productive campaign against masculinity. Men, like women, can do terrible things. Men are responsible for much more violence than women. I agree we’re living through a plague of domestic violence that we must stop. But you won’t make men decent, respectful and successful by telling them masculinity itself is bad.<br/>
<br/>
Seventeen years ago, in central Melbourne, about 7.30am, a biker, who had been on an all-night binge, was beating up his girlfriend. Two men came to her aid. One was killed in the process. In giving his life to the instinct to protect a woman under assault, that man was displaying masculinity, and it wasn’t toxic.<br/>
<br/>
At the school I attended more than 50 years ago, the brothers, and all the teachers, stressed that men had certain obligations to women – politeness, consideration, respect, courtesy.<br/>
<br/>
The brothers taught that when walking down the street with a girl the bloke should try to walk between the girl and the road. That’s so any danger coming from the road, such as a car crashing off the street, hits the bloke first.<br/>
<br/>
That may all seem hopelessly outdated. But men and women are still different. Completely equal but different. The idea that the differences are mainly the result of socialisation is contemporary ideology waging war against human nature.<br/>
<br/>
Almost no one really lives their life according to the new ideology. Is there a household in Australia where, if a married couple hears a strange noise in the middle of the night, the husband turns to the wife and says: “Now, darling, why don’t you go and see if that noise is a burglar. I’ll stay here by the phone. I would go myself but I don’t want us to be trapped in gender stereotypes.”<br/>
<br/>
It’s good that women’s sport is increasingly seen as the equal of men’s sport. But it’s still different. No one argues that men and women should play rugby league together. The army for a long time included boxing in its training. It’s a tough sport. Maybe its concussion risks render it no longer fit for such training. But you can see it helped soldiers cope psychologically with experiencing a physical blow but carrying on. It has never been the case that men and women enter the same boxing ring and box against each other.<br/>
<br/>
The variety of human experience is vast but boys and girls are different. Co-ed can work superbly, but so can schools that focus only on boys, or only girls. Boys and girls do tend, within all kinds of statistical variation, to learn a bit differently, so boys schools can focus on the way boys learn.<br/>
<br/>
Girls tend to mature earlier than boys and in that early adolescent period a single-sex school allows a boy to remain a boy for as long as necessary. And then become a man.<br/>
<br/>
Cardinal George Pell once remarked that “self-confidence, directness and an instinct for struggle and competition” characterised Christian Brothers schools. That’s pretty accurate.<br/>
<br/>
But boys schools also offer boys a distinctive diversity. At a boys school, if there’s going to be a choir it has to be the boys singing.<br/>
<br/>
The school I went to was exceptionally strong in sports. My one season as a junior rugby league player led to a broken shoulder; my parents decided I’d dispense with footy. I wasn’t very good at sport anyway but the school offered multitudes of other activities. I was always in the debating team, the chess club, sometimes the drama performances, sometimes music groups, briefly in the science club, in Christian youth groups and a million other things.<br/>
<br/>
Even though I didn’t play football or cricket, and hardly excelled at the sports I did participate in, I never felt out of place. Books, learning, contention, energy, purpose, competition – it was a pro-life environment.<br/>
<br/>
The teachers occasionally gave us the strap for our malefactions. Some of life’s antipathies are irrational. I greatly disliked one teacher, who warmly returned my sentiments. No doubt unfairly, I thought him a dogmatic smart alec. Perhaps we were too much alike.<br/>
<br/>
I persecuted him with many pedantic questions and points of order while staying well within the rules and norms. One day, nonetheless, he sort of gave in and gave me the strap. I went home that afternoon immensely chuffed, feeling I’d won a moral victory.<br/>
<br/>
There were times, of course, when we were louts and hooligans, and needed strong direction. The school was pretty strict. Sensibly so. And it had a great tradition. Wearing its uniform meant something. We cared about it. No doubt it struck other kids entirely differently.<br/>
<br/>
But it gave me wonderful treasures. In its library, in primary school, I met PG Wodehouse, my lifelong companion.<br/>
<br/>
We moved house and I finished at a co-ed school. It was good, too. Diversity is good. The urge of ideological censors to hammer everything into a single monotonous conformity is as misbegotten as their demonisation of masculinity, and of the need to turn good boys, indeed, into good men.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/why-abolishing-boys-schools-is-an-act-of-woke-madness/news-story/e08f940cc72712c7956431ea1ae4c0eb">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/why-abolishing-boys-schools-is-an-act-of-woke-madness/news-story/e08f940cc72712c7956431ea1ae4c0eb</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-71306408112751165332024-03-13T23:53:00.003+13:002024-03-13T23:53:51.646+13:00
<br/>
<b> House Education Committee Demands Documents Related to Elite University’s Handling of Antisemitism</b><br/>
<br/>
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is demanding documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology related to the school’s handling of antisemitism on campus, according to a Friday letter.<br/>
<br/>
The House committee is requesting all reports of antisemitic and discriminatory acts at the university since Jan. 1, 2021; documents outlining the school’s processes to respond to “allegations of hate crimes, discrimination, bias, or harassment”; and documents related to the outcome of disciplinary processes, among others, according to the letter addressed to MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corp. Chair Mark Gorenberg.<br/>
<br/>
The committee is investigating several elite universities after their presidents testified in December and refused to say if calling for the genocide of Jews violated the schools’ codes of conduct.<br/>
<br/>
“The Committee on Education and the Workforce (the Committee) is investigating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT or the Institute) response to antisemitism and its failure to protect Jewish students. We have grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT’s response to antisemitism on campus,” the letter reads.<br/>
<br/>
The committee alleges that the university has ignored antisemitism on its campus since Oct. 7 and cited several incidents, including a pro-Palestinian activist group disrupting classes and allegedly harassing students. Kornbluth is also alleged to have told MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan that the school could not evenly apply the code of conduct due to fear of “losing faculty support.”<br/>
<br/>
“MIT has cited its supposed commitment to free speech as limiting its ability to take action against antisemitism on campus. However, the Institute has demonstrated a clear double standard in how it has tolerated antisemitic harassment and intimidation by acting to suppress and penalize expression it deemed problematic. In October 2021, MIT’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department canceled University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s planned John Carlson lecture over Abbot’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the letter reads.<br/>
<br/>
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also demanding documents related to the amount of foreign donations to MIT, as well as donations to MIT from Qatari sources, including the Qatar Foundation, since Jan. 1, 2021, according to the letter.<br/>
<br/>
Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania are also under investigation by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from their roles after the Dec. 5 hearing on antisemitism on college campuses.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/08/grave-concerns-house-education-committee-demands-documents-related-to-elite-universitys-handling-of-antisemitism/">https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/08/grave-concerns-house-education-committee-demands-documents-related-to-elite-universitys-handling-of-antisemitism/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> At the CREATE Conservatory, an Alternative to Public Schools</b><br/>
<br/>
Nikki Duslak says she never fit in as a public school teacher. “I have a background in theater—a bachelor’s degree in fine art and musical theater—and I always carried that love with me in the classroom. I was constantly doing crazy, off‐the‐wall things and other teachers would look at me like I had six heads,” she explains. “I had always had that passion to integrate art into my classroom, and I saw firsthand what it could do for students.”<br/>
<br/>
She remembers sitting in the teachers’ room at lunch hearing people complain about the state of things. “If I was a school principal, I wouldn’t do things this way,” she thought. So, she went back to school and got her masters in educational leadership and policy studies. “I became a school principal, and I constantly found myself saying, ‘Gosh, this is awful. Someday I’m going to open my own school, and I’m going to do things differently.’”<br/>
<br/>
But a “someday” dream doesn’t always become reality. “It was very challenging to even think about because there were so many loose ends. There is no handbook or guidebook; it’s different depending on what state you’re in. And it was just a very overwhelming thought,” Nikki says.<br/>
<br/>
Eventually, it was her own child’s needs that gave Nikki the push she needed. Her son was reading at a third‐grade level and solving Algebra problems at age three, so she knew it was going to be tough to find the right school for him. After trying a few options—including having him in classes with 13‐year‐olds when he was five—Nikki realized it was time to start a new kind of school. The result is CREATE Conservatory, which opened in Florida in 2020.<br/>
<br/>
“People think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I found a book called Nonprofits for Dummies, and I sat down with the book and a bottle of wine. I thought, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it,’” she recalls. “I decided that the fear of what would happen if I tried to open the school was less than the fear of what was going to happen to him if I didn’t.”<br/>
<br/>
Nikki’s public school career gave her a realization that the public system is about mass producing. “If you’re a mass production kind of student, then that might work great for you. If you’re the kind of student who can sit down and be quiet and listen—and you can show what you’ve learned through a very specific methodology—that system might work for you. But it doesn’t work for so many of our children,” she says.<br/>
<br/>
What I was really trying to create was an environment where students were able to show what they know as opposed to being caught with what they don’t know. And an opportunity to teach children how to think; I believe so much of the modern education system has removed opportunities for children to think. We’re asking them to memorize information. We’re asking them to spit it back at us. But we’re not teaching them how to be critical thinkers. We’re not teaching them how to solve problems, especially how to solve problems creatively, which I believe is a massive part of your eventual success, whether it’s college or career or the workforce or military. Being able to look at a problem and solve it in a creative way is just something that doesn’t exist in the system right now. So for me that became, ‘How do I do that?’ I was immediately drawn back to all those times in a classroom where I saw arts integration be so wildly successful. And that was with students that you’d never think. I was teaching in a very rural, very low income school, and I was using arts integration.<br/>
<br/>
Nikki and her team write the curriculum themselves. “I think part of why we don’t see arts integration as a more widespread methodology is because it is incredibly hard,” she says. “You have to have a really deep understanding of the arts. You have to have a very deep understanding of curriculum, curriculum writing, and scope and sequence. And you also have to have an incredible knowledge of your students who are in front of you. Because if you don’t have all three of those things, it’s not going to work.” Nikki uses Florida state standards as the basis and then finds ways to incorporate the arts into various topics.<br/>
<br/>
“We don’t have textbooks here. We learn everything through videos or articles I find online,” Nikki says. “If we want to study the solar system, if we want to learn about space, why am I going to use a 10‐year‐old textbook when I can go to NASA’s website right now and we can talk about the comet they discovered this morning? We can pull it up on the screen and read the website right now. The kids feel like they’re cutting edge because they’re learning about it, and it just happened yesterday. And they’re excited about it.”<br/>
<br/>
After the struggles of Nikki’s own gifted children trying to fit in a standard classroom, differentiation is a key aspect of CREATE. “The way that we differentiate here is either through content, product, or process,” she explains. She currently has 4th grade through 9th grade in one classroom, and she acknowledges that’s a challenge. She’ll do a group lesson on a subject and then break them into smaller groups to work on specific aspects at more individualized levels. This allows students to work on mastery at their ability level rather than an arbitrary metric based on their age.<br/>
<br/>
Nikki has been approached about creating a curriculum that can be replicated in other schools, but she hasn’t figured out a way due to the creativity and personalization she incorporates throughout all of her classes. “I find that the curriculum piece is becoming that someday dream of mine. Someday when I have time, I’m going to sit down and flesh this out a bit because I do think it’s something that we need,” she says. Considering her last “someday” dream became a flourishing microschool that was a semifinalist for the Yass Prize, it’s probably safe to keep an eye out for her curriculum in the future.<br/>
<br/>
When she first started planning CREATE, Nikki was a school choice skeptic because she saw the state as part of the problem when it came to public schools. But then she realized she would retain autonomy with Florida’s scholarship programs, so she now happily participates to ensure students in her rural, low‐income area can attend CREATE Conservatory.<br/>
<br/>
“As adults, it’s rare that we have the opportunity to sit back and reflect on a decision that we made and be able to say I’m very proud of myself. But I do with this because I really was very opposed to it at the beginning. Then the more I sat down and read, the more I looked into it, and the more I talked to people, I thought, ‘Well, I think I was wrong about this. And I think if the school’s going to survive, we have to go this route.’ And so every day I’m thankful I was smart enough to realize that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and to change my opinion about it all,” she says. “I couldn’t be more thankful for Step Up and for AAA and for all the things that they do because we wouldn’t exist at this point without them.”<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/create-conservatory-alternative-choice-public-schools/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/create-conservatory-alternative-choice-public-schools/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Australia:Christian schools under fire from official body</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> Tax deductibility for Greenie bodies is OK but not for Christian ones.</i><br/>
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The insidious influence of Catholic schools was a matter of no small concern to the colonial establishment in the late 19th century, not least because of their devilish power to corrupt the youth.<br/>
<br/>
“Large numbers of children are perverted to Popery before their parents are aware of the true character of the teaching,” The Protestant Weekly reported in 1886, arguing that Catholic schools should be barred from government funding. Romanist education was “a false mean deceit” propagating “a religion degrading to the intellect and the heart as its design was simply to extract money”.<br/>
<br/>
Such narrow sectarian prejudice would be deemed inappropriate in the 21st century by the guardians of diversity and inclusion, whose job is to make everybody feel comfortable.<br/>
<br/>
Today, their intolerance extends to all forms of Christian education and, indeed, to any private school that undermines the monopoly of the state system. The Productivity Commission fired a particularly nasty salvo against religious schools, out of character for an organisation that once anchored its findings in data rather than the fashionable preconceptions of the intelligentsia.<br/>
<br/>
In November, the Commission published a draft report recommending that donations to Christian school building funds should no longer be tax-deductible. The draft argued that the Deductible Gift Recipient status granted by the Australian Taxation Office to a wide range of registered charities was inappropriate since religious education had limited claim to a broader public purpose.<br/>
<br/>
The PC argues that DGR donations require co-investment from taxpayers since a $100 donation from someone in the top income bracket saved them $35 in tax. This, the PC argues, is unfair since the priorities for public investment in schools should be decided by the government, not God-bothering tax dodgers.<br/>
<br/>
They were not the exact words the PC used, but how else should we read a passage like this? “The Commission does not see a case for additional government support for the practice of religion through the DGR system.”<br/>
<br/>
Or this? “Providing indirect government support through school building funds means government funding is not prioritised according to a systemic assessment of the infrastructure needs of different schools.”<br/>
<br/>
The naive proposition that the government knows better where to spend public money than the public themselves sits awkwardly with the lessons from the Rudd government’s Building the Education Revolution program, a $16.2bn splurge on school infrastructure projects to stave off the recession that never was. The official report into the implementation of the BER by Brad Orgill found public schools in Queensland, NSW and Victoria paid 25 per cent more than Catholic schools and 55 per cent more than independent schools for near identical projects.<br/>
<br/>
Yet the Commission doggedly insists that tax deductibility for donations to school building projects is unfair. It bolsters its argument with a peculiarly perverse interpretation of what constitutes private benefit. Potential donors are most likely to be people directly involved with the school, it claims, and are likely to reap the fruits of their donations as the parents of students or as alumni.<br/>
<br/>
The Commission does not oppose tax-deductible donations per se. Indeed, it argues that they should be extended to a broader range of charities. Nor is it opposed to charities that want to build things, just those who like to build buildings that could be used for religious purposes.<br/>
<br/>
It declares the building of social capital to be a worthy charitable ambition. Ditto is the building of bonds between individuals and communities, however loose that goal might be defined. Capacity-building activities for organisations and individuals get a tick, particularly the building of empowerment and self-determination by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations. Indeed, the Commission recommends the establishment of an independent philanthropic foundation controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for that very purpose.<br/>
<br/>
It is religion to which the Commission seems to object. Not all of the 5000 school building funds that are currently endorsed are religious. Some three-quarters are for charities, and a quarter for government entities, such as public schools.<br/>
<br/>
Yet the Commission wears its prejudices on its sleeve by mounting arguments exclusively against Christian schools rather than private schools. The concerns about tax-deductible proselytising do not extend to the 148 environmental charities with tax-deductible status.<br/>
<br/>
The Commission does not question the broader public purpose of Boundless Earth Limited, which attracted $30.6m in revenue in its most recent annual report lodged with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.<br/>
<br/>
Boundless Earth gained its tax-deductible concession in 2021, stating its purpose is ”to accelerate climate solutions at the scale and speed required for Australia to do its fair share to avert the climate crisis”. Boundless Earth’s registered address is 13 Trelawney Street, Woollahra, the site of the former German consulate now owned by Mike Cannon-Brookes.<br/>
<br/>
The Commission makes no recommendation that the projects and organisations Boundless Earth funds should be put on the public record, or suggest that Boundless should be declared an associated entity by the Australian Electoral Commission under the disclosure rules for political donations. And this would not be an unreasonable recommendation since Cannon-Brookes has made no secret of his financial support for the teal campaign at the last federal election.<br/>
<br/>
The granting of DGR status to Boundless, Greenpeace, Lock The Gate, the Australian Solar Energy Society (which operates as the Smart Energy Council) the Climate Council, Farmers for Climate Action, Veterinarians for Climate Action and other members of the renewable energy cheer squad reinforces the growing concern that privileges of charitable status should be reviewed.<br/>
<br/>
The Albanese government has prudently distanced itself from the Commission’s recommendations. “It’s not something we’re considering,” Assistant Education Minister Anthony Chisholm told a Senate committee last month.<br/>
<br/>
The Commission is right to complain that the DGR system is poorly designed. It is piecemeal, overly complex and lacks a coherent policy rationale. It is responsible for inefficient, inconsistent and unfair outcomes for charities, donors and the community. It is badly in need of review.<br/>
<br/>
Yet the draft report of the philanthropy inquiry is a small-minded, mean-spirited document unworthy of an organisation with a reputation for forensic and impartial examination of public policy. For the sake of their own reputation, the commissioners should find the courage to send the report back to its authors and ask them to start again.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/christian-schools-on-the-nose-amid-pcs-green-faith/news-story/74d7ec97ccba7a9dcee309b528ac145a">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/christian-schools-on-the-nose-amid-pcs-green-faith/news-story/74d7ec97ccba7a9dcee309b528ac145a</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-75581445686496722392024-03-12T22:56:00.001+13:002024-03-12T22:56:06.735+13:00<br><br/>
<b> A Fraudulent Attack on Education Choice</b><br/>
<br/>
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has indicted former government employees hired by a fellow Democrat, then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, for defrauding the government. Now she’s desperately trying to use the story as a cudgel against families benefitting from the state’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account policy.<br/>
<br/>
On Thursday, Mayes’ office announced the indictment of five people, including three former Arizona Department of Education employees, for “allegedly engaging in fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery” related to the ESA.<br/>
<br/>
“My overarching concern here is this is a program that is easy to target for fraud,” Mayes claimed.<br/>
<br/>
But these were no ordinary scammers. This was an inside job.<br/>
<br/>
According to the grand jury indictment, the three former ADE employees, “admitted minor students, real and fictitious into the ESA Program by using false, forged, or fraudulent documentation,” including falsified special-education evaluations from public schools, and “awarded said student funds from the ESA Program, and approved expenses for reimbursement or funds for distribution of behalf of said students for their own benefit.”<br/>
<br/>
Had the scammers not been working at the Department of Education, this would not have been possible. As ESA director John Ward explained to the Arizona Capitol Times, the ESA program already has proper guardrails in place: “ADE employees are trained to review birth certificates and look for anything ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’ in assessing authenticity of disability evaluations.”<br/>
<br/>
Unlike the Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment System scandal—which has seen dozens of scammers indicted for stealing more than a billion dollars from the state’s Medicaid system—ordinary scammers could not have gotten away with this without help from inside.<br/>
<br/>
Moreover, the scammers were caught. Contrary to Mayes’s telling, the Arizona Education Department was investigating its own employees before the AG’s office got involved. “The Attorney General is not telling the truth when she states that the alleged criminal activities of former ADE employees did not raise flags in the department,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne clarified in a press release. “In fact, the opposite is true. Our office did alert the Attorney General’s Office to concerns we discovered regarding” the former employees.<br/>
<br/>
Mayes’s attempt to smear the ESA program as having a “lack of controls and regulations” is belied by the facts. The most recent review by the ESA by the Arizona Auditor General found an improper payment rate of nearly zero. During their “review of all 168,020 approved transactions identified in the Department’s Program account transaction data” over the prior fiscal year, they “found only 1 successful transaction at an unapproved merchant totaling $30.”<br/>
<br/>
In other words, the rate of improper payments to unapproved merchants was only 0.001 percent.<br/>
<br/>
That’s far better than other government programs. According to a 2021 analysis by the federal Office of Management and Budget, the improper payment rate across federal agencies is 7.2 percent. Some of the worst offenders are the federal school meals programs. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “the school meals programs have reported high improper payment error rates, as high as almost 16 percent for the National School Lunch Program and almost 23 percent for the School Breakfast Program over the past 4 years.”<br/>
<br/>
Opponents of school choice like Mayes and Save Our Schools Arizona are predictably using the indictments to attack the popular ESA program. But anyone who is really concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse should start in the district school system.<br/>
<br/>
As the Goldwater Institute documented, “just 10 percent of Arizona’s school districts have managed to accumulate almost $26 million in documented fraud” over two decades. If the attorney general is really concerned about fraud, perhaps she should investigate the 13 school districts that the Arizona Auditor General has reprimanded for failing to comply with the state’s financial reporting requirements.<br/>
<br/>
The district schools aren’t immune from hiring people who commit fraud either. In just the last two years, employees at school districts in Glendale, Hyder, and Wilson have been indicted for theft, fraud, forgery, and misuse of public funds, while an Eloy School District employee pled guilty to theft and forgery.<br/>
<br/>
Any fraud or theft should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But no one has proposed eliminating AHCCCS or the district schools over the financial misconduct of external or internal swindlers.<br/>
<br/>
Politicians and special interests are exploiting the ESA indictments to push an agenda that would cheat children out of a quality education and punish parents for the misdeeds of bamboozling bureaucrats. The public should recognize their fraudulent smears for what they are.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/fraudulent-attack-education-choice">https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/fraudulent-attack-education-choice</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Embattled Ivy League Professor Amy Wax Alleges School is Attempting to ‘Punish’ Her for Conservative Speech</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> She's a hero of straight talk</i><br/>
<br/>
University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) law professor Amy Wax alleged that the university does not adhere to free speech standards and is targeting the scholar because of her conservative beliefs.<br/>
<br/>
Wax, who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation, has made several controversial statements outside of the classroom, and the university has claimed that her speech created “a hostile campus environment.” Former UPenn President Liz Magill signed off on sanctions against Wax, which Wax said was an attempt to sanction her for extramural speech, which is speech outside the classroom, and said that the school is “flagrantly in violation of the principles of academic freedom.”<br/>
<br/>
“Penn has zero interest in developing and adhering to principles of a consistent position on free expression, zero interest. They can protect the people they basically agree with or favor, like the pro-Palestinians, anti-Israeli, antisemitic, and they can punish people like me. They have never articulated a consistent position,” Wax told the DCNF.<br/>
<br/>
“Everybody says after October 7, universities are on the run, they’re going to change the way they do things or after the affirmative action case, they’re going to change the way they do things. I don’t see any evidence of that. I hear people doubling down on their conviction that everything they’re doing is right and good,” Wax continued.<br/>
<br/>
Universities are dominated by left-wing professors, with one 2018 review of over 60 top colleges in the U.S. revealing that the professoriate is over ten to one Democratic to Republican. Wax pointed to the left-wing dominance of the universities as a reason she was being targeted for her more conservative speech, while radical left-wing speech had largely gone unquestioned.<br/>
<br/>
As recently as 2015, UPenn awarded Wax with the school’s top teaching prize, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, according to a UPenn news article. “Cancel culture really started accelerating around, I think, around 2015, 2016,” Wax told the DCNF.<br/>
<br/>
The Penn Law Council of Student Representatives held a student body meeting with then-UPenn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger in September 2019 to discuss “issues regarding Professor Amy Wax,” according to an email obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech legal organization.<br/>
<br/>
“The objections to me had nothing really to do with the quality of my teaching. It had to do with my openly expressing views and opinions and discussing facts that were forbidden and deviated from this very narrow catechism,” Wax told the DCNF. Wax said that many of the ideas and thoughts she had expressed were discussed in mainstream conservative circles but are forbidden at universities.<br/>
<br/>
Wax previously made controversial statements, including saying that America should let fewer Asians immigrate to the country due to their “indifference to liberty,” and that different racial “groups have different levels of ability” and that unequal outcomes are “not due to racism,” according to a June 2023 UPenn memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. She also said that diversity, equity and inclusion officers “couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it,” and that they are “true believer bureaucrats.”<br/>
<br/>
“People are afraid now to express a lot of this stuff in public because they will be censured or even lose their job or their livelihood,” Wax told the DCNF. “There is a myth, a fairy tale in the universities that all people are equal in their latent ability, whatever that means, and their achievement, and that is just completely contrary to fact.”<br/>
<br/>
Wax said allegations that she made students uncomfortable in the classroom were unfounded and that Ruger targeted her for extramural speech. She pointed out that the recently leaked memo of the faculty senate didn’t list any speech in the classroom.<br/>
<br/>
The memo recommends that Wax receive a public reprimand from university leadership, a loss of her named chair and a requirement to note when she publicly speaks, she is not speaking for the university. It also recommends a one-year suspension at half pay and a loss of summer pay in perpetuity. The memo claims that Wax’s speech should be treated as “major infractions of University behavioral standards.”<br/>
<br/>
Magill, who signed off on the recommendation to sanction Wax in the leaked memo, argued at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that the university had been lenient on antisemitic speech due to the school’s adherence to free speech principles. Magill also defended the Palestine Writes Festival at the school, which involved one speaker who likened Zionism to Nazism and one who said “most Jews” are “evil.”<br/>
<br/>
“Liz Magill lied to Congress because it has never adhered to First Amendment standards,” Wax told the DCNF. “But the fact that they’re bringing this case against me is directly contrary to First Amendment standards.”<br/>
<br/>
Free speech issues on college campuses have been a source of fierce debate since the Oct.7 terrorist attacks against Israel. Former Harvard President Claudine Gay wrote that students “had a right to speak” after over 30 student groups signed a letter blaming the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and also alluded to free speech at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism.<br/>
<br/>
Harvard University previously rescinded an offer to a student in 2019 for alleged racist comments made when he was 16 years old, and disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from campus in 2022 because of her views on trans issues.<br/>
<br/>
MIT President Sally Kornbluth allegedly told MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan that the university could not evenly apply the code of conduct due to fear of possibly “losing faculty support.” MIT previously disinvited speaker Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, due to his criticism of affirmative action.<br/>
<br/>
“The far left holds power in the universities, and they are not about to relinquish it,” Wax told the DCNF.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/embattled-ivy-league-professor-amy-wax-alleges-school-is-attempting-to-punish-her-for-conservative-speech/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/embattled-ivy-league-professor-amy-wax-alleges-school-is-attempting-to-punish-her-for-conservative-speech/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin Signs Bill Banning Legacy Admissions</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> This will put a few noses out of joint</i><br/>
<br/>
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill Friday banning legacy admissions at public colleges in the state.<br/>
<br/>
Several states have moved to eliminate legacy admissions, which are admissions based on prior familial attendance to a school, after the fall of race-based admissions at the Supreme Court in June 2023. The bill passed the Virginia Senate with bipartisan support, 39-0, and passed the state’s House of Delegates 99-0, and has now been signed by Youngkin.<br/>
<br/>
“Governor Youngkin has consistently advocated for merit-based admissions to Virginia’s colleges and universities. In Virginia, students can be encouraged to know their hard work and academic career will be recognized on its merit,” a spokesperson for Youngkin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.<br/>
<br/>
“No public institution of higher education shall provide any manner of preferential treatment in the admissions decision to any student applicant on the basis of such student’s legacy status or such student’s familial relationship to any donor to such institution,” the bill reads.<br/>
<br/>
“It’s about fairness. It’s about higher ed being available to everybody,” Virginia Democratic state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview before the Senate vote, according to The Associated Press.<br/>
<br/>
The Connecticut legislature’s education committee said it plans to look into legacy admissions during this upcoming legislative session, according to the Connecticut Mirror. Federal legislation was also introduced in November to eliminate legacy admissions in Congress by Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.<br/>
<br/>
Nearly 56% of the top 250 colleges and universities in the U.S. used legacy admissions in the enrollment process.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/virginia-governor-glenn-youngkin-signs-bill-banning-legacy-admissions/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/virginia-governor-glenn-youngkin-signs-bill-banning-legacy-admissions/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-70370736132351908312024-03-11T11:36:00.002+13:002024-03-12T23:37:06.448+13:00<br />
<b> Outrage grows after Nevada college oversight leader asked if state's universities have any men 'masquerading as women' on sports teams and hurting girls</b><br/>
<br/>
A Nevada college oversight leader is facing calls to resign after referring to trans athletes as 'men masquerading as women.'<br/>
<br/>
Patrick Boylan has been slammed for making the comments during a meeting of the Nevada System of Higher Education's Board of Regents on Friday.<br/>
<br/>
He said he had 'one simple question' for the athletic directors who were presenting to the board before asking, 'Do we have any men masquerading as women playing in any of our teams and hurting any of the women?'<br/>
<br/>
The question was shut down by board attorney Michael Wixom, who advised it was against federal privacy laws to collate and disclose that information. He cautioned the directors not to respond and said any question would need to be brought on a separate agenda.<br/>
<br/>
Boylan's remarks were also blasted by The Nevada Faculty Alliance which said it was, 'deeply angered by repeated anti-transgender comments.'<br/>
<br/>
The alliance said it was 'especially appalled' by the regent's 'aggressive response' to a student leader who upbraided his remarks in the public comment portion of the meeting.<br/>
<br/>
In the public comment section Kevin Osorio-Hernández, president of the Nevada State Student Alliance, told Boylan he was disappointed by the rhetoric and that he hopes he can 'expand and change your paradigm'.<br/>
<br/>
Boylan told the student he had freedom of speech and continued to make inflammatory remarks.<br/>
<br/>
'If he has not had his "you know what" cut off or anything, he's still a man,' Boylan said.<br/>
<br/>
But Boylan has stood by his position and confirmed to the Las Vegas Review that he has no plans to step down.<br/>
<br/>
He asserted that 'safety and freedom of speech' are more important than the feelings of the faculty alliance headed by Jim New, which he said had 'totally misconstrued' his comments.<br/>
<br/>
Boylan insisted he was doing the right thing by talking about women's safety in sport and claimed to have been confused about the proper way to refer to trans people.<br/>
<br/>
The regent defended his position and maintains he was just trying to speak up for women in sport. 'If I used the wrong terms, then OK,' he said, adding he had received emails of support since the meeting.<br/>
<br/>
'They're tired of all of this woke nonsense,' he said. Boylan also told the outlet he believes trans athletes should get to compete in their own separate category.<br/>
<br/>
He admitted during the Friday meeting his comments came on the heels of high-profile incidents across the nation of trans athletes competing against women and leading to injuries of the girls. One recent incident happened in Massachusetts when a trans athlete competed in a high school basketball game.<br/>
<br/>
The faculty alliance argues that Boylan's conduct goes against the board's anti-discrimination policy.<br/>
<br/>
'In the March 1 meeting, Regent Boylan also questioned the qualifications of students from underrepresented minority groups,' their statement added.<br/>
<br/>
'These are not isolated incidents. Regent Boylan has a history of racist and discriminatory remarks that have been condemned by a number of Nevada System of Higher Education students, including the Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada.'<br/>
<br/>
However, not everyone is supportive of the calls for his resignation.<br/>
<br/>
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks came to Boylan's defense, saying he was being asked to step down, 'for stating that a man is a man.'<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13167293/Nevada-colleges-trans-athletes-leader-resign.html">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13167293/Nevada-colleges-trans-athletes-leader-resign.html</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Classroom Warfare</b><br/>
<br/>
While COVID-related school violence may have subsided, too many teachers and students are still not safe in the classroom.<br/>
<br/>
About 857,500 violent incidents and 479,500 nonviolent incidents were recorded by public schools in 2021-22, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Nonviolent incidents include theft, vandalism, drug possession, etc.) About 67% of public schools reported having at least one violent incident.<br/>
<br/>
Hence, it’s hardly surprising that almost half of all teachers reported they “desire or plan to quit or transfer their jobs due to concerns about school climate and school safety,” per a 2022 study by the American Psychological Association,<br/>
<br/>
The ongoing question is what to do about this egregious problem. The National Education Association claims that to deal with it, we must hire more counselors and interventionists.<br/>
<br/>
While additional counselors who can reason with youthful offenders may help in some cases, it is not a fix that will always work.<br/>
<br/>
Corporal punishment?<br/>
<br/>
While there may be something to be said for the “spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child mentality” (18 states still permit corporal punishment), this approach is fraught with problems. Schools benefit from a school-wide discipline program, and not all teachers are comfortable whacking kids. I know that when I taught a middle school, it would be unthinkable for me to paddle a 13-year-old, especially a girl. Also, many parents might not want to send their kids to a school with a designated flogger.<br/>
<br/>
Cops<br/>
<br/>
Having a campus cop is helpful. A law enforcement officer surely is a deterrent to some miscreants. It’s important to note that while many teacher union leaders want to defund the cops, many boots-on-the-ground teachers disagree. A 2021 Heritage Foundation survey asked if defunding school resource officers will make schools safer and just 7% of teachers responded affirmatively. Additionally, an Ed Week Research Center poll from 2020 showed that, when asked if armed police officers should be eliminated from our nation’s schools, only 20% of teachers, principals, and district leaders completely or partly agreed.<br/>
<br/>
But the racially obsessed equity crowd maintains that a cop’s presence “increases the number of students facing suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, particularly if they are black.” The same bunch, howeve<br/>
<br/>
The race hustlers in the Windy City are acting on the issue. The Chicago Board of Education has just voted to approve a resolution to remove police officers from its schools by the beginning of next school year.<br/>
<br/>
Restorative justice<br/>
<br/>
Promoted by the teachers’ unions and other leftwing education establishmentarians,this touchy-feely new-age malarkey is dangerous. It emphasizes “making the victim and offender whole” and involves “an open discussion of feelings.” Restorative justice came into being because blacks are far more likely to be suspended than other ethnic groups. The suggestion here, of course, is that white teachers and administrators tend to be racist. But the bean counters never get around to explaining why the racial disparity exists even in schools where black principals and staff predominate.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartland.org/opinion/classroom-warfare/">https://heartland.org/opinion/classroom-warfare/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Forget the school bus — these kids are flying first class</b><br/>
<br/>
A private tutor to the ultra rich and famous — including the Jenners and Dr. Dre — is lifting the lid on what its like to work with their kids and how some parents fork out as much as $32,000 a month in fees.<br/>
<br/>
Celebrity tutor Tiffany Sorya — who once dissected Catcher in the Rye with Kylie Jenner as she had her makeup applied — told The Post homeschooling demand soared during the pandemic and has now entrenched itself as an increasingly appealing path.<br/>
<br/>
“This started in LA,” said the founder of Novel Education Group. “Families of a certain type — celebrities, high profile CEOS who were traveling a lot — they needed something that fits their lifestyle.”<br/>
<br/>
The richest families find private tutors are much more flexible than traditional schooling options, and for the right price elite educators can be at their beck and call around the clock as they jet set around the world.<br/>
<br/>
Others harbor security and privacy concerns for their children at regular campuses — no matter how exclusive or expensive.<br/>
<br/>
“The idea of being locked into one location for ten months out of the year is not going to work for them,” Sorya said.<br/>
<br/>
The private educator was tasked with supervising the homeschooling of Dr. Dre’s daughter, Truly, whose creative pursuits made a traditional education unappealing and largely unfeasible.<br/>
<br/>
“The parents still want standards, they want structure,” she said. “But they also want to have the ability to nurture their kids’ interests outside the classroom. They aren’t so interested in the prom and football games. They’re busy making albums.”<br/>
<br/>
Demand for high-end homeschooling has become so intense that some of Sorya’s clients are withdrawing their children from some of New York and Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools to pivot to remote education.<br/>
<br/>
The costs of top-tier homeschooling, Sorya said, have rocketed accordingly.<br/>
<br/>
While her packages vary, a full-time tutor costs roughly $16,000 a month. Those instructors are available at all times and will jump on a plane to meet with their students as needed.<br/>
<br/>
Some clients, Sorya said, hire two such tutors to work with their children at a cost of $32,000 a month.<br/>
<br/>
Typically, clients have their assigned in-home teacher sign airtight non-disclosure agreements to guard against leaks and loose lips.<br/>
<br/>
Other especially demanding clients have asked Sorya to find them tutors without any personal attachments so they can focus solely on their children.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/us-news/ultra-rich-spend-up-to-32k-a-month-on-kids-private-tutors/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/us-news/ultra-rich-spend-up-to-32k-a-month-on-kids-private-tutors/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-82037142719372785432024-03-10T23:36:00.002+13:002024-03-10T23:36:54.705+13:00<br><b> Is the ‘Test-Optional’ Racist Scheme Under Threat?</b><br/>
<br/>
Elite colleges are engaged in a balancing act: They are trying to maintain their reputation for having the best students while also giving an admissions advantage to their preferred races. In recent years, the desire for racial diversity has trumped academic excellence. This reality was clearly demonstrated in the Supreme Court cases Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions and University of North Carolina v. Students for Fair Admissions. The cases numerically showed the extent to which these universities choose less-qualified black and Hispanic students over better-qualified Asian and white students. At Harvard University, for instance, black applicants in the fourth-lowest decile of academic achievement had a greater chance of admission than Asian students in the top decile of academic achievement.<br/>
<br/>
In reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences in college admissions are illegal under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, many colleges have moved to permanently eliminate standardized testing requirements so as to continue preferring less-qualified black and Hispanic students over better-qualified Asian and white students without getting caught.<br/>
<br/>
Some colleges that have eliminated standardized testing requirements have been quite clear that they intend to surreptitiously continue using race. For example, the president of the University of Louisville, which has gone test-optional, stated in the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions decisions that the university would instead use “experience with race” in admissions decisions. “[W]e’re going to drive a truck through experience with race in terms of our admissions,” said President Kim Schatzel. In addition, the University of California voted in 2020 to totally remove standardized testing from admissions decisions in the name of equity.<br/>
<br/>
While going test-optional gives colleges license to continue racially discriminating without getting caught, it has a negative side effect: It decreases the quality of a college’s student body. This is because standardized testing is the best predictor of academic success and a strong predictor of post-college success. Eliminating this accurate predictor makes it difficult for colleges to choose the best students.<br/>
<br/>
While numerous colleges have opted to forego standardized testing requirements in order to evade allegations of racial discrimination, there is now a small movement among elite universities to reintroduce standardized testing requirements. These schools are recognizing the fact that standardized testing is critical to achieving their goal of building an elite student body. This goal is important to them because the value of the degrees they grant lies in the perception that their students are talented and successful (and less in their ability to actually teach their students).<br/>
<br/>
This week, Brown University announced that it will require students to submit standardized testing scores in the upcoming admissions cycle. In doing so, Brown joins Yale, Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in ditching pandemic-era test-optional policies. In making the announcement, Brown cited the benefit of standardized testing for building an excellent student body: “Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment.” When Yale made its announcement that it would restore its testing requirement, it stated that standardized testing is actually the best indicator of academic success at Yale.<br/>
<br/>
Brown also sought to claim that standardized testing is beneficial to its goal of achieving racial diversity. “The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds are choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so would actually increase their chances of being admitted,” the university said. Similarly, Dartmouth has claimed that standardized testing is helpful in identifying low-income students who will be successful in college.<br/>
<br/>
Brown’s decision to restore its testing requirement even though doing so will make it accountable for whether it fairly judges students of all races shows that the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion has not totally overtaken the university. It still maintains a drive to produce students who are academically talented, regardless of race. However, while merit has triumphed over racial bias in regard to Brown’s standardized testing policy, this does not mean that the university will not practice racial discrimination in admissions. The school is simply not so wildly ideological as to eliminate the best indicator of merit.<br/>
<br/>
The decisions of these top schools to restore testing requirements could put pressure on other schools to restore their requirements. This is because standardized testing’s ability to most accurately predict student success will mean that schools that require it will be more effective at admitting the best students. In addition, these schools’ standardized testing policies could give them a reputation for admitting the best students, given that it is well-known that standardized testing is highly effective at identifying people who will be successful. Thus, in elite colleges’ race to enroll the best students and better their reputations in comparison to one another, the ones with standardized testing requirements will have an advantage over the ones that do not.<br/>
<br/>
This could mean that more elite schools will shift back toward requiring standardized testing. However, the incentive to compete will also be tempered by college administrations’ preferences for certain races over others, as well as their ideological commitment to equity over merit.<br/>
<br/>
Brown’s decision to restore its standardized testing requirement gives hope that merit will still be valued in higher education. However, it remains uncertain whether this is a minor gesture by a school seeking to increase its competitiveness or a genuine progression toward the prioritization of merit over equity.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://spectator.org/is-the-test-optional-racist-scheme-under-threat-admissions/">https://spectator.org/is-the-test-optional-racist-scheme-under-threat-admissions/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn't Always Socratic</b><br/>
<br/>
The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network.<br/>
<br/>
The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir "Rescuing Socrates," are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted in Christian conservatism. What makes Montás’ upcoming speech so notable, then, is the signal it sends about the movement’s effort to diversify its brand and project a welcoming attitude as it seeks to expand beyond conservative strongholds and suburbs where it began.<br/>
<br/>
But not everyone is enamored of the effort, neither educational conservatives nor local school officials, unions, and progressive advocates. The latter liken classical charters to a Trojan Horse, sneaking quasi-Christian right-wing dogma into public education under the cover of liberal arts.<br/>
<br/>
That makes classical education perhaps the biggest culture-war flashpoint in the current disruption of traditional public education prompted by the historic exodus of students during the pandemic – even though the movement's numbers are small.<br/>
<br/>
In all, there are about 250 classical charters today, according to one study, making them a small niche within the broader charter sector of 8,000 schools and campuses focused on everything from STEM subjects to art to special needs. They have produced both notable successes and scandalous failures in bringing innovation to public education.<br/>
<br/>
Classical education, whose name gained traction in the 1980s to evoke the movement's focus on liberal arts and the Western canon, is struggling to overcome local political opposition and open schools in lower-income communities where most students reside. By making common cause with a range of prominent black and Latino thinkers and educators like Montás, classical charter leaders hope to show that their style of moral education is valuable to students from all backgrounds and beliefs.<br/>
<br/>
“Our experience has been that the bar for opening a classical charter school that serves disadvantaged students is much higher, and that the process gets extremely political early on,” said Kathleen O’Toole, who heads the K-12 program at Hillsdale College, a Christian school at the center of the wrangling. “The opposition paints us as if we're trying to do political things with children, which we are not.”<br/>
<br/>
Some of the movement’s top leaders are outspoken Republicans and have Ph.D.s from the conservative Claremont Graduate University. And some classical charters convey a patriotic zeal in their marketing as a counterpoint to the social justice zeal found in some traditional public schools.<br/>
<br/>
But classical leaders reject the accusation that they are running a partisan enterprise, saying they aim for something higher, in line with Aristotle’s teaching – to nurture in students a desire to find their own answers to the big question of what constitutes the good life.<br/>
<br/>
“We base ourselves in the West, in the culture of freedom that produced the Magna Carta, the founding documents of this country, and the civil rights movement,” said Dan Scoggin, co-founder of Great Hearts and a Claremont alum. “We read Marx, Rousseau – writers who push back on the Christian tradition, but it’s also a big part of Western culture. To those who try to pigeonhole classical charters as pseudo-Christian, no, we are not.”<br/>
<br/>
Robert Jackson, who arranged for Montás to address the symposium in Phoenix, is at the center of the effort to mainstream classical education. After teaching at a Christian college and working at Great Hearts, Jackson started Classical Commons, a new platform to unite educators from different political and religious camps and support the recruitment and training of classical teachers – a key to expansion.<br/>
<br/>
“There is an impulse among the classical leaders that this time-tested education should also be available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds who haven’t had the opportunity,” said Albert Cheng, who runs a classical education research lab at the University of Arkansas. “There’s a social justice vibe to it. Everyone isn’t marching lockstep to a conservative ideology.”<br/>
<br/>
To enlarge the tent of classical education, scholars like Cornel West, the progressive independent presidential aspirant, are giving talks at events and making podcasts about the liberating power of classical education for all students. Classical Academic Press, run by white Christian writer Christopher Perrin, published “The Black Intellectual Tradition,” highlighting how the classics inspired leaders from Anna Julia Cooper to Martin Luther King in the quest for justice.<br/>
<br/>
Change is also coming to the classrooms. Professor Anika Prather, a co-author of “The Black Intellectual Tradition” and founder of the Living Water Christian school, has made many presentations to teachers at classical charters. Leaders are also debating whether to add more diverse authors to their Great Books reading lists after the Classical Learning Test, an assessment group, did so. (Related article here.)<br/>
<br/>
But reappraising the Western canon doesn’t sit well with hardline conservatives in the movement like David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He has issued several warnings, in his writings and to RealClear, about the dangerous waters classical charters are entering.<br/>
<br/>
Goodwin says it was bad enough that charters removed the moorings of Christian truth from education. Now they are succumbing to the intense pressures for diversity, which he calls antithetical to the mission of classical education – the Platonic pursuit of “truth, goodness and beauty in a meritorious way.”<br/>
<br/>
Josh Herring, a professor who helped run the Thales network of private classical academies, adds that the movement’s attempt to find a middle ground that no longer exists in America will fail. Instead, he says, it should embrace its fundamental conservatism and accept the fact that all education is inescapably political. “For classical education to continue to thrive, it has to know its own essence and defend that essence,” he says.<br/>
<br/>
Squeezed from both the left and right, classical charters are nonetheless charging ahead in their effort to grow. Their biggest assets are families that form long waiting lists to enroll at the many high-performing classical charters. Some parents are attracted by their conservative reputation, but mostly it’s their rigorous curriculum that focuses on core academic subjects in the tradition of liberal arts, according to a study by Arkansas’ Cheng.<br/>
<br/>
Classical education, a term the movement adopted to suggest its ancient lineage, reemerged first with private Christian schools in the 1980s. They provided the inspiration and part of the curriculum for the first classical charter, Tempe Prep, in Arizona in 1996.<br/>
<br/>
Scoggin, a Christian like most of the charter movement leaders, worked as head of school at Tempe before setting up Great Hearts. He capitalized on Arizona’s school choice law, which made it possible to bring the classical model into public education and reach more families that couldn’t afford private tuition. Starting in 2003, Great Hearts now has 44 academies in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana and expects to get to 70 in five years.<br/>
<br/>
Classical charters are not as antiquarian as the name implies. College prep courses and state test scores still matter, but they also focus to varying degrees on canonical literature, ancient history, philosophy, religious texts, and Latin and Greek. A few schools, like St. Croix Prep outside of Minneapolis, have even resurrected a medieval form of teaching called the trivium that breaks up every subject in three stages over 12 years – facts first, then argument, and finally persuasion.<br/>
<br/>
Put simply, the charters want students to grapple with what it means to be human before they create their LinkedIn page.<br/>
<br/>
Many add a modern touch. Washington Latin, one of a handful of urban classical schools, mixes Latin and student-led Socratic seminars in every subject with a modern twist to the reading list. Students read ancient and contemporary books on similar themes, such as Plato’s “Symposium” and the black scholar bell hooks’ seminal 2000 feminist work, “All About Love,” to create a dialog between the two worlds, says Diana Smith, the charter’s chief of classical education.<br/>
<br/>
“We have a long waiting list to enroll because of our willingness to talk about the true, the good and the beautiful that goes beyond what came from Western Greece and Rome,” Smith said.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/03/07/when_classical_schooling_meets_public_education_the_dialog_isnt_always_socratic_1015923.html?mc_cid=3664fe8e02&mc_eid=012a6b3e32">https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/03/07/when_classical_schooling_meets_public_education_the_dialog_isnt_always_socratic_1015923.html?mc_cid=3664fe8e02&mc_eid=012a6b3e32</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Universality and the university</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> More selectivity needed for admissions, not less</i><br/>
<br/>
Recently, the Australian University Accord met to discuss the manifest failings of our tertiary education system. The result has been a predictable raft of recommendations, couched in the langue de bois of our modern class: equity, innovation, agility, et al. In other words, all the things that got us into this mess to start with. These are words that, once they start tumbling from someone’s mouth, indemnify them against the risk of being identified as a genuine mind.<br/>
<br/>
Established by the Labor Party, we should expect the Australian University Accord’s report would reflect Labor values. Those Labor values now apparently include the annihilation of the working man, with the recommendation that 80 per cent of Australians should pass through the hallowed doors of the university system. They, like everything else in a society driven by data-as-God, mistake quantity for quality.<br/>
<br/>
In one respect, they are addressing a genuine problem. As a nation we are perhaps stupider than ever; PISA results continue to decline, and our primary and secondary education systems are mutual reflections of our tertiary system. Literary references, a command of basic mathematics, a sense of history, and the ability to write coherently: these all seem blue remembered hills.<br/>
<br/>
However, furthering universal education is unlikely to fix the problems the proliferation of universal education created. For reasons entirely predictable, education proved vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns. An elite education cannot be made available to everybody; it is far easier to ensure that nobody receives an elite education. This is the cost of equity-above-all-else as a governing principle. People are not equal, and cannot be made equal. People cannot even be made to regard one another as equal. Equality, along with our obsession with data, is another false god of our age.<br/>
<br/>
The problem with the university system is not one of scarcity, but one of inflation. We bend every possible requirement to allow people the opportunity to enter university, and do everything possible to prevent them failing once they’re there. We’re one step from conscripting the population into tertiary education, and the credentials required for entry-level jobs have changed to reflect this. This is to say nothing of adolescence extended, family delayed, and earning prospects limited for several years of study. A bachelor’s degree today is the equivalent of the school leaver certificate of yesterday; people collect master’s degrees today like they collected Pokémon as children. Credentialism for most of the population represents a ticket to the middle class and social respectability, as much as potential earning power in the future. These are powerful incentives, which explain why 60 per cent of the population has been pressed into the ivory tower at some point in their lives. Yet careerism is not the only purpose the university is supposed to serve.<br/>
<br/>
Among those giving, everything produced by the university sector – certainly in the non-empirical world – has been through a peer-reviewed strainer to prevent anything original or novel emerging. They reference one another like incestuous monks and write in a bizarre argot to demonstrate their membership. Some faculties, and some universities, are worse than others. They bring to mind the scholasticism of earlier centuries, but without the rigour. And, as was the case in the Reformation, genuinely new ideas will emerge from outside the walls of what we consider epistemologically established. Many academics are reincarnations of apocryphal medieval theologians arguing about the quantity of angels that can fit on a pinhead. It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for your average academic to produce something interesting.<br/>
<br/>
On the receiving end, the university system is no better. Every second person has a Mickey-Mouse degree from a Mickey-Mouse university, and few of them could hold an intelligent conversation with a secondary school graduate from half a century ago. Whatever the university is producing, it is not minds. But I’ve long held the suspicion that this is exactly the point. The last thing the postmodern West is interested in is a population with minds, and for most people what passes for wisdom today is browsing Wikipedia and calling out logical fallacies on Reddit. The snarky intellect of the educated Millennial or Zoomer, like a shallow and unbearably noisy stream, lacks blue water. We produce sophistry among those who should be passing on the knowledge of our civilisation, and encourage cynicism among those who receive it.<br/>
<br/>
Aside from the turgid careerism of academics and the acquisitiveness of students – perhaps sellers and buyers of indulgences is a better term – there are two obvious reasons why The Powers That Be encourage this. The first is for financial reasons. Education is big business in Australia. Only mining has a larger output share. The university system doubles as a means of laundering citizenship and immigration, and siphoning money from overseas elites adds to the cash paid over the span of their working lives by native-born graduates. The government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax. No government that values its bottom line is going to advocate for less tertiary education.<br/>
<br/>
The second reason is an ideological one. The universities are captured institutions: an American report estimated that the ratio of conservative to liberal professors shifted 350 per cent in the latter direction since 1984. Even if you enter to study STEM or something vocational, they’ll still get you with the mandatory modules on diversity and Indigenous perspectives and all the rest of the postmodern religiosity we now accept as normal. The result is a braindead middle class composed of eunuchs and temple priestesses. If this sounds hyperbolic, remember how the university sector responded to the Western Civilisation courses offered by the Ramsay Centre. You’d think they’d like more money and more students, but to give them credit, occasionally their principles get in the way. Both ANU and the University of Sydney weren’t interested. They value the message above the money. Today’s liberal-Marxist elite, who live in constant terror afraid of their own shadows, will broker no competition in the world of ideas. They know it was thanks to that they got their stranglehold to begin with. They also suspect, in their heart of hearts, that their cherished ideas are terrible, anti-natural, and essentially anti-human.<br/>
<br/>
The postmodern university is a house of cards. It would be too much to expect the Australian Universities Accord to admit as much.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/universality-and-the-university/">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/universality-and-the-university/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-61786821217135746952024-03-07T23:49:00.002+13:002024-03-07T23:49:54.081+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Is there hope for Harvard? It matters more than you think</b><br/>
<br/>
By Carol M. Swain [who is black]<br/>
<br/>
Harvard University squandered its brand as a world-class institution dedicated to hiring the world’s best and brightest.<br/>
<br/>
It’s not a problem we can ignore: Ivy League graduates make or break policy in America.<br/>
<br/>
Just look at the ranks of White House staffers.<br/>
<br/>
The state of our nation’s oldest institution is tied to our nation’s well-being, so we must ask: Is there hope for Harvard?<br/>
<br/>
Many of us who have watched Harvard’s handling of the antisemitism on its campus and the steady string of plagiarism cases among its faculty and administrators blame the social-engineer class that’s elevated diversity, equity and inclusion above academic excellence defined by the pursuit of truth.<br/>
<br/>
The brief and controversial tenure of the university’s recently resigned president, Claudine Gay, serves as proof.<br/>
<br/>
Gay confirmed at Harvard Divinity School’s September convocation what we’d all known or suspected for quite some time: Harvard University had “expanded well beyond” the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of social justice.<br/>
<br/>
The irony is not lost on me, one of the victims of her career-long use of plagiarism to secure the coveted title of “first black president” of the university last summer.<br/>
<br/>
But by December, Gay’s plagiarism was found out.<br/>
<br/>
It was the unspoken rules of the very world the social-engineer class crafted for her that opened her up to the scrutiny prompting her downfall.<br/>
<br/>
It all unraveled quickly following her disastrous congressional testimony.<br/>
<br/>
Rep. Elise Stefanik gave Gay multiple opportunities to offer moral clarity about Harvard’s disciplinary procedures for those harassing Jewish students with chants of “From the river to the sea” or screams of “Intifada,” which is a call for their deaths.<br/>
<br/>
Yet Gay’s dedication to the relativism that social justice demands left her unable or unwilling to state any penalties for threatening Jewish students.<br/>
<br/>
While onlookers were reeling from her shocking testimony, bold reporters gave Gay an embarrassing caveat to her coveted title of “first black president”: Some embraced my “serial plagiarist” phrasing.<br/>
<br/>
No fewer than 47 instances of pilfering other people’s work made her worthy of that description.<br/>
<br/>
Despite Gay’s serious moral failings, Harvard retained her as a faculty member with about the same pay — $900,000.<br/>
<br/>
To cut her loose completely would further embarrass the once-world-class institution: It would be even clearer she was hired in the shortest presidential search in Harvard’s illustrious history with relaxed standards that did not include an examination of her scholarship.<br/>
<br/>
Gay is not Harvard’s only DEI disaster — City Journal’s Chris Rufo identified two other Harvard administrators who plagiarized their dissertations or other scholarly publications: Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Ann Charleston and Office for Gender Equity Title IX Coordinator Shirley Greene.<br/>
<br/>
Unfortunately, these women also happen to be black women.<br/>
<br/>
But Harvard has had plagiarists of other races, and some remain in their positions.<br/>
<br/>
Does the school have any clear standards for enforcing its own prohibitions against plagiarism?<br/>
<br/>
When Gay stepped down, the university issued a puzzling statement that mocked academic integrity and contradicted its motto: “First and foremost, we thank President Gay for her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.”<br/>
<br/>
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” Latin for “Truth.” Certainly, there was no truth in Harvard’s statement and its subsequent decision to describe Gay’s actions as merely “duplicative language.”<br/>
<br/>
That’s entered the lexicon as an excusable offense less egregious than old-fashioned plagiarism.<br/>
<br/>
To add insult to injury, both Harvard and Gay blamed racism and right-wing extremists for her transgressions.<br/>
<br/>
Gay made seven corrections to three of her published works, per the latest reporting.<br/>
<br/>
That still leaves 40 instances of duplicative language that haven’t been touched, including her pilfering of my ideas in her dissertation and early work on black representation in Congress.<br/>
<br/>
Harvard’s brand suffers because Gay and other plagiarists remain on the faculty instructing students and interacting with the campus community.<br/>
<br/>
What will it be like to take Gay’s African American Studies courses?<br/>
<br/>
Can she teach her students anything about academic integrity and standards that will help prepare them for the positions of power Harvard graduates have historically enjoyed?<br/>
<br/>
No, I am afraid the students will be fed the standard fare of black victimization and systemic racism.<br/>
<br/>
High-achieving black and Hispanic students will suffer the most, at first, from the lowered academic standards and social engineering at the root of Harvard’s decline.<br/>
<br/>
Then all the rest of us will suffer, more than we have already, unless Harvard and other Ivy League institutions correct course.\<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/opinion/is-there-hope-for-harvard-it-matters-more-than-you-think/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/opinion/is-there-hope-for-harvard-it-matters-more-than-you-think/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Manhattan College cuts spark protest against president: ‘He even fired the nuns’</b><br/>
<br/>
Riverdale’s beloved private Catholic liberal arts university is facing drastic cuts to its staff and course offerings amid on-going financial struggles. Last June, Milo Riverso, a former CEO of an engineering and construction management firm, was appointed president. In the months since, he’s laid off 63 faculty members — nearly 25% of the staff. The most recent round of brutal staffing cuts, which occurred in January, included two nuns, Sr. Remigia Kushner, 82, and Sr. Mary Ann Jacobs, 69.<br/>
<br/>
“If you are committed to the Catholic mission, why would you fire two of its most important guardians?” asked Maeve Adams, 46, an English professor who has been teaching at the school for more than a decade.<br/>
<br/>
“Sr. Remigia Kushner, was on every committee — she’s 82. It was totally shocking to her. Marlene Gottlieb, a Spanish professor and former chair of the languages department who was also laid off in January, told The Post. “She was a fixture at the college. She did all the graduate work for the educational program.”<br/>
<br/>
The small college, which has 3,495 students, most of them undergrad, counts former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly and novelist James Patterson among its alumni. Patterson has been a vocal and active supporter of its liberal arts program, but some of of the cuts have been particularly devastating to those offerings.<br/>
<br/>
In November, it was announced that the college’s six schools – Engineering, Business, Education, Liberal Arts, Health Professions, and Continuing and Professional Studies – would be merged into three to cut costs. Under the new restructuring, Education, Liberal Arts and Health Profession will now be grouped together as the Science and Liberal Arts school. Even more drastic, in January the school nixed 20 majors and minors including religious studies and French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese languages — without consulting any faculty chairs or curriculum committees.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/us-news/manhattan-college-cuts-and-nun-firings-spark-protest/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/us-news/manhattan-college-cuts-and-nun-firings-spark-protest/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Wesleyan University Faces Federal Investigation Over Anti-Semitism Complaint</b><br/>
<br/>
The Department of Education opened an investigation into Illinois Wesleyan University over its response to anti-Semitism on campus since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, 2023.<br/>
<br/>
The complaint, filed by Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Dr. Zachary Marschall, accuses the university of not responding to anti-Semitism on campus.<br/>
<br/>
An investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was opened on Tuesday into Illinois Wesleyan University.<br/>
<br/>
The complaint cites Campus Reform coverage of a “Free Palestine” display at Illinois Wesleyan University which justified Hamas “rockets” and compared Israel to a “rapist.”<br/>
<br/>
Pictures of the display obtained by Campus Reform contain a sign which states: “BLAMING HAMAS FOR FIRING ROCKTS IS LIKE BLAMING A WOMAN FOR PUNCHING HER RAPIST.”<br/>
<br/>
Illinois Wesleyan University didn’t appear to initially comment on the display.<br/>
<br/>
Weeks after the October 7, 2023 attack, students at the university protested at Illinois Wesleyan University’s campus, making chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea,” according to The Pantagraph.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/illinois-wesleyan-university-federal-investigation-anti-semitism-complaint/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/illinois-wesleyan-university-federal-investigation-anti-semitism-complaint/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-79675921267459598922024-03-06T23:09:00.002+13:002024-03-06T23:09:41.097+13:00<br> <br/>
<b> Why grants to students primarily benefit colleges</b><br/>
<br/>
Econ 101 instructors take note—a new illustration of the important microeconomic concept of incidence just dropped. Economists emphasize that there is a world of difference between legal and economic incidence. Legal incidence specifies who, on paper, has the right to claim a benefit or the obligation to bear a liability. Economic incidence analyzes which party receives a benefit or bears a cost in actuality. Who gets to command more or fewer resources?<br/>
<br/>
Here’s how Art Carden and I discuss the incidence of a subsidy in a forthcoming book manuscript:<br/>
<br/>
Subsidies follow the same logic. Whether the subsidy lands on the buyers or sellers is irrelevant. It sticks to whoever is the less price-sensitive side. Subsidies to corn consumers, for instance, often end up in corn growers’ pockets because they raise corn demand. Food stamps raise demand for approved foods: browsing Amazon.com for foods people can buy with funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), we find Corn Flakes, Corn Chex, Corn Nuts, Corn Pops, corn chips, corn tortillas, cornmeal cornbread mix, corn salsa, canned corn, creamed corn, and popcorn, plus all sorts of other corn derivatives like corn syrup-sweetened soft drinks and candy corn (first ingredient: sugar. Second ingredient: corn syrup). The loud part of the food stamp program is that it helps poor people buy food. The quiet part is that it passes the taxpayers’ money to corn farmers through the pockets of the poor. It’s no accident that the Department of Agriculture administers SNAP while Congress funds it through the Farm Bill.<br/>
<br/>
Economic incidence was also unintentionally illustrated via a recent Time article on the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Grove City College v. Bell. Grove City, my alma mater and employer, had long sought complete independence from government entanglement with higher education. When Title IX was passed, as Time puts it, “complications arose.”<br/>
<br/>
The Time article reads, “On four occasions between 1976 and 1977, Grove City College refused to sign an Assurance of Compliance form needed for students to receive Basic Educational Opportunity Grants (BEOGs) and Guaranteed Student Loans (GSLs). It contended that students received federal aid, not the college.”<br/>
<br/>
The government responded by saying the quiet part out loud: Legal incidence is not synonymous with economic incidence.<br/>
<br/>
The Time article continues, “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW, later ED), argued that the college was the ultimate beneficiary of the federal funds and needed to sign the compliance for students to receive those fund as of 1977.”<br/>
<br/>
In other words, the federal government admitted what economic analysis already knew: Student loans are “ultimately” a handout to colleges and universities. More concretely, the loans increase the incomes of college administrators, faculty, and other employees.<br/>
<br/>
Yes, subsidies pass through the “pockets” (legal incidence) of students, but they end up in the “bank accounts” (economic incidence) of schools. Put another way, student loans increase the demand for higher education, ultimately increasing its sticker price.<br/>
<br/>
In the long run, once the dust has settled, some students pay more, some pay less, resources flow to higher ed (what’s the opportunity cost?), taxpayers’ wealth falls, and society overall is poorer. A benefit to some (e.g., higher ed employees) is not a benefit to all—and in this case it’s not even necessarily a boon to students themselves.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://blog.independent.org/2024/02/29/saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/">https://blog.independent.org/2024/02/29/saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Rhode Island School District Sends 8,800 Pages of Emails to Leftist hate site</b><br/>
<br/>
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.<br/>
<br/>
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit, but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.<br/>
<br/>
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.<br/>
<br/>
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.<br/>
<br/>
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.<br/>
<br/>
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that President Joe Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.”<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.<br/>
<br/>
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegal aliens are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America.<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”<br/>
<br/>
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.<br/>
<br/>
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”<br/>
<br/>
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.<br/>
<br/>
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.<br/>
<br/>
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/05/is-your-kids-school-taking-tips-hate-splc-group-demonizes-response-border-crisis/">https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/05/is-your-kids-school-taking-tips-hate-splc-group-demonizes-response-border-crisis/</a>
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<b> "Accord" proposals won’t do anything to fix Australia's universities</b><br/>
<br/>
JUDITH SLOAN<br/>
<br/>
Through the years I have become something of a dab hand at reading government reports. They are almost always far too long, badly argued and littered with carefully chosen photographs. I figure I can save my readers the trouble of wading through these tomes by simply cutting to the chase.<br/>
<br/>
The final report of the Australian Universities Accord, at around 400 pages, is dubious and unhelpful. It is built on a highly unconvincing premise and works its way from there. On the basis of a bit of arm-waving by a consultant and asking around, the panel concludes the tertiary education attainment rate must rise from its current figure of about 60 per cent to at least 80 per cent of the workforce by 2050. For those aged 25 to 34, the proportion with a university education must rise from 45 per cent to 55 per cent by 2050.<br/>
<br/>
Let’s face it, other guesses are equally plausible. After all, artificial intelligence is about to cut a swath through the workforce, meaning many university-educated workers may be out of jobs as machines replace their roles. And just in case you think it’s simply those who undertake repetitive, low-level jobs who are in the firing line, it seems AI can be highly creative and solve problems, to boot.<br/>
<br/>
There is also the important issue of credentialism. It’s not as though jobs always require a university education – or indeed completion of school. But university education creates its own momentum by giving a head start to other applicants without qualifications. It doesn’t actually add to productivity, it simply alters the pecking order. To the extent that this is the case, the government – aka taxpayer – shouldn’t be investing even more in university education, particularly certain courses.<br/>
<br/>
The accord makes much of the lack of equity in the admission to universities. Those from poor socio-economic backgrounds, those from regional areas and First Nations students are much less likely to go to university, let alone complete a course, relative to their better-off city-based cousins. Reflecting the backstory of federal Education Minister Jason Clare, who was the first in his family to attend university, the panel makes several suggestions to “expand opportunity to all”.<br/>
<br/>
But here’s the rub: many students simply are not suited to university study and it is selling them a pup to suggest university is the best post-school pathway for them. I once taught economic statistics to university students with low entry scores – it was a nightmare. Most of them struggled, many lost self-confidence and a reasonable chunk failed. My advice to many of them was to consider alternative opportunities, such as becoming a tradie.<br/>
<br/>
We have had a recent experiment with allowing universities to enrol any student they deem to have the necessary qualifications – the so-called demand-driven system of enrolments. Of course, “necessary qualifications” is a rubbery concept and allowing self-serving universities to set the entry standards is really akin to handing the keys to the chook house to the fox.<br/>
<br/>
It is clear what happened when the demand-driven system was in full flight: the participation in higher education of marginal groups increased but the rate at which they completed courses was significantly below those with higher marks. According to higher education expert Andrew Norton, “students with ATARs (year 12 ranking) below 60 are twice as likely to drop out of university as students with ATARs over 90”. He estimates that those who fail to complete a university course are, on average, stuck with a debt of $12,000 to pay off.<br/>
<br/>
Working backwards from the accord’s arbitrary targets, students with an ATAR as low as 45 will now be expected to go to university. And this in the context of sliding school performance across the past two decades.<br/>
<br/>
Rather than accept that most of these students simply are not suited to university study, the panel wants additional funding, foundation courses, study hubs and the like. On the face of it, this just looks like a waste of resources given there will be plenty of jobs in the future that don’t require a university education.<br/>
<br/>
Is someone with a bachelor of arts in cultural studies really more qualified than a plumber?<br/>
<br/>
The one recommendation of the report that gave me a good laugh deals with the establishment of a higher education future fund. At this rate we’ll have future funds for everything. The source of funds will be a tax on our best universities – probably the Group of Eight – with the federal government matching their contributions. It’s a bit like how the Australian Football League operates: penalise the top teams to level out the competition. It’s really a form of socialism.<br/>
<br/>
While this might make some sense for a football code, it makes no sense for a university system that should be focused on attaining global excellence. Why would we want to tax the best universities to spray money around with unknown outcomes? If I were heading up one of the Go8 universities I would be objecting in the strongest and loudest terms.<br/>
<br/>
As is the case with most government reports, there are suggestions for more reviews and new bureaucratic agencies. There should be a centre of excellence in higher education and research (refer to previous paragraph); a survey on the prevalence of racism in higher education; and a First Nations-led review of higher education.<br/>
<br/>
The most significant is the proposal to establish an Australian tertiary education commission, “a statutory, national body to plan and oversee the creation of a high quality and cohesive tertiary education system to meet Australia’s future needs”. You will be pleased to know one of the functions will be to negotiate “mission-based compacts for universities”, whatever that means.<br/>
<br/>
The reality is we have had such agencies in the past and they haven’t worked well. Where does the minister sit in all this, let alone the federal Department of Education? The appointed commissioners often get ahead of themselves and the outcomes are often extremely disappointing.<br/>
<br/>
Don’t get me wrong here: I think there is plenty wrong with the Australian university system.<br/>
<br/>
Many of our universities are too big; they are clones of each other but of highly variable quality; and many offer a very poor offering to domestic students. The links with vocational education are patchy at best.<br/>
<br/>
But the 400-page accord report is not the path to fixing these problems: indeed, most of the recommendations would make them worse and cost the taxpayer a small fortune. Obviously, the notion of opportunity cost has not been front of mind to the panel. The government would be ill-advised to spend even more money on a bloated, poorly performing sector based on made-up targets.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/accord-proposals-wont-do-anything-to-fix-our-universities/news-story/721a79f7d7a0214f66bec711172d1c68">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/accord-proposals-wont-do-anything-to-fix-our-universities/news-story/721a79f7d7a0214f66bec711172d1c68</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-42928852733380043232024-03-05T20:20:00.002+13:002024-03-05T20:20:38.630+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Antisemitic teens terrorizing Jewish teacher with Hitler jabs, death threats as NYC school refuses to discipline them</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> Mainly Muslim students at work, it seems. Islam is a religion of hate</i><br/>
<br/>
A Brooklyn high school has become a haven for Hitler-loving hooligans who terrorize Jewish teachers and classmates, The Post has learned.<br/>
<br/>
On Oct. 26, just three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, 40 to 50 teens marched through Origins HS in Sheepshead Bay waving a Palestinian flag and chanting “Death to Israel!” and “Kill the Jews!” staffers said.<br/>
<br/>
The hateful procession was shocking even for Origins, a school rife with bias and bullying, insiders told The Post.<br/>
<br/>
“I live in fear of going to work every day,” said global history teacher Danielle Kaminsky.<br/>
<br/>
According to interviews with multiple staffers, and a Jewish student’s safety transfer request, recent hate incidents include:<br/>
<br/>
A student painted a mustache on his face to look like Hitler, and banged on classroom doors. When someone opened, he clicked his heels and raised his arm in the Nazi gesture, security footage shows.<br/>
<br/>
Three swastikas in one week were drawn on teachers’ walls and other objects, a manager found.<br/>
<br/>
A 10th-grader told Kaminsky, 33, who is Jewish, “I wish you were killed.”<br/>
<br/>
Another student called her “a dirty Jew” and said he wished Hitler could have “hit more Jews,” including her.<br/>
<br/>
Students pasted drawings of the Palestinian flag and notes saying “Free Palestine” on Kaminsky’s classroom door. One scribbled note that said simply, “Die.”<br/>
<br/>
The teen tormentors have so far faced no serious discipline under interim acting principal Dara Kammerman, who has done little beyond contacting parents in an effort to practice “restorative justice,” staffers said.<br/>
<br/>
“She is perpetuating an antisemitic environment and a school of hate,” said Michael Beaudry, campus manager of the Sheepshead Bay building that houses Origins and three other schools. “The students continue these behaviors because they know there won’t be any consequences.”<br/>
<br/>
In response, the city Department of Education said it will launch a probe: “There is currently no evidence that these claims are true, but we are investigating the claims.”<br/>
<br/>
Teachers allege that interim principal Dara Kammerman perpetuates antisemitism by not disciplining students.<br/>
In a disturbing instance in late January, a group of boys came into Kaminsky’s classroom at the end of the day, and cornered her, laughing, she said.<br/>
<br/>
“Miss Kaminsky, do you love Hitler?” one asked.<br/>
<br/>
“I was so taken aback,” she said. “I did not respond, and they all gave the heil Hitler sign.”<br/>
<br/>
Frightened, Kaminsky quickly left her classroom.<br/>
<br/>
One boy waved to his friends to chase her inside the building, a scene captured on security footage, Beaudry said.<br/>
<br/>
Kaminsky immediately reported the harassment to the acting principal — who refused to suspend the boys because she found they did nothing wrong, records show.<br/>
<br/>
“We can’t do anything because the students claimed they were trying to have an ‘academic conversation,’” staffers quoted her as explaining.<br/>
<br/>
Antisemitism at Origins HS has festered for several years, Kaminsky and Beaudry said.<br/>
<br/>
At Kaminsky’s request last March, Kammerman arranged for a group of students to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which had a new program to educate students about antisemitism and the Holocaust.<br/>
<br/>
The museum, in Battery Park City, first sent two female interns to Origins to prepare the teens for what they would see.<br/>
<br/>
Several boys nearly brought the young women to tears with rude and appalling comments, according to emails with the museum and staff accounts.<br/>
<br/>
One student wrote “die” on Kaminsky’s classroom door.<br/>
One teen said he would have sex with a dead Jewish woman.<br/>
<br/>
Another said he would “take money from the dead Jewish people’s corpses.”<br/>
<br/>
Others made derisive remarks like “Who cares about the Jews?”<br/>
<br/>
The museum canceled the visit.<br/>
<br/>
When another group of Origins kids went later that year, some stuffed trash in the donation box.<br/>
<br/>
The museum omitted a meeting with a Holocaust survivor because some kids were so disrespectful.<br/>
<br/>
About 40% of Origins students are Muslim. DOE stats list 22% as Asian, 22% Black, 17% Hispanic and 32% white.<br/>
<br/>
The school has many students in families from Middle Eastern nations such as Yemen, Egypt, and Palestine who identify as white, along with those from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Central Asia.<br/>
<br/>
Several Jewish students bullied because of their religion have fled Origins since last year. In that time, the school’s enrollment of 508 has plummeted to 445.<br/>
<br/>
Currently, no more than a dozen Jewish kids attend Origins, staffers say.<br/>
<br/>
In one case, a Jewish sophomore found three swastikas scribbled on his laptop charger when he returned from the restroom, he wrote in a safety transfer request obtained by The Post.<br/>
<br/>
“I feel like in history class I’m always targeted and it’s hard for me to take,” the student wrote,<br/>
<br/>
He also said he heard that a classmate called Hitler “the G.O.A.T.”<br/>
<br/>
Kaminsky, who joined Origins in 2017 after working four years in Long Island, has experienced antisemitism only at the DOE school, she said.<br/>
<br/>
Kaminsky is pro-Israel, but aims for neutrality in lessons and at cultural events, she said: “As history teachers, we know how to discuss controversial and sensitive topics while looking at all points of view, and encouraging kids to become critical thinkers.”<br/>
<br/>
It’s widely known among students that Kaminsky is Jewish, though she doesn’t make a point of it, she said.<br/>
<br/>
Her students routinely draw swastikas next to their names on classwork, engrave the Nazi symbol on their desks, and scribble them on bulletin boards, she said.<br/>
<br/>
An Israeli flag – one of nearly 200 from countries around the world that Kaminsky hangs in her classroom – was ripped down in the spring of 2021. A group of girls told her it was taken across the street and burned.<br/>
<br/>
“I’ve been yelled at, followed, taunted,” Kaminsky said. “I report everything to the principal. I’ve been to a school safety committee. I’ve told my union, the UFT. I’ve told my superintendent,” Brooklyn South high schools chief Michael Prayor.<br/>
<br/>
They’ve offered little help. “Nothing has made me feel safe going to school,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/jewish-teachers-suing-nyc-school-that-wont-discipline-antisemitic-teens-terrorizing-them-on-daily-basis-i-live-in-fear/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/jewish-teachers-suing-nyc-school-that-wont-discipline-antisemitic-teens-terrorizing-them-on-daily-basis-i-live-in-fear/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Brooklyn Catholic school teacher accused of locking terrified 3-year-old in closet and warning ‘Grinch’ was coming for him</b><br/>
<br/>
A Brooklyn Catholic school teacher allegedly put a 3-year-old student in a cardboard box inside a locked closet, and threatened the terrified child that the “Grinch” was coming for him, The Post has learned.<br/>
<br/>
Alexis Breeden, the lead 3-K teacher at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Academy in Windsor Terrace, was arrested on Feb. 28 and charged with unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child, four weeks after allegedly imposing the twisted timeout, according to a criminal complaint.<br/>
<br/>
“Simply put, there are no imaginable circumstances where this can be called anything but child abuse,” said John Elefterakis of Elefterakis, Elefterakis & Panek, which is working with the family of the child, who have requested anonymity.<br/>
<br/>
“This incident is extremely troubling, and we intend to fully investigate and force accountability,” Elefterakis said.<br/>
<br/>
On Feb. 2, the school nurse witnessed Breeden holding the handle of the storage closet door shut as a child cried inside, according to a complaint filed with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.<br/>
<br/>
The nurse told Breeden to open the door and when Breeden unlocked it, the nurse observed “a 3-year-old child crying inside the closet in a large cardboard box,” the complaint stated.<br/>
<br/>
The nurse reported the disturbing discovery and the K-3 program was immediately shut down as the city Health Department and NYPD began probes of child-abuse allegations.<br/>
<br/>
The tax-payer-funded, city-run Universal 3-K program, which is located on Prospect Park West behind Holy Name of Jesus Church, reopened Tuesday.<br/>
<br/>
Breeden, of Castleton Corners, Staten Island, was fired soon after the incident. She was charged with unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the district attorney’s office. She pled not guilty and was released on her own recognizance, according to court records.<br/>
<br/>
The Brooklyn diocese says it “took immediate action upon learning of a safe environment code of conduct violation,” according to the Catholic newspaper The Tablet.<br/>
<br/>
“The child did not sustain any injuries and out of respect for the student, we will not provide any additional details about this incident,” a diocesan statement said.<br/>
<br/>
The $6,600-a-year-tuition Catholic school serves about 280 students.<br/>
<br/>
The shocking incident was allegedly not the only case of alleged bullying toward children at the school, which touts its nurturing parochial environment, according to Elefterakis.<br/>
<br/>
“Unfortunately, our initial inquiry has revealed that this is not the first instance at this school where helpless children were subject to abusive behavior,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
Parents bashed the school in online reviews for a pervasive “culture of bullying” among students and staff, teachers that make kids cry and a harsh “disciplinarian” principal, Stephanie Ann Germann.<br/>
<br/>
Parents tell The Post that there have been concerns about Breeden since she started in 2020.<br/>
<br/>
“It’s just outrageous and unacceptable that this could have happened in the first place,” said one parent, who pulled her son from the school last year over safety concerns. “The principal has been warned about this teacher’s behavior for years now.”<br/>
<br/>
“We’ve had concerns since the beginning of the year,” another parent told The Post. “All the kids in her class started acting differently. They weren’t their usual 3-year-old selves anymore.”<br/>
<br/>
Her 3-year-old is now on a waiting list for another school.<br/>
<br/>
Another class parent said the scenario since February has been “horrific” and will have “lasting psychological consequences.” “It goes beyond one bad apple,” she wrote in a parent Facebook group.<br/>
<br/>
“The school has completely ignored the parents in the affected class,” she added.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/brooklyn-3-k-teacher-accused-of-locking-kid-in-closet-for-timeout/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/brooklyn-3-k-teacher-accused-of-locking-kid-in-closet-for-timeout/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Incorrectness of ham sandwiches in Australian schools</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> How ridiculous can you get?</i><br/>
<br/>
With one in four Australian children classified as overweight or obese and an Australian state limiting the amount of ham sold in schools, what's on offer at the tuckshop is again in the spotlight.<br/>
<br/>
What is sold in state school tuckshops or canteens is governed, or at least guided, by policies set out by state and territory government departments.<br/>
<br/>
Queensland's is called Smart Choices and is run by the state's education department.<br/>
<br/>
In New South Wales it's the Healthy School Canteen Strategy run by NSW Health and South Australia employs the Right Bite Food and Drink Supply Standards developed by its department for education.<br/>
<br/>
What's central to them all is a "traffic light" system that classifies foods and drinks into green, amber and red categories.<br/>
<br/>
According to most policies, red items like pies, pizzas and pastries should only be supplied twice per school term.<br/>
<br/>
Amber items like burgers, muffins and lasagne shouldn't dominate menus, and green items like fresh fruit, vegetables and reduced fat dairy products should make up most items available.<br/>
<br/>
Debate about healthy eating at school often flares up in term 1, but this year it's been helped along by Western Australia's review of its traffic light system which has resulted in ham being shifted into a new red category.<br/>
<br/>
The Queensland Association of School Tuckshops (QAST) said it's time the Sunshine State's policy, which was written in 2007 and updated in 2016 and 2020, was also reviewed.<br/>
<br/>
Ms Wooden said a QAST audit in 2022 examined the menus of more than 250 school tuckshops and found none were fully compliant with Queensland's traffic light system.<br/>
<br/>
"At the moment, we know that the policy is not being implemented the way it should be [and] there's no incentive or mechanism to make sure that it is."<br/>
<br/>
Principle nutritionist with Health and Wellbeing Queensland Matthew Dick said Western Australia's new rules on ham at school tuckshops were in line with expert advice.<br/>
<br/>
"They want to limit it to two times per week, which is exactly the same message we as nutritionists are giving," Mr Dick said.<br/>
<br/>
"Don't rely on ham all the time. It's okay as an occasional filling in your sandwiches but relying on processed foods like ham, bacon and sausages can start to become a problem."<br/>
<br/>
Mr Dick said ham and processed meats were often high in fats, salt and additives and are considered carcinogens by the World Health Organisation.<br/>
<br/>
"Long-term consumption of processed foods can contribute to cancers in people and that's one of the real concerns with them."<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-04/tuckshop-menus-explained-school-food-nutrition/103521758">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-04/tuckshop-menus-explained-school-food-nutrition/103521758</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-60997558062041605992024-03-04T22:30:00.003+13:002024-03-04T22:31:34.452+13:00
<br/>
<b> Yale University Employs Nearly One Administrator Per Undergrad</b><br/>
<br/>
Yale University employs more than three administrators and support staff for every four undergraduate students – roughly one administrator per undergrad, according to a College Fix analysis.<br/>
<br/>
Over the last decade, Yale added 631 administrators and support staff to its payroll, according to data provided by administrators to the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.<br/>
<br/>
As the university embraced new DEI efforts, the number of administrators and support staff increased by 13 percent, from 4,942 to 5,573, between 2013-14 and 2021-22, the analysis found.<br/>
<br/>
During this period, the number of full-time undergraduates at Yale increased by about 20 percent, from 5,424 to 6,532. Meanwhile, the number of teaching and instructional positions compared to students decreased by about 6 percent, from 403 per 1,000 to 379 educators per 1,000.<br/>
<br/>
Under the analysis, administrators and support staff include management, student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, and legal and other non-academic departments.<br/>
<br/>
The growth of administrators and support staff at Yale can be linked in some part to its efforts to grow DEI on campus. Yale’s DEI diversity initiative included a hiring program that aimed to diversify the campus by creating faculty search committees and hosting implicit bias workshops.<br/>
<br/>
“The percentage of Yale managers and professionals from historically underrepresented minority groups has more than doubled in the past decade,” President Peter Salovey wrote to the campus community in October 2020.<br/>
<br/>
But Salovey pledged to do more, and the campus continued to grow DEI efforts after the university pledged $135 million for a diversity initiative in 2020 and moved forward with implementing DEI offices in schools across the campus in 2022.<br/>
<br/>
For example, in 2021, the Yale Child Study Center created a chief diversity officer position. In 2022, the Yale School of Art created a new position: Director of Sustainable Equity and Inclusion. In 2023, Yale’s Cancer Center hired a DEI director to increase efforts to hire faculty of color.<br/>
<br/>
Yale’s Interim Vice President for Communications Karen Peart did not respond to emails from The Fix over the last two months asking how many new administrators and support staff the university hired to support its DEI initiatives.<br/>
<br/>
The Fix found 94 named DEI officials across 10 of Yale’s 19 schools. Numbers varied widely, with only one DEI official reported at the School of Architecture but 45 DEI officials at the School of Medicine’s Diversity Advisory Council.<br/>
<br/>
Yale employs one DEI official in its public health school, three in its music school, three in its environment school, four in its nursing school, four in its divinity school, and 11 in its drama school. Yale also employed five university-wide DEI officials and 17 at its undergraduate school.<br/>
<br/>
The Diversity Advisory Council has five vice chairs for DEI as well as a director of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; an associate dean for gender equity and deputy chair for DEI; an associate dean for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging; a faculty director of workforce development and diversity; three directors of DEI; a vice chief for DEI; a chief diversity officer; and a departmental director for DEI.<br/>
<br/>
The remaining members of the Diversity Advisory Council have no DEI-specific titles but help the council in its mission of “disseminating DEI-related best practices . . . and enabling department chairs to implement the YSM Diversity Strategic Plan.”<br/>
<br/>
Asked for comment on Yale’s DEI hiring, conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald* said that adding more bureaucrats, diversity or otherwise, will not solve a non-existent racism problem at the school, but it will drive up its “already exorbitant” tuition.<br/>
<br/>
“Faculty bias does not stand in the way of greater black and Hispanic representation among the Yale professoriate,” she said via email. “The dearth of qualified minorities in the hiring pipeline is the problem, whether in STEM or in the hard social sciences.”<br/>
<br/>
“Every college in the country is desperately chasing the same small pool of competitively qualified black and Hispanic Ph.D.’s,” she said. “There is an arms race in salary offers; part of Yale’s latest gargantuan diversity allocation will go to outbidding other schools for the same inadequate supply of satisfactorily diverse faculty faces. This is a grotesque waste of money.”<br/>
<br/>
But, she added, the growth of DEI bureaucrats is not the only problem.<br/>
<br/>
“Conservative critics of higher education risk overstating the importance of official DEI bureaucrats in creating today’s left-wing campus orthodoxies. The faculty, curriculum, and the students themselves are equally to blame,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
“A university’s mission is not to fight alleged racism or other claimed social ills; it is to pass on a cultural inheritance and to create new knowledge through the rigorous testing of hypotheses and evidence,” she said. “Such testing can occur only in an environment of epistemological openness, not in one of ideological conformity. Yes, DEI bureaucrats can enforce such conformity, but so can other actors within a university.”<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/yale-university-employs-nearly-one-administrator-per-undergrad/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/03/yale-university-employs-nearly-one-administrator-per-undergrad/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> The Battle To Eliminate DEI in Higher Education Has Just Begun</b><br/>
<br/>
Proponents of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion ideology may be down, but they’re not out.<br/>
<br/>
Yes, the Supreme Court has forced the practices of race-based college admissions underground. Yes, some state legislatures, most notably Wisconsin, have tied universities’ access to public funding to reductions in DEI staffing. Yes, some wealthy alumni have curbed their giving. And yes, three of DEI’s avatars—the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT—performed so badly at a Congressional hearing about campus antisemitism that two lost their jobs and the third is under a microscope.<br/>
<br/>
But no one should be naïve enough to think that the defeat of DEI in our universities is somehow imminent or inevitable. In fact, in the wake of the developments listed above, many schools have doubled down on DEI.<br/>
<br/>
The University of Michigan, for example, just launched a new DEI program that increases the number of DEI employees from 142 to 500 and increases DEI payroll from $18 million to $30 million. Princeton University, meanwhile, issued a report celebrating the expansion of its DEI programs, grants, lecture series, and administrative positions.<br/>
<br/>
But even if these programs are cut, DEI will still be strong on campuses because DEI bureaucracies are no longer necessary for its propagation.<br/>
<br/>
All that’s necessary is that a critical mass of professors and administrators adhere to it. And they do. More than that, this critical mass uses all sorts of tactics to retain control and silence dissenting voices.<br/>
<br/>
At many schools, the whole process of hiring is soaked through with DEI.<br/>
<br/>
For example, Suffolk University is looking for a professor of Civil Rights at “the intersection of law and race, gender, and sexual orientation” and asks candidates to explain how they’d advance the school’s “commitment to diversity and inclusion through their teaching, scholarship or service.”<br/>
<br/>
Syracuse is looking for a director of “academic & bar success,” whose emphasis is on cultivating “Diversity and Inclusive Excellence” within a school that affirms that “diversity [is] a core value not just in vision but in practice.”<br/>
<br/>
UCLA Law is looking for professors whose prior experience “supports equality and diversity” and includes “significant experience mentoring underrepresented students.” And of course, the school wants an official “statement of contributions to diversity.”<br/>
<br/>
At NYU Law, the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, seeks a scholar whose entire job is to “lead a new Defending DEI Initiative.” One of the qualifications is a commitment to the “core values” of DEI.<br/>
<br/>
And the University of Washington, in a throwback to the old days of explicit race hatred, refused to hire the #1 and #2 ranked candidates for a professor of psychology for no other reason than that they were white and Asian, respectively.<br/>
<br/>
Diversity statements, ideological screening, and plain racial discrimination are the bluntest instruments in schools’ arsenals. They have more delicate ones, too, like “citational justice.”<br/>
<br/>
Citational justice is the practice of citing the works of scholars simply because the scholar checks an identity box and refusing to cite the works of scholars with “problematic” ideas.<br/>
<br/>
Academia uses citations as a proxy for quality of scholarship, which affects promotion and tenure decisions. A non-white scholar might produce something totally unoriginal (Claudine Gay, for example), but if her work is widely cited, she’s likely to get promoted anyway. But a scholar who produces high quality work that undercuts liberal narratives can be denied promotion if liberal scholars refuse to cite her work.<br/>
<br/>
DEI adherents have ways of dealing with the few heterodox faculty members who snuck through the diversity traps and won’t remain dutifully silent.<br/>
<br/>
Consider David Porter and his employer North Carolina State University. Porter, a tenured statistics professor, raised concerns over his department’s use of DEI-based criteria in course evaluations and faculty hiring. He also criticized his discipline’s drift towards a social-justice agenda. Porter’s colleagues did not defend their decisions; perhaps they assumed the value was self-evident and beyond criticism. Instead, they resorted to administrative sanctions.<br/>
<br/>
Administrators recharacterized Porter’s criticisms in human-resources verbiage: his words were bullying, violations of collegial norms, a cause of discomfort to a small but always vocal subset of students. The department head demonstrated her own collegiality by removing Porter from his academic program, restricting him from advising PhD candidates, and setting him firmly on the descent towards professional irrelevance.<br/>
<br/>
Porter sought help from the courts, and four different federal judges heard his case. Only one thought Porter had viable First Amendment claims against the state university.<br/>
<br/>
Although the Supreme Court has rejected racialized university admissions, legal redress remains elusive for DEI’s victims in the faculty ranks. The result is that the few dissenters who slip past DEI’s gatekeepers are forced into silence.<br/>
<br/>
There are plenty more examples of this.<br/>
<br/>
Although some progress has been made against DEI on campuses, it’s only a beginning. All who oversee schools, including legislators, should continue efforts to defund DEI bureaucracies, but as long as faculty and administrators overwhelmingly support DEI, they will enforce its orthodoxies even without vast bureaucratic apparatuses.<br/>
<br/>
The fight against DEI on campus must expand to replace closed-minded commissars with open-minded educators committed to teaching and training successive generations to bravely pursue the truth.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/the-battle-eliminate-dei-higher-education-has-just-begun">https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/the-battle-eliminate-dei-higher-education-has-just-begun</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Sydney University abandons maths prerequisites in diversity push</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> I think this is a step in the right direction. I was always bad at maths at school but became a capable computer programmer using a demanding language called FORTRAN, which literally means "formula translation". A line of FORTRAN code looks very much like a line of algebra. And I did write programs requiring up to 5-dimensional matrices.<br/>
<br/>
So I was good at something maths-related that would normally have required a maths prerequisite. But I would have been blocked by such a prerequisite these days. Prerequisites are simply too rigid to account for varying patterns of abiity in students</i><br/>
<br/>
The University of Sydney is ditching the advanced mathematics prerequisites for scores of degrees in response to the declining number of HSC students taking the subject.<br/>
<br/>
Vice chancellor Mark Scott said maths teacher shortages meant too many students could not study the subject in year 12, providing a barrier for diverse students to study at the university.<br/>
<br/>
“Mathematical skills and knowledge are vital for students to succeed at university and thrive in the workplaces of the future,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
“Yet through no fault of their own, many students don’t have the opportunity to take advanced mathematics at school, a situation exacerbated by ongoing maths teacher shortages that affect some schools more than others.”<br/>
<br/>
The prerequisite change, to begin next year, is a reversal of much of the changes brought into effect in 2019 that introduced two unit maths prerequisites for 62 degrees.<br/>
<br/>
That was supposed to address falling enrolments in maths and lift academic standards at the university.<br/>
<br/>
However, the latest data from the NSW Education Standards Authority shows there were almost 10 per cent fewer students taking advanced maths in 2023 compared to 2018.<br/>
<br/>
Scott, a former NSW Education secretary, said the university would provide “bespoke mathematics support” which would include tailored assistance and advice, preparatory workshops and bridging courses to catch students up.<br/>
<br/>
The change will mean degrees including commerce, science, medicine, psychology, veterinary science and economics will no longer require students to have undertaken advanced maths in year 12.<br/>
<br/>
Degrees in engineering, advanced computing and pharmacy will retain the mathematics prerequisite.<br/>
<br/>
From next year, year 12 students who achieve a Band 3 or higher in advanced mathematics will also be eligible to receive an additional point towards their selection rank under the university’s Academic Excellence Scheme.<br/>
<br/>
University of Canberra University associate professor Philip Roberts, a rural education specialist, said a lack of access to advanced mathematics was a huge issue, particularly in regional and low SES areas.<br/>
<br/>
“Our research shows that schools which have larger numbers of low SES students are not studying advanced maths at the same rate as schools which have higher SES students,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
He said teacher shortages were making the issue worse, but that it was also driven by a perception by students they would score better in general maths.<br/>
<br/>
Roberts said even when universities did not have calculus-based mathematics prerequisites, students who did not take HSC advanced maths were still behind their peers who had once they started their degrees.<br/>
<br/>
“Advanced maths also contributes more to their overall ATAR, so a lack of access limits their opportunities of getting into uni,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
University of Sydney deputy vice chancellor (education) Professor Joanne Wright said it was clear it was harder for some students to access higher-level mathematics simply because of where they are from.<br/>
<br/>
“Schools in regional and remote locations are significantly less likely to offer advanced and extension mathematics,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
“Our new approach responds to these realities of the student experience today and ensures we’re better equipping students for their university studies and careers.”<br/>
<br/>
She said new tools were being developed to identify gaps in students’ knowledge, including a pilot of a diagnostic tool designed to match students with the most appropriate learning support services when they enrol.<br/>
<br/>
“Regardless of their starting point, all our students will have the opportunity to complete their studies with the same level of mathematics skills and knowledge,” Professor Wright said<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-university-abandons-hsc-prerequisites-in-diversity-push-20240301-p5f918.html">https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-university-abandons-hsc-prerequisites-in-diversity-push-20240301-p5f918.html</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-40202176948283915132024-03-03T14:25:00.002+13:002024-03-03T14:25:45.242+13:00<br><br/>
<b> NYC public school officials grilled about plan to comply with controversial class-size law</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> This old, old class size fetish is ridiculous. There are plenty of instances of kids in large classes doing well.<br/>
<br/>
It is teacher quality that matters and good teachers are largely born, not made. There are only so many good teachers around regardlesss of what teacher-training courses they undergo, so class size limitations can cause a lot of barely competent teachers to be hired, thus HARMING, not helping the education of the kids.<br/>
<br/>
Below are links to some of my old posts on the matter that give more detail:<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2006/11/public-school-class-size-doesnt-matter.html">https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2006/11/public-school-class-size-doesnt-matter.html</a>
</p>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2007/06/class-size-where-belief-trumps-reality.html">https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2007/06/class-size-where-belief-trumps-reality.html</a>
</p>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2008/03/great-class-size-myth-i-note-that-gos.html">https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2008/03/great-class-size-myth-i-note-that-gos.html</a>
</p>
</i><br/>
<br/>
City Department of Education officials were grilled Thursday about their plan to comply with a controversial state law that requires Big Apple public schools to reduce class sizes across the board by 2028.<br/>
<br/>
The City Council hearing on the issue came as the legislative body’s education committee introduced legislation that would require the DOE to report data twice a year on the actual size of classes at all schools and special programs.<br/>
<br/>
“Here’s my issue, the people that are making the decisions have never taught in New York City public schools,” Committee on Education Chair Rita Joseph told the panel of DOE officials during the hearing.<br/>
<br/>
“You must apply the law,” added the council member, a veteran educator, challenging the DOE’s argument that it needs more funding to hire more teachers in order to comply with the mandate.<br/>
<br/>
Mayor Eric Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks have called on lawmakers to provide $1.4 billion to $1.9 billion — the projected cost of hiring between 10,000 to 12,000 educators — to help the city comply.<br/>
<br/>
According to DOE’s “Class Size Reduction Plan” update, nearly half of all classes currently fall under the size caps set by the law. But the department’s plan noted that more work will be required<br/>
<br/>
DOE Deputy Chancellor Emma Vadehra said the administration supports the goal to lower class sizes but reiterated that more work needs to be done in the 2025-26 school year and beyond to meet the requirements.<br/>
<br/>
“In brief, we are currently fully in compliance with the class size legislation. In the coming years, however, we do have work and we will face some difficult choices to maintain compliance,” Vadehra told the education committee.<br/>
<br/>
The department’s First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg, NYC School Construction Authority President and CEO Nina Kubota and District 23 Superintendent Khalek Kirkland made up the rest of the panel speaking to the committee.<br/>
<br/>
“Our work is not complete without New York City planning to make these changes and enact those changes,” Jackson said.<br/>
<br/>
Liu said he doesn’t “begrudge” Adams and Banks over the mandate being fiscally difficult to deal with, but maintained a plan for compliance needs to be made transparent.<br/>
<br/>
“The reality is, they’re in control of the public schools, and even though they did not make this problem, this problem they inherited, it is their responsibility to fix it,” he stressed.<br/>
<br/>
Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature — under intense lobbying from the United Federation of Teachers union — approved the law in 2022.<br/>
<br/>
It states that grades K-3 must have a maximum of 20 students, with 23 students in grades 4-8 and 25 students in grades 9-12 by the 2027–28 school year.<br/>
<br/>
Earlier, Joseph held a rally with parents, educators, advocates and elected officials on the steps of City Hall in support of the law.<br/>
<br/>
“The DOE has an incredible opportunity to change the educational lives of students by implementing class laws,” said Michael Sill, the UFT’s assistant secretary, who was at the rally.<br/>
<br/>
“Sadly, the DOE’s engagement thus far has been typified by inflating cost estimates and inventing excuses for not doing what needs to be done,” Sill told The Post.<br/>
<br/>
“While revenues are up, the reserves are overflowing, and the state has invested in New York City’s young people, the city continues to push a false austerity narrative that is designed to frighten the public.”<br/>
<br/>
UFT President Michael Mulgrew claimed the DOE was “trying to sabotage the law.”<br/>
<br/>
“Parents want this. Educators want this. We challenge the DOE to identify the schools that have the space right now to make this change and get started,” he told The Post.<br/>
<br/>
“We ask the City Council to help us hold the DOE accountable.”<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/nyc-public-school-officials-grilled-about-plan-to-comply-with-controversial-class-size-law/">https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/nyc-public-school-officials-grilled-about-plan-to-comply-with-controversial-class-size-law/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> University of Florida eliminates DEI office, will put its $5M toward recruiting faculty</b><br/>
<br/>
The University of Florida on Friday closed its diversity office and fired 13 full-time staffers to comply with a new state law that bans Sunshine State schools from spending on such ideologies.<br/>
<br/>
“The University of Florida has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors,” the memo issued by the university provost, the general counsel, and the vice president for human resources read.<br/>
<br/>
The $5 million allocated for diversity, equity and inclusion will now be redistributed to faculty recruitment, it added.<br/>
<br/>
The announcement comes in light of a 2023 statute prohibiting the university from spending state or federal funds on DEI initiatives, reported the Alligator, the school’s paper.<br/>
<br/>
The statute was approved in its final form by the Florida Board of Governors on Jan. 24, the outlet added.<br/>
<br/>
Employees whose positions were eliminated will receive 12 weeks of pay and will be encouraged to apply for other positions at the state university, according to its statement.<br/>
<br/>
The memo did not touch on the future of the Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement, which received over $400,000 in the 2022-2023 UF operating budget – 85% of which came from the state, the Alligator noted.<br/>
<br/>
The center includes officers for LGBTQ+, black, Asian and Hispanic student groups, according to its website.<br/>
<br/>
Those who do seek new jobs at the university within the next three months will have their interviews fast-tracked.<br/>
<br/>
“The University of Florida is — and will always be — unwavering in our commitment to universal human dignity,” the memo read.<br/>
<br/>
“As we educate students by thoughtfully engaging a wide range of ideas and views, we will continue to foster a community of trust and respect for every member of the Gator Nation.<br/>
<br/>
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who passed the law banning DEI in state schools, cheered the announcement on X. “Florida is where DEI goes to die,” he wrote.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/us-news/university-of-florida-eliminates-dei-office-to-comply-with-new-state-law/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/us-news/university-of-florida-eliminates-dei-office-to-comply-with-new-state-law/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> US Education Dept. opens probe into nonbinary teen Nex Benedict’s Oklahoma school district</b><br/>
<br/>
The US Education Department is launching an investigation into the Oklahoma school district where a 16-year-old nonbinary student was beaten by bullies in a bathroom one day before dying.<br/>
<br/>
The probe was opened Friday following multiple complaints filed by the Human Rights Campaign alleging that Owasso Public Schools had “failed to respond appropriately to sex-based harassment that may have contributed to the tragic death of Nex Benedict.”<br/>
<br/>
Nex, who used he/them pronouns, died Feb. 8, the day after getting into a fight with a group of girls who allegedly smashed the teen’s head into the floor until they blacked out.<br/>
<br/>
In a video taken after the fight, the sophomore told a school resource officer that the girls had been “antagonizing” them and their friends in the days before over the way they dressed — bullying that the school allegedly knew about but did not address.<br/>
<br/>
The probe was opened Friday following multiple complaints filed by the Human Rights Campaign alleging that Owasso Public Schools had "failed to respond appropriately to sex-based harassment that may have contributed to the tragic death of Nex Benedict."<br/>
<br/>
Okla. schools chief says death of nonbinary student Nex Benedict is being exploited by ‘radical leftists’<br/>
<br/>
“Their death is a gut-wrenching tragedy that exposes the chilling reality of anti-transgender hatred spreading across the United States, and that the Department must investigate as part of Owasso High School’s failure to address harassment and discrimination on its campus beginning in the 2023 school year,” HRC President Kelley Robinson wrote in a plea last week.<br/>
<br/>
“Schools have an obligation to provide equal educational opportunities, including safe and affirming learning environments for the well-being of all students. We are deeply concerned about the failure of Owasso High School to address documented instances of bullying, violence, and harassment against Nex.”<br/>
<br/>
The federal DOE notified the HRC Friday that it would be opening an investigation into the complaint, and would be namely probing whether the school district “failed to appropriately respond to alleged harassment of students” within the requirements of Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act<br/>
<br/>
Okla. schools chief says death of nonbinary student Nex Benedict is being exploited by ‘radical leftists’<br/>
Owasso Public Schools confirmed to The Post that they recieved a notice for the investigation Friday.<br/>
<br/>
“The district is committed to cooperating with federal officials and believes the complaint submitted by HRC is not supported by the facts and is without merit,” the district said in a statement.<br/>
<br/>
Although an official autopsy report has not been released, officials said preliminary results indicate Nex did not die from trauma, but have not yet ruled out whether the bathroom brawl may have contributed to their death.<br/>
<br/>
From their hospital bed the day before their death, Nex recounted to an officer the events leading up to the brawl, stating they had squirted water on the group of girls because they were fed up with the bullying.<br/>
<br/>
Friends and family of the teenager have since said the relentless tormenting Nex faced because of their gender identity was an open secret at the school that administrators and faculty allegedly turned a blind eye to.<br/>
<br/>
Nex’s family has opened their own investigation into the teen’s death, stating they are seeking “to hold those responsible to account and to ensure it never happens again.”<br/>
<br/>
The family said some facts about the case have not been released and were “troubling at least” – and called on “school, local, state and national officials to join forces to determine why this happened.”<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/us-education-department-launching-probe-into-owasso-school-district-after-nex-benedict-death/">https://nypost.com/2024/03/02/us-news/us-education-department-launching-probe-into-owasso-school-district-after-nex-benedict-death/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-19589785615314753772024-02-29T23:33:00.001+13:002024-02-29T23:33:59.989+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Building Evacuated as Angry Mob of Berkeley Students Violently Shuts Down Jewish Event: ‘Dirty Jew’</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> Berkeley lives up to its far-Left reputation</i><br/>
<br/>
Pro-Palestine protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, violently shut down an event that featured a former Israel Defence Forces member on Monday night.<br/>
<br/>
The event on Monday night featuring Ran Bar Yoshafat, a former member of the IDF and lawyer, was titled “Israel at War: Combat the Lies,” and would address the country’s “international legal challenges,” according to the Daily Californian. It was sponsored by Bears for Israel, Tikvah, Club Z, and the Israeli Consulate to the Pacific Northwest.<br/>
<br/>
Bears for Palestine, a Pro-Palestine group at the University of California, Berkeley, announced on social media before the event that it would be “SHUTTING IT DOWN.”<br/>
<br/>
”In October of 2023, Ran Bar-Yoshafat was serving in the IOF, partaking in the obliteration of Gaza and extermination of Palestinians,” a Sunday post by the group states. “He has now been invited to speak on our campus to spread settler colonial Zionist propaganda about the very genocide he has participated in. This individual is dangerous. Ran Bar-Yoshafat has Palestinian blood on his hands. He has committed crimes against humanity, is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on. GENOCIDAL MURDERERS OUT OF BERKELEY.”<br/>
<br/>
The group went on to encourage others to help “shut it down” at 6 p.m. and gave protesters the location of the event.<br/>
<br/>
Pro-Palestine protesters successfully prevented Yoshafat from speaking, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, smashing a window and shutting down the event. Around 200 protesters mobbed the building and prevented people from entering, the university said, adding that doors were broken and the building was evacuated.<br/>
<br/>
”Minutes before the event was to start, a crowd of some 200 protesters began to surround the building. Doors were broken open and the protesters gained unauthorized entry to the building. The event was canceled, and the building was evacuated to protect the speaker and members of the audience,” reads a university statement.<br/>
<br/>
Danielle Sobkin, an organizer for the event and co-president of Bears for Israel, told The Chronicle that one of the people in the mob grabbed a sophomore attempting to enter the event and called him a “dirty Jew,” also spitting on him.<br/>
<br/>
Sobkin said that a senior was also shoved into an auditorium door by the protesters and a freshman was grabbed by her neck.<br/>
<br/>
“This isn’t an isolated incident. This is a continuous trend that’s persisted my entire time on campus. Jewish hate. The targeting of Jewish students,” Sobkin said. “For a lot of us, this was the tipping point. The last straw,”<br/>
<br/>
Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for the university, told the outlet that about 200 students mobbed Zellerbach Playhouse on campus, where the event took place.<br/>
<br/>
“I can’t emphasize how seriously we’re taking this, and how appalling it is,” he said, adding that the students stationed at Sather Gate are also violating campus rules. “We are working as we speak to address that,” Mogulof said.<br/>
<br/>
The event was initially set to take place outside of Wheeler Hall on campus, but a massive crowd gathered outside the building interrupted classes, Sobkin said, prompting a shift to Zellerbach Playhouse, where protesters followed.<br/>
<br/>
Bears for Palestine, who organized the protest that turned violent, hasn’t apologized for the event and continues to promote its “Apartheid Week,” which is a series of on-campus events scheduled for March 3-8.<br/>
<br/>
In a post titled “Upholding our Values,” Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin wrote that the protest violated university policies.<br/>
<br/>
”We are committed to responding to violations of our “Time, Place, and Manner” rules. We deeply respect the right to protest as intrinsic to the values of a democracy and an institution of higher education,” they wrote. “Yet, we cannot ignore protest activity that interferes with the rights of others to hear and/or express perspectives of their choosing. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to violate the First Amendment rights of a speaker, no matter how much we might disagree with their views. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to imperil members of our community and deny them the ability to feel safe and welcome on our campus. We cannot cede our values to those willing to engage in transgressive behavior.”<br/>
<br/>
”We will in the days ahead decide on the best possible path to fully understand what happened and why; to determine how we will address what occurred; and to do everything possible to preclude a repeat of what happened,” the administrators added.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/02/building-evacuated-angry-mob-berkeley-violently-shuts-down-jewish-event/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/02/building-evacuated-angry-mob-berkeley-violently-shuts-down-jewish-event/</a>
</p>
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<b> Las Vegas school district agrees to protect free speech rights of pro-life students after lawsuit</b><br/>
<br/>
Pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac urges DOJ to investigate potential 'crime' behind abortions of 'The Five'<br/>
Progressive pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac spoke to Fox News Digital on Wednesday about the DOJ allegedly covering up an investigation into whether five babies in were aborted illegally in D.C. in 2022.<br/>
<br/>
A Las Vegas school district has agreed to protect pro-life students' views after current and former students sued their high school, the district and school administrators, alleging discrimination against their campus club.<br/>
<br/>
The group of students from the Students for Life chapter at East Career and Technical Academy (ECTA) filed their lawsuit in 2022 in response to "ongoing bias" against the club for its beliefs, the Thomas More Society said.<br/>
<br/>
The legal group representing the students announced they recently reached a settlement agreement with the Clark County School District (CCSD) to make changes to the school's student handbook and distribute a memorandum to district administration reminding them to protect students' First Amendment rights.<br/>
<br/>
The agreement will ensure pro-life students' views are protected in the district's more than 300 schools, the Thomas More Society touted.<br/>
<br/>
"This public, taxpayer funded, school district and high school were actively violating the Equal Access Act, the Nevada Constitution, and the United States Constitution, apparently due to ongoing bias against the club’s pro-life beliefs and actions," Joan Mannix, Executive Vice President and counsel for the Thomas More Society, said in a statement.<br/>
<br/>
Mannix was "pleased" with the settlement, but said it was "regrettable" that school officials needed this reminder, and they were violating their own district policies on discrimination regarding student clubs.<br/>
<br/>
Fox News Digital previously reported the Students for Life group had accused ECTA of denying their fliers with images in the school newspaper, despite other groups being allowed to include pictures in their fliers. The suit also claimed the ECTA assistant principal had "refused" to allow students to post fliers referring to an adoption agency and pregnancy resource clinic during the 2019-2020 school year.<br/>
<br/>
The school also reportedly rejected a club meeting announcement which depicted pictures of students declaring, "I reject abortion," as "too controversial," while allowing faculty to display pro-abortion posters in classrooms.<br/>
<br/>
The school district had previously found itself in legal trouble with another student in 2015 after initially refusing to approve her application to start a pro-life club on campus at a different high school, the lawsuit claimed.<br/>
<br/>
Kristan Hawkins, President of Students for Life of America, which assisted the local chapter in its fight, vowed to keep holding schools accountable for trying to silence pro-life students.<br/>
<br/>
"As hostile attacks on pro-life free speech steadily grow, Students for Life of America will not allow school administrations to overlook or instigate First Amendment violations against the Pro-Life Generation," she said in a statement. "Free speech includes pro-life speech, whether you like it or not. Pro-life students will always have a voice for the voiceless, and Students for Life of America will ensure their freedom to do so is respected."<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/las-vegas-school-district-agrees-protect-free-speech-rights-pro-life-students-lawsuit">https://www.foxnews.com/media/las-vegas-school-district-agrees-protect-free-speech-rights-pro-life-students-lawsuit</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Alabama lawmakers push for families to receive state dollars for children to attend private school, tutoring</b><br/>
<br/>
Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley reacts to the Supreme Court ruling Maine's tuition program violates the First Amendment for excluding religious schools.<br/>
<br/>
Alabama lawmakers have advanced a school voucher-like program that could provide eligible families with state dollars to help pay for private school or home school expenses.<br/>
<br/>
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 69-34 Tuesday for the proposal that now moves to the Alabama Senate. Six Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill. The bill comes as Republicans in a number of states have debated voucher proposals under the banner of expanding school choice.<br/>
<br/>
The proposal, championed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and dubbed the CHOOSE Act, would allow eligible families to access up to $7,000 in state dollars for private school tuition, tutoring or transfer fees to move to another public school. Parents could get also get up to $2,000 for home school expenses.<br/>
<br/>
"The CHOOSE Act will provide provide an opportunity for students to learn and thrive in an environment that best meets their needs, which could be another public school," Republican Rep. Danny Garrett, the bill's sponsor, told lawmakers.<br/>
<br/>
The first 500 slots would be reserved for families of students with disabilities. Eligibility would initially be limited to families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level — which would be about $77,460 for a family of three. The income cap would go away in 2027, but lower-income families and families with students with disabilities would have priority for receiving funds.<br/>
<br/>
Democrats expressed concern about using public dollars for private schools.<br/>
<br/>
"If we keep pulling away from public education, how are ever going to make it better?" asked Democratic Rep. Barbara Drummond of Mobile.<br/>
<br/>
Some Democrats also questioned the financial sustainability of the program and if it is intended to be a mechanism for white families to leave public schools.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-lawmakers-push-families-receive-state-dollars-children-attend-private-school-tutoring">https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-lawmakers-push-families-receive-state-dollars-children-attend-private-school-tutoring</a>
</p>
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<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-68814393786070467422024-02-28T22:51:00.002+13:002024-02-28T22:51:24.574+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Biden Transfers More Student Loans to Taxpayers, Wants a ‘Thank You’</b><br/>
<br/>
Democrats are nothing if not shameless in how they go about buying votes. Worse, Joe Biden is using your money to buy other people’s votes via his student loan “forgiveness” transfer program. He added another 153,000 borrowers to that roster for about $1.2 billion this week.<br/>
<br/>
The timing was exquisite. With all the concern over the fact that he’s in steep cognitive decline, Biden needed to remind voters that he’s a “sympathetic” and “well-meaning” man, not just an “elderly” one with “a poor memory.”<br/>
<br/>
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in 2021 that “the president can’t do” what Biden eventually did anyway. “The president can only postpone, delay, but not forgive,” she explained, saying anything of that sort would require “an act of Congress.”<br/>
<br/>
Frankly, that, too, would be unconstitutional. The Constitution does not grant the federal government the authority to abrogate private contracts between lenders and borrowers, forcing taxpayers to pay back loans they did not take for college degrees they did not earn.<br/>
<br/>
But since when did Washington politicians care much for that musty old parchment?<br/>
<br/>
Indeed, in August 2022, Biden did it anyway in a transparent ploy for votes. In July 2023, the Supreme Court rebuked him in a resounding 6-3 ruling. Biden immediately proceeded to ignore the Court and implemented a workaround to keep up the transfer payments in smaller batches.<br/>
<br/>
Since then, a new White House “fact sheet” says, “The Biden-Harris Administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions.” Billions more dollars will be spent leading up to the election because millions more borrowers are registered in his program.<br/>
<br/>
Biden has no authority to do that, and the Supreme Court told him so. He doesn’t care. In fact, he’s blatantly daring anyone to play the villain and stop him.<br/>
<br/>
“Tens of millions of people in debt were literally about to be canceled, their debts,” he said Wednesday in revising the history. “But my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials, and special interests stepped in and sued us, and the Supreme Court blocked it. They blocked it. But that didn’t stop me.”<br/>
<br/>
Constitutional authority? Malarkey. Checks and balances? Please. Totally unfair to send the bill for loans to people who didn’t take them out? Whatever.<br/>
<br/>
Kind Uncle Joe is here to take care of (not so) poor college graduates struggling to get by, and mean, stingy Republicans aren’t going to stop him.<br/>
<br/>
Remember, this is the same guy warning that Donald Trump is a would-be dictator who threatens democracy.<br/>
<br/>
Speaking of Trump, one thing Biden did learn from his predecessor is to put his name on the check. When approving COVID stimulus checks under his administration, Trump made sure his name was on the checks. Team Biden promised such political games would stop under his administration. They did until they didn’t.<br/>
<br/>
“I promise you I’m never going to stop fighting for hardworking American families,” Biden said Wednesday. “So if you qualify, you’ll be hearing from me shortly.” Politico reported that “he’s sending emails to make sure they know whom to thank for it.” Indeed, in that email, he says, “I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room.” It ends with his signature.<br/>
<br/>
Again, he’s also making sure people know who to blame if this money gets taken away from them.<br/>
<br/>
“A lot of people can’t even repay, and they try — they don’t miss payments,” Biden said. “They work like the devil every month to pay the bills.”<br/>
<br/>
What about those of us who worked like the devil and paid off our own student loans? What about those of us whose mortgage and escrow payments have gone up hundreds of dollars a month, not because we bought a new house but because of the inflation Joe Biden caused? Where’s our relief?<br/>
<br/>
We get none. We just get another bill so Biden can buy votes. And, as with rampant inflation, we know whose name is on that bill.<br/>
<br/>
Unfortunately, millions of Americans benefit from Biden’s graft, and Republicans are going to have a difficult time opposing or stopping him. House Republicans passed a bill to block him last year, but it failed in the Senate. He wouldn’t sign it anyway.<br/>
<br/>
Establishing standing in court will likewise be tough; without standing, who can sue? Since Biden began the smaller rounds of debt transfer payments, no major lawsuit has been filed.<br/>
<br/>
No, Biden will likely get away with this, and he knows it. The result will be an entitled generation that is learning to depend on the federal government, more expensive college tuition bills going forward, increased federal debt ($34 trillion and counting), and one more huge chunk missing from the constitutional order of checks and balances.<br/>
<br/>
Biden is “saving democracy,” and we’re all paying dearly for it.<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://patriotpost.us/articles/104671">https://patriotpost.us/articles/104671</a> ?<br/>
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<b> Students at Beverly Hills middle school hit with AI-generated nude deepfake images</b><br/>
<br/>
A Beverly Hills middle school was rocked by photos that circulated the internet last week of real students’ faces superimposed on artificial intelligence-generated nude bodies.<br/>
<br/>
According to the Beverly Hills Unified School District, the X-rated deepfake images were created and shared by students at Beverly Vista Middle School — the Los Angeles school district’s sole institution for sixth to eighth grades, according to the Los Angeles Times.<br/>
<br/>
About 750 students age 11 through 14 are enrolled in Beverly Vista, the LA Times reported.<br/>
<br/>
It wasn’t immediately clear who created the nude photos, which were initially shared via group chats between students.<br/>
<br/>
School administrators said they won’t hesitate to expel the culprits when they are identified.<br/>
<br/>
It’s not just Taylor Swift ‘nudes’: Millions of teen girls victimized as classmates turn them into deepfake porn<br/>
“Any student found to be creating, disseminating, or in possession of AI-generated images of this nature will face disciplinary actions, including, but not limited to, a recommendation for expulsion,” they said in a statement mailed to parents last week,” the school district’s officials said in a note mailed to parents, per the LA Times.<br/>
<br/>
Parents were also advised to “speak with your children about this dangerous behavior,” which they said “is becoming more and more accessible to individuals of all ages.”<br/>
<br/>
“Students, please talk to your friends about how disturbing and inappropriate this manipulation of images is.”<br/>
<br/>
As of Monday, the school has also launched an investigation with the Beverly Hills Police Department into the nude deepfakes, NBC 4 Los Angeles reported.<br/>
<br/>
“We will be looking at the appropriate discipline so that students understand there are consequences and accountability for their actions,” said Dr. Michael Bregy, Superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District.<br/>
<br/>
Beverly Vista principal Kelly Skon has used her regularly scheduled “administrative chats” to discuss the issue with students in all three grades at the school, she said in another note sent to parents.<br/>
<br/>
Skon said she asked students to “make sure your social media accounts are private and you do not have people you do not know following your accounts,” per the LA Times.<br/>
<br/>
A Beverly Vista student who wished not to be identified told NBC: “It is very scary people can’t feel safe to come to school.”<br/>
<br/>
“They are scared people will show off explicit photos of them,” the student added.<br/>
<br/>
In December, two students were suspended from a Miami high school for using an AI deepfake software to create nude images using headshots of male and female students obtained from the school’s social media account.<br/>
<br/>
One parent whose daughter was a victim of the scheme at Pinecrest Cove Preparatory Academy said she’s hesitant to return to school out of humiliation and fear.<br/>
<br/>
“She’s been crying,” parent Vanessa Posso told CBS at the time. “She hasn’t been eating. She’s just been mentally unstable. She does cheer and she didn’t even want to come to school to do it.”<br/>
<br/>
The offending students were suspended for 10 days from the Florida charter school, but some parents want them booted permanently.<br/>
<br/>
Weeks earlier, more than 30 female students at New Jersey’s Westfield High School fell victim to the practice after learning that the manufactured images were in wide circulation.<br/>
<br/>
According to visual threat intelligence company Sensity, more than 90% of deepfake images are pornographic.<br/>
<br/>
Many also use celebrities’ likenesses, including Taylor Swift, who was the subject of deepfakes — which showed Swift in various sexualized positions at a Kansas City Chiefs game, a nod to her highly-publicized romance with the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce — that took the internet by storm last month.<br/>
<br/>
The account reportedly garnered the images of Swift from Celeb Jihad, which boasts a collection of fake pornographic imagery, or “deepfakes,” using celebrities’ likenesses.<br/>
<br/>
It wasn’t immediately clear which AI website was used to create the pornographic images that circulated Beverly Vista, though there are many free AI-backed image generators on the internet, including OpenAI’s Dall-E, Adobe’s Firefly and Canva, as well as a slew of lesser-known tools such as Freepik, Wepik, Craiyon and Fotor, just to name a few.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/27/business/ai-generated-nude-deepfakes-circulate-at-beverly-hills-middle-school/">https://nypost.com/2024/02/27/business/ai-generated-nude-deepfakes-circulate-at-beverly-hills-middle-school/</a>
</p>
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<b> Laken Riley murder: Students on UGA campus, joggers nationwide shocked after alleged illegal immigrant killing</b><br/>
<br/>
The brutal murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus last week has sparked concerns among other students and women joggers who run alone.<br/>
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Riley, a student at Augusta University, was allegedly murdered by 26-year-old Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, while she was jogging along dirt trails near Lake Herrick in Athens in what UGA Police described as a "crime of opportunity."<br/>
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"It's a mother's worst nightmare," Michelle, the mother of a female UGA student and a UGA alumnus, previously told Fox News Digital.<br/>
<br/>
Michelle said she’s told her daughter countless times to be careful when she walks alone and to only go running with her Labrador retriever.<br/>
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"It shakes people to their core because it makes people realize there’s a dirty underbelly we don’t see," she said. "My heart breaks. I’ve been praying for [Riley’s] mom every time she comes to mind."<br/>
<br/>
Numerous women have taken to social media to share safety tips for solo female joggers and share their own stories of scary encounters while running. Sarah Lyoness, a Chicago-based runner who is training for a marathon, produced a video sharing jogger safety tips that went viral on TikTok.<br/>
<br/>
"I used to live in Omaha, Nebraska, and there was a trail … away from a lot of traffic. You could see cornfields for miles, and so it was pretty empty. And if I would go early in the morning, if I allowed myself to think about it too much, like, ‘Oh, someone could pop out of the cornfields or I could see a car following me' I was just always aware of my surroundings," she told Fox News Digital. She added that her mom eventually bought a bike to ride with her while she was running in that area.<br/>
<br/>
Lyoness suggests other solo runners always carry a phone or smartwatch, be aware of their surroundings and have a safety weapon like pepper spray while out jogging.<br/>
<br/>
Michael Arterburn, a former police officer, told Fox News Digital running in groups or in daylight isn't feasible for some runners and shared tips for those who run alone.<br/>
<br/>
"Either wear no headphones or just wear one headphone. They made the bone conduction headphones now so that you can hear what's going on around you if someone runs up behind you. You don't want to take away one of your senses," he said. "I recommend runner's pepper gel. … It stays in your hand and instantly activates with just the flick of your thumb."<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/laken-riley-murder-students-uga-campus-joggers-nationwide-shocked-alleged-illegal-immigrant-killing">https://www.foxnews.com/us/laken-riley-murder-students-uga-campus-joggers-nationwide-shocked-alleged-illegal-immigrant-killing</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-14486632305237889902024-02-27T23:39:00.002+13:002024-02-27T23:39:55.007+13:00<br><br/>
<b> What if digital learning is a catastrophe?</b><br/>
<br/>
There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break… all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our own youth. More than that, smartphones are extraordinarily distracting. How are the children to learn if they’re surreptitiously WhatsApping one another under the desk?<br/>
<br/>
But this focus on smartphones in schools seems to me to ignore another issue: what happens outside school. The comprehensive my two older children attend is, as I understand it, typical in not allowing but requiring almost all its out-of-school learning to be done online. Physical textbooks are seldom seen. Exercise books are barely used. Homework is set, completed and marked in cyberspace. This has certain admirable effects – among other things, email alerts can let parents know when homework hasn’t been handed in, and you can see in one place which assignments are required for all the different classes.<br/>
<br/>
Schools seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning<br/>
<br/>
And yet and yet. The first problem with this is the obvious one. The school carefully and conscientiously insists that during school hours children should not be distracted by smartphones. But then come the end of school hours, the point at which children are expected to develop the vital skills of self-guided learning, unsupervised, the work must be done on one of the very devices that are most likely to distract and interrupt. On a laptop, or on an iPad, you are only an alt-tab away from TikTok, YouTube shorts, Spotify, Instagram, or any of the other internet timesinks that Silicon Valley has engineered to be addictively more-ish. Grown adults struggle to disengage from them, let alone teenagers with their spongy and unformed brains.<br/>
<br/>
Yes, parents have a role here. I am all too aware of it. Do not imagine, reader, that I am not by now intimately familiar with the ins-and-outs of Broadband Shield; that I do not frequently (and at some cost of time and grief) block various sites at the router during homework hours; that I have not got to the stage of hiding the master password to the parent account offline after discovering my kid was using the saved passwords on my Chrome profile to place TikTok on the always-allowed list. Do not think I haven’t spent a lot of time googling whether it’s possible to prevent a child deleting their internet history (it isn’t). Or arguing about whether homework could be done somewhere the student in question can be supervised full time (student in question very aggressively not keen on this). It’s exhausting.<br/>
<br/>
So, there’s that: the do-your-homework-on-the-distraction-machine thing. That’s the obvious one. But there is something more, and it’s deeper. I worry it may be a nationwide or first-worldwide generational problem. We have shifted learning almost entirely online, and as far as I know we have done so without any evidenced consideration of whether kids learn in the same way, or as well, reading and writing on screens as they do when reading from physical textbooks and writing with pen on paper. Not for nothing has this distinctive mode of online engagement been described as ‘continuous partial attention’. There is good reason to believe you just don’t take in what you read on a website in the same way you do what you read in a book.<br/>
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Memory and spatial awareness are intimately connected in the brain. We have known this since ancient times. The ‘method of loci’ – popularised by Hannibal Lecter’s ‘memory palace’; you remember things by placing them in an imaginary architecture – goes back to Simonides of Ceos (circa 500BC; absolutely the man you want on the scene if your temple has collapsed and you need to identify some mangled bodies) and is still used by competitive mnemonists. The hippocampus, which is notoriously enlarged in black cab drivers, is the seat of memory and of geography.<br/>
<br/>
This isn’t a trivial point. When you read a physical book you have a series of spatial clues in the process: a sense of left-hand page or right-hand page; orientation with regard to the corners; the physical memory of how far through the book you are, and so on. You can flick back and forth much faster than you can scroll a long document. Everyone who has ever looked for a quotation will know that feeling of three-quarters-up-a-left-hand-page-ness. It may be that a new generation of digital natives will navigate online pdfs with the same ease – that the problem here is old dogs and new tricks – but I have my doubts. Cognition and memory are much more embodied than we like to imagine. Other associative sensory cues – smell, sound, touch, colour – contribute to memory (just ask Proust). Those sensory cues are not present in the nowhere of cyberspace.<br/>
<br/>
My wife and I – even allowing for the teenager’s natural resistance to interference – have really struggled to try to help our daughter with her exam revision. It’s quite impossible to follow what she’s doing as she flicks uncertainly back and forth between Google Classroom, online textbooks, half-written documents, gamified quiz programmes like Caboodle and Seneca and Lord alone knows what else. She’s pursuing her work through a trackless wasteland of tabs and windows. It gives me palpitations just watching her.<br/>
<br/>
As it happens, when you look closely, you see that her school has supplied her with excellent teaching materials, notes, textbook extracts and so on. It’s navigating them that is the challenge. The closest we’ve come to being able to make sense of them was when we printed out hard copies – just like an old-fashioned book. We have even, tentatively, suggested that taking old-fashioned longhand notes might here and there function as an aide-memoire in a way that the provisional, ephemeral, disembodied quality of a note in a Word document may not.<br/>
<br/>
There are lots of reasons why this shift to digital has been made. Some are practical: it’s a lot cheaper and easier not to have to buy textbooks or gather up handwritten essays for marking, to be able to distribute and check homework through tools like Google Classroom. These are quality-of-life improvements for teachers, and quality-of-budget improvements for schools. Others are more utopian. There’s the seductive sense in the culture that learning online must be better because the digital world is the future. There are all sorts of big tech companies with shiny PR machines and billions to gain economically from inserting their products into the education of our children.<br/>
<br/>
But it’s far from clear that – in terms of cultivating deep reading, structured learning and the sort of continual focused attention that educational attainment requires – this is an improvement on the use of dead trees and ink rather than otherwise. Such academic studies as we have on the subject seem to suggest that it is not – though of course it’s tricky to make rigorous or authoritative comparisons, and the data are complex.<br/>
<br/>
A forthcoming study from Columbia University Teachers College, reported a few weeks ago, concludes that: ‘Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning’.<br/>
<br/>
A 2018 meta-analysis of studies involving more than 170,000 participants, published in Educational Research Review, found a consistent advantage to comprehension on paper over that on screen (at least in digesting informational rather than narrative texts). What’s more, it tentatively suggested that digitally literate users might actually get worse rather than better at taking in texts on screen, citing as a possible explanation ‘people’s stronger inclination toward shallow work in digital-based environments than in paper-based ones’.<br/>
<br/>
I don’t demand we return to blackboards and chalk or inkwells and exercise books. But I do note that schools up and down the country seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning, and done so before much in the way of data on the subject was in. It’ll be a generational betrayal if, ten years from now, it becomes clear that the roulette ball’s going to clatter into red.<br/>
<br/>
Education should be one of the things, surely, that helps growing people make sense of hectic chaos of the world – an anchor against being swept up in what Cory Doctorow has memorably called the internet’s ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies’. It will be a catastrophe if education itself is co-opted by that very ecosystem.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/what-if-digital-learning-is-a-catastrophe/">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/what-if-digital-learning-is-a-catastrophe/</a>
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<b> UK: Why shortening the school summer holidays helps no one</b><br/>
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A new report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has recommended that the six-week school summer holiday should be reduced to four weeks, and the two weeks redistributed so that schools have a two-week half-term in October and February. Lee Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said that spreading out the holidays more equally throughout the year would ‘improve the wellbeing of pupils and the working lives of teachers, balance out childcare costs for parents, and potentially boost academic results for many children’.<br/>
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I’m not convinced shortening the summer holidays would actually do any of those things. Firstly, I highly doubt that having extra time off in October and February – two of the darkest, coldest, wettest months of the year – would do much to improve staff or pupil wellbeing. Teachers would inevitably end up working through most of it, and pupils would spend the extra time festering inside, probably glued to multiple screens, because sports camps and social clubs don’t run over winter when the pitches are waterlogged and the energy bills are too high. Instead, we would have them locked up for the whole of July, sweating away in non-air-conditioned classrooms, when the days are longer, lighter, and warmer. Anyone who has ever taught in a school, or read Romeo and Juliet, knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour.<br/>
<br/>
I’m also not sure how it would balance out childcare costs, given that employed parents still get the same number of annual leave days a year, and so would still have the same administrative issue to resolve. Here’s one thing it would definitely do though: push up the already eye-wateringly expensive premium on holidays out of term time. Parents will probably be less willing to go abroad in October and February, where you have to fly long-haul for guaranteed sunshine, meaning that the vast majority of families will be competing to go away in the same four weeks: cue larger costs, larger crowds, and a large impact on seasonal economies like Cornwall’s. Some will choose, understandably, to take their children on holiday in term time instead, as a £60 fine is insignificant compared to the hundreds or even thousands you might save on an off-peak all-inclusive holiday or some earlier Easyjet flights.<br/>
<br/>
Anyone who has ever taught in a school knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour<br/>
<br/>
There is an argument that cutting the summer holidays may help to mitigate the learning loss that happens over a longer break, sometimes called the ‘summer slide’. Yet other countries with excellent education systems have much longer summer holidays than us: Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have 12 weeks; Estonia and Finland have 11 weeks; Canada has ten weeks; America and Sweden have nine weeks; whilst China and South Korea have eight weeks. The UK is already an outlier in many respects: we have the fewest public holidays of any country in the world bar Mexico, the shortest summer holidays of any country in Europe, and we also start school two or three years earlier than most OECD countries. I am not sure quantity of education is the issue here.<br/>
<br/>
Maybe I am just being nostalgic and sentimental, but I genuinely believe that the summer holidays are a sacred time: a precious break from the pressure of homework and tests; a chance for children to spend time outdoors; an opportunity to learn important life skills or pursue extracurricular activities or, God forbid, to cope with being bored. When I think of summer holidays, I think of disappearing on bikes with friends until the sun went down, or setting up makeshift camps in the garden with a hastily-assembled picnic, or endless made-up games with my siblings in the driveway: precious, formative experiences that probably would never have been achieved over this February half-term, where it rained everyday except one.<br/>
<br/>
Perhaps a better alternative would be to keep the summer holidays the length they are (something the majority of teachers and parents want), and instead seriously consider how we can better support working parents, single parents, or disadvantaged families. For example, in Sweden, parents can apply for income-linked summer camps, where children can try fishing, drama and sports, as well as helping out with chores including cooking and cleaning, all for as little as £0 to £28 per day. There are some similar, more affordable options in the UK, like Forest Schools, National Citizen Service, or YMCA and YHA Camps, but the reality is that discounts are limited, and often only for pupils on free school meals. If you are not eligible, then one charity estimates it will cost you on average £943 per child for provision over the holiday, and so the subsidies or opportunities on offer do not go anywhere near far enough.<br/>
<br/>
Shortening the school summer holidays therefore does nothing to ease financial pressures or logistical stresses, but it does take away from the welcome reprieve and mental and physical freedom those six weeks bring. If anything, we should be giving families more flexibility to choose when to take holiday rather than less, because education happens as much outside of school as it does inside.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/why-shortening-the-school-summer-holidays-helps-no-one/">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/why-shortening-the-school-summer-holidays-helps-no-one/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Decolonising (or radicalising) the Australian curriculum</b><br/>
<br/>
It appears our educational elites have learned nothing from 2023’s referendum on the Voice to Parliament. Despite promises of a ‘back to basics’ curriculum, this year Victorian teachers will have to contend with a curriculum blinded by Woke racial ideology and historical myth.<br/>
<br/>
One of the ‘texts’ teachers can select for VCE English is a four-minute video of an Australian Indigenous actor reciting a monologue from his play City of Gold featured on Q&A in June 2020. Described as a ‘howl of rage at the injustice, inequality and wilful amnesia of this country’s 21st Century’, an ‘urgent and necessary play’ in light of ‘the global Black Lives Matter movement’, and a ‘powerful message’ urging students to ‘offend your family, call them out’ – the monologue asks that we ‘re-write’ the ‘colonial narrative’.<br/>
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Classified by the IPA as a text that fits with the agenda of ‘decolonisation theory’, which, according to the pedagogy, involves combating ‘systemic racism’ by not simply including ‘token intellectual achievements of non-white cultures’ into a curriculum but by occasioning a ‘paradigm shift from a culture of exclusion and denial to the making of space for other political philosophies and knowledge systems … a culture shift to think more widely about why common knowledge is what it is, and in so doing adjusting cultural perceptions and power relations in real and significant ways’, the artist addresses students as a ‘Blak Australian’ and tells us that they ‘hate[s] being a token. Some box to tick, part of some diversity angle’.<br/>
<br/>
The monologue then mentions the regularly repeated, but historically incorrect claim that Indigenous Australians were covered by the Flora and Fauna Act which did not classify them as human beings, and that this only changed when the Constitution was amended following the 1967 referendum. ‘C’mon man we was flora and fauna before 1967’ cries the monologue, cadit quaestio. ‘Adjusting cultural perceptions’ and ‘making space for other knowledge systems’, indeed, the play is ‘decolonisation’ theory in action.<br/>
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This long-debunked myth about the Flora and Fauna Act has made its way into a text set for year 12 Victorian English in 2024. So much for ‘back to basics’. And where are the fact checkers when you need them?<br/>
<br/>
Interestingly, in the VCE annotation for teachers that accompanies the text, the VCLAA warns that the play ‘contains explicit language’. No mention of the historically incorrect claim, of course, as decolonisation theory dictates that ‘anti-racism’ trumps facts. The IPA analysed the list in full here where I also show how the 2024 rules mean that teachers cannot avoid selecting Woke, in particular, ‘decolonisation theory’ texts.<br/>
<br/>
This is all despite Australians voting overwhelming against dividing our country along racial lines only last year. It seems that the educational Powers That Be did not get the memo. The VCLAA, the body responsible for the 2024 text list teachers are to select from, insists on continuing to indoctrinate students with critical race theory largely imported from the United States, providing a list of texts that purport to ‘directly explore Australian knowledge, experience, and voices’ but are thinly veiled anti-colonial or ‘anti-racists’ manifestos.<br/>
<br/>
This monologue is just one of an inordinate number of texts on race in the VCE 2024 English document, with the first post-colonial African novel in English, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 Things Fall Apart, topping the list. Of the 16 texts assigned under the ‘Framework of Ideas’ section, over half deal directly with race, with this monologue and another titled The Hate Race standing out as particularly overt.<br/>
<br/>
The Hate Race is a memoir that links the experience of Indigenous Australians to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The teachers’ resource states that the text ‘is framed by the racist policies and politics that define Australia’ and gives suggestions on how to approach teaching the text. It illustrates explicitly how Critical Race and Decolonisation theory is weaponised for our Australian context. ‘The Atlantic Slave trade’ is to be considered alongside ‘the impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australian communities’, while ‘the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, Enoch Powell in the UK, and Pauline Hanson in Australia’ are all grouped under the heading ‘white supremacist political movements’ and suggested to teachers as ‘aspects of history and contemporary politics’ relevant to a discussion of the VCE text.<br/>
<br/>
Faced with a text list that more resembles the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement than English literature as we once knew it, students will miss out on not only the ‘greats’ of the Western canon, but a wealth of Australian literature that celebrates our distinctively Australian way of life based on fairness, equality, freedom, and tolerance. As executive director of the IPA Scott Hargreaves pointed out in 2021, classic works in which Australian artists and writers told their countrymen of our nation and asserted the innate worth of a national culture are now either explicitly cancelled or simply crowed out by a right-on national curriculum full of Woke preening and second-rate texts. Disturbingly, the new 2024 rules mean that the teaching of this ideology is now unavoidable.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/decolonising-or-radicalising-the-curriculum/">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/decolonising-or-radicalising-the-curriculum/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-81441711685015268042024-02-27T00:50:00.002+13:002024-02-27T00:50:33.689+13:00<br><br/>
<b> GOP Senator Demands Answers About Taxpayer Funding For ‘Woke Kindergarten’ at California...</b><br/>
<br/>
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana announced on Friday that he was seeking information about a California elementary school that spent hundreds of thousands on a “Woke Kindergarten” program.<br/>
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Glassbrook Elementary School reportedly spent $250,000 on “Woke Kindergarten,” a nonprofit that encourages a “global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem.” Cassidy raised concerns in several letters to the nonprofit and the California Department of Education requesting information on the purpose of the program’s inclusion in light of “failing test scores in crucial subjects like math and reading.”<br/>
<br/>
“The reports regarding Woke Kindergarten are serious. Teachers at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, reportedly stated that the Woke Kindergarten program is ‘rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children,’” Cassidy wrote in a letter to the department.<br/>
<br/>
The nonprofit’s website includes “woke read alouds” in which the founder, Akiea Gross, reads books about the importance “for all of us to affirm people’s identities.” The website also includes resources titled “lil’ comrade convos,” “woke words of the day” and “teach Palestine.”<br/>
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Cassidy demanded that Woke Kindergarten explain the “purpose” of its activities, as well as “produce copies of all materials used in connection with your program,” according to the letter. The Louisiana senator asked the department to explain if it was aware of the program’s use at Glassbrook and if the department knew where the federal funds were coming from to pay for the program.<br/>
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During the program’s implementation in the 2022–2023 school year, grades also dropped significantly in crucial subjects, with reading and math at 16% and 14% respectively, according to the California School Dashboard. The school was also ranked as one of the worst-performing elementary schools in the state.<br/>
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The Hayward Unified School District canceled the contract with Woke Kindergarten in February after immense backlash from conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Jesse Waters and the activist account Libs of Tik Tok. The program was halted because it was “distracting the district,” according to Michael Bazeley, HUSD spokesperson, who formerly spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation about the situation.<br/>
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Woke Kindergarten, Glassbrook and the department did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/02/gop-senator-demands-answers-woke-kindergarten-california-school/">https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/02/gop-senator-demands-answers-woke-kindergarten-california-school/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> The School Funding Fraud</b><br/>
<br/>
Politico reports that billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief aid to schools is running dry.The money must be spent by September, and there is “urgent concern over how schools might get burned when the money’s gone, as the process to request extensions to looming spending deadlines heats up in the coming months.”<br/>
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Schools might be burned?!<br/>
<br/>
We are led to believe that the cheapskate American taxpayers are not forking over enough cash to the government school monopoly. But the data tell a very different story.<br/>
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According to the invaluable Just Facts, which is dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable data about the critical public policy issues of our time, the U.S. spent $1.2 trillion on education in 2022. The bulk of the spending, $834 billion, goes to elementary and secondary education, while $226 billion is spent on higher education, and $121 billion goes to libraries and other forms of education.<br/>
<br/>
This total breaks down to $8,993 for every household in the U.S., 4.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product, and 14% of the government’s current expenditures. It’s important to note that these figures don’t include land purchases for schools and other facilities, as well as some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers. The unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (like health insurance) are also not included.<br/>
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Unimpressed by any such data, California Teacher Association president David Goldberg bellyached in early February that California has suffered through “decades of deliberate disinvestment in public schools.” The union boss added, “This erratic system of starved school budgets during economic boom years mustn’t continue. We need to find lasting solutions to California’s broken budget system.”<br/>
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We are led to believe that Golden State legislators are siphoning money from cash-poor schools. However, the Public Policy Institute of California discloses that school spending per pupil is roughly 65% higher than a decade ago in the Golden State. In 2021, the state allotted $22,684 per student, compared to $14,245 in 2012–13. This amount doesn’t include federal monies, which brings the total to almost $24,000. So, a class of 25 students costs taxpayers about $600,000.<br/>
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The money grabbers’ basic assumption (or at least their selling point) is that spending more equates to better education results. Sadly, so many people buy into this myth and have done so for many years. In 2008, Dan Lips, then senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, wrote, “American spending on public K-12 education is at an all-time high and is still rising. Polls show that many believe a lack of resources is a primary problem facing public schools. Yet spending on American K-12 public Education is at an all-time high. Approximately $9,300 is spent per pupil. Real spending per student has increased by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years.”<br/>
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It cannot be said enough that there is no correlation between the amount of funding and the level of student proficiency. The most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) noted that the U.S. had additional funding of more than $75,000 per student over a ten-year period. Still, it did not have additional positive effects on academic achievement.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://heartland.org/opinion/the-school-funding-fraud/">https://heartland.org/opinion/the-school-funding-fraud/</a>
</p>
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<b> Going to university is not always the right choice</b><br/>
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Students with poor grades in high school will be encouraged to go to university and set on a career path that is wrong for them, experts warn, under sweeping recommendations in the federal government’s higher education review that are coming under fire from vice-chancellors.<br/>
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One higher education expert warned that students with ATARs as low as 45 could make it into university under the blueprint for the sector outlined in the Universities Accord review’s final report, released by Education Minister Jason Clare on Sunday.<br/>
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The biggest review of tertiary education in 15 years has called on the Albanese government to double the number of university places in the next 25 years, reduce the high fees students pay in some subjects and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates.<br/>
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The recommendations in the review will cost tens of billions of dollars over the next 25 years if fully implemented. They aim to create a highly educated workforce, with more than 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds having a bachelor degree or above by 2050.<br/>
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The review recommends more government funding to dramatically increase the number of disadvantaged students from poor backgrounds and regional areas at university.<br/>
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“At the moment almost half of young people in their 20s and 30s have a uni degree. But not … in the outer suburbs … not in our regions. And the accord is about changing that,” Mr Clare said. Although the report was welcomed by most universities, Australian National University higher education expert Andrew Norton warned the attendance target meant that students with an ATAR of only 45 would be going to university,<br/>
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“Historically most students with ATARs below 50 don’t go,” Professor Norton writes in The Australian. “Those who do, face a high risk of dropping out, and if they finish a reduced chance of getting a well-paid job. Nobody should be encouraged to take courses that probably won’t leave them better off.”<br/>
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While most of the recommendations are uncosted, Australia’s three wealthiest universities – Sydney, Melbourne and Monash – have slammed a key proposal to tax university income and redistribute resources from richer institutions to poorer ones.<br/>
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The report calls for all universities to pay an impost on “untied” revenue they earn through their own efforts, including international student fees, unsubsidised domestic student fees, interest and investment income, and business earnings.<br/>
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The tax, which will fall mainly on universities with high international student income, will contribute half of a $10bn investment in the Higher Education Future Fund, to pay for university infrastructure including campus buildings and student accommodation. The $5bn raised in tax would be matched by the government.<br/>
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Monash University vice-chancellor Sharon Pickering said the future fund plan would interfere with universities’ ability to deliver on the accord review’s goals of increasing numbers of disadvantaged students and building the workforce skills needed in a modern economy.<br/>
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University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said he was concerned by the proposal. “A new tax on universities will weaken Australia’s current and future productivity, innovative potential and prosperity,” he said.<br/>
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University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who is also chair of the Group of Eight universities which benefit most from international student fees, said the future fund tax plan “would hurt our reputation and our capacity to attract international students”.<br/>
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The report made no recommendations on the level of the tax but said it should only commence once a new university funding system was in place and should cease when $5bn had been raised.<br/>
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It would mainly affect five of the Group of Eight universities which have large numbers of high fee paying Chinese students – Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW and Queensland.<br/>
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Western Sydney University vice-chancellor Barney Glover, a member of the accord review panel, said the fund was “important future proofing for the sector” but there was “work to do on design and timing”.<br/>
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On Sunday Mr Clare said he had an open mind on the tax and the future fund, and would decide over the next weeks and months. “There are some universities who hate it, there are other universities who love it,” he told the ABC.<br/>
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The review called on the government to reduce the high fees student pay in some subjects, and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates. The review says high university fees of over $16,000 a year in some fields – including humanities, communications, and other society and culture subjects such as human movement – should be reduced.<br/>
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It also urged reforms to HECS to ease the effect high inflation has on increasing the amount students owe and to reduce the financial impact on HECS debtors when their income first hits the loan repayment threshold.<br/>
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The report says banks lending practices should be reviewed so people don’t have their home loan borrowing capacity unduly affected by HECS debt.<br/>
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The review panel, headed by former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane, makes 47 recommendations for reforming tertiary education, aimed at dramatically increasing the number of Australians who continue education after finishing school.<br/>
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The review recommends a goal of having 80 per cent of working age Australians with at least one tertiary qualification (vocational or higher education) by 2050 compared to 60 per cent at the moment.<br/>
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It urges the government to set an achievement target of having 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds holding a bachelor degree or above by 2050, compared to 45 per cent now. This will require a doubling of commonwealth supported university places for domestic students from 860,000 in 2022 to 1.8 million in 2050.<br/>
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The review says universities should get more government funding for educating students with higher needs, such as those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, from regional and remote areas, and Indigenous students.<br/>
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The review also calls for more innovative types of courses such as micro-credentials and degree apprenticeships, payments to students for compulsory internships, free university preparatory courses, higher living allowances for needy students, better recognition of prior learning for people starting qualifications, and a “jobs broker” to help students find part-time jobs while they are studying in the area of their course.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/low-bar-to-entry-under-university-reform/news-story/133b1ab82dbb8828f74b1ef0a02da0fb">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/low-bar-to-entry-under-university-reform/news-story/133b1ab82dbb8828f74b1ef0a02da0fb</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-77643725305505247132024-02-25T23:14:00.002+13:002024-02-25T23:14:19.392+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Reflections on the College Admissions Process</b><br/>
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In the past two years, I’ve felt my life becoming a collection of useful and beautiful images. I spend early mornings on boats in the Chicago River. I run into Lake Michigan in the winter’s snow. I’m given a private dinner and the chance to ask questions to a journalist persecuted by the Russian state. One Friday night, I write a short play about humans and fish people in love and see it performed by talented actors the next day. I am surrounded by stone arches and nineteen-year-olds who love poetry.<br/>
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There’s a certain swagger I’ve attained here at an “elite university,” a certain pep in my step now that I feel I’ve become a person worth watching. Students here wear our school colors in our hometowns, contemplate solipsism at “the low IQ of the American population” on flights (as posted on the institution-specific anonymous social platform Sidechat), feel special dancing on the knife’s edge of self-importance and conviction to create change and actualize the potential for which we were chosen. We’re made of our experiences; currently, I owe mine to the institution where I live and learn.<br/>
<br/>
Dispatches from the outside remind me that it wasn’t easy to get here. Claire spoke to me during a free period between two Advanced Placement Classes in her high school’s library. Claire is from my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, and she and I worked together the past few summers. I’d remembered her as precocious and kind–patient with the kids and always carrying a novel. Now, she’s a senior at one of the top private high schools in North Carolina and going through the college process herself.<br/>
<br/>
I told her on the phone that I was staring at a bust of Walt Whitman, sitting on the landing by a library as well. It had been a long morning, and I struggled to form coherent sentences on my first tries. Claire had no such difficulties, even in expressing feelings of stress. Her voice was caring and articulate.<br/>
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“Last night, after cross country practice and homework, it was 10:30 or 11 and I decided I needed to finish my Duke supp[lemental]. I woke up this morning and tried to go for a run and thought, this is not happening.” She confided in me that she was applying to Duke under the binding early decision program, but that no one had told her how difficult it would be to balance a senior-year course load with college applications. Though she had reservations about her choice to commit to one school so early, she felt it was an opportunity she couldn’t waste. She had so much to say that my hands began to cramp while typing it all up.<br/>
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“You have the golden handcuffs, right?” I interrupted. I knew this all too well. Many top universities offer tuition benefits to children of certain employees. At Duke, this amounts to $63,000 per year. Claire’s parents are both tenured faculty at Duke’s hospital, and eligible for the benefit. My own father was, too.<br/>
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“My family has three daughters,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom not having that available to me.” The benefit played a large role in her choice to commit to early decision. “I’m participating in it because you have to, but I find it unethical.”<br/>
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I was also struck by how matter-of-factly she stated that you have to. It implied she understood that admission to an elite college would be the beginning of a life of successes. Claire’s profile is competitive. Beyond her high test scores, challenging classes, and involvement in school extracurriculars, she spent two years as the president of an organization that represents youth interests to the statewide Democratic party. But for high achievers who want to guarantee entry to the next stage of their lives, college admissions is a game whose rules must be followed.<br/>
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Before World War II, American colleges accepted virtually all qualified applicants, which were largely white, Protestant men. After a general shift to expand the demographics of student bodies, average test scores increased and admissions processes purported to focus on students’ academic merit, making the process much more selective. Merit itself is complicated; tests like the SAT are known to be historically biased based on race and class. And beyond academics, students already immersed in elite environments through private high schools and wealthy families often have the ability to do high-level research, train extensively at sports, or create nonprofits to do charity work funded out of their parents’ pockets–factors which allow them to add “diversity” to a school in a way their socioeconomic status most likely doesn’t.<br/>
<br/>
Now, admissions rates hover under ten percent for the most selective schools. All twelve “Ivy-plus” schools offer early admission plans (seven early decision, five early action). While early action programs are non-binding, early decision is its own set of golden handcuffs, requiring students to attend if admitted. Through early decision, selective institutions can accept students that they know will be able to pay and fill a certain portion of a new class early. Claire told me her friends who would need to take out loans to pay for college weren’t considering early decision programs.<br/>
<br/>
After all, most applicants to university don’t have the benefit that Claire and I enjoy. According to a study by Ipsos and Sallie Mae, families paid an average of $28,026 for college in 2022, half of which was out of pocket. And money provides not just the means of attending college, but freedom to strategize one’s way into an elite space.<br/>
<br/>
There’s a wealth of scholarship into the question of who gets in, and why. Economics professors Christopher Avery and Jonathan Levin, from Harvard and Stanford, investigated the function of early admission programs to selective universities in 201o using a game theoretical model. They found that, because elite schools want students who are both academically qualified and enthusiastic to attend, early applications serve to sort students who are not only well-prepared, but judge themselves to be good fits for the university.<br/>
<br/>
Here, everything, from your idealized love for a school, to the story about becoming proud of your racial identity, to the hours you poured into the SAT math section, to the niche musical instrument you play, is a resource to spend. And in the application game, you’re rewarded for thinking this way, since there’s a decided advantage to applying early. Controlling for student variables, early admission programs provide a 20 to 30% increase in chance of admission–a similar boost to a 100-point increase on the SAT. And for elite schools that are outside of HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, the colleges consistently judged to be the most prestigious in America), there’s a competitive effect of attracting top students like Claire who want to hedge their bets.<br/>
<br/>
As Claire suspected, early decision applicants tend to possess more material wealth and more cultural capital–subtler social factors that influence class mobility, like connections and inherited knowledge. Professors of education Julie Park and Kevin Eagan found in 2011 that, for every 1% increase in college-counselor-to-student ratio at a high school, students became 1.3% more likely to enroll through college with an early program. Use of a private college counselor increased the figure by 14%. Claire praised her high school’s counseling department to me, saying that applying early was what they’d decided together was Claire’s best option. The resource confirms what most of us already know, that for college applications, knowledge of the game is a resource we pay to have.<br/>
<br/>
And of course, the stress of the year goes beyond financials.<br/>
<br/>
“I have to turn down dinner party invitations, because I know that I will get grilled.” Claire functions as a big sister figure in her family and her community, a fact she told me she’d emphasized in her common application essay. Her parents’ friends often tried to use her as a test run for their own children, or would question her about her “strategy” rather than her academic interests. I realized I’d been making the same mistake and asked her if she was interested in political science. She laughed.<br/>
<br/>
“I couldn’t stand working in politics anymore. It’s been a special place to be.” Claire continually used the term “special,” colored with a certain darkened tone, to mark difficult experiences. It struck me as a conscious attempt to reframe. Claire had a similar attitude when I asked her about admissions-related content online.<br/>
<br/>
“I find relatable college content funny, but I try to stay away from the advice.” She mentioned a TikTok creator who attends Duke and makes attention-grabbing videos predicting where a certain set of stats and extracurriculars would be accepted. For me, consuming this content was like a job, a daily search for data points into what was an ultimately unknowable context: my own admission. Claire continued.<br/>
<br/>
“It created this feeling of insufficiency in myself that I didn’t want to let hang out.”<br/>
<br/>
“You sound very healthy.” I told her. Claire was similar to me–a high-achieving wealthy white girl with many of the same academic interests, but she seemed to be avoiding the worst of it. What had made one of us spiral into online spaces of stress and the other manage perfectly fine?<br/>
<br/>
“I hope I can stay that way.” It’s only October. Gaining early admission would end Claire’s college process as quickly as possible, but there will be many more months of waiting if not.<br/>
<br/>
More here:<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://medium.com/@josiebarboriak/privileged-information-reflections-on-the-college-admissions-process-a7915768a7ec">https://medium.com/@josiebarboriak/privileged-information-reflections-on-the-college-admissions-process-a7915768a7ec</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> More than 150,000 students sue </b><br/>
<br/>
More than 150,000 students are taking legal action against their universities over online teaching during the pandemic.<br/>
<br/>
They claim education chiefs breached their contractual duty to provide in-person teaching and facilities.<br/>
<br/>
The students want partial refunds of around £5,000 – the typical pre-pandemic difference between the £9,250 in-person degree fee and an online one. It could cost the sector up to £765million.<br/>
<br/>
Their claims are being handled by law firms on a no-win, no-fee basis. The first case, against University College London, is likely to go ahead over the next year. It was paused last summer when a judge gave parties eight months to come to a compromise, but negotiations were unsuccessful.<br/>
<br/>
Canadian Maiah Thompson, 20, spent 16 months unsuccessfully chasing refunds of her £32,100 international fee through existing channels.<br/>
<br/>
She told The Times: 'It wasn't what I was promised. I signed up for a world-famous university, not Zoom lessons.'<br/>
<br/>
UCL vice-provost Professor Kathy Armour said she was disappointed lawyers had 'flatly rejected' alternative resolution routes, adding: 'Throughout the pandemic, we prioritised the health and safety of our whole community and followed Government guidance.'<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13115597/students-sue-universities-online-teaching-pandemic.html">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13115597/students-sue-universities-online-teaching-pandemic.html</a>
</p>
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<b> Co-ed schools ‘healthy’ for teens asserts Australian PM amid elite private schools’ battle of the sexes</b><br/>
<br/>
<i> This is an old, old debate but there is no denying that single sex schools have produced many notable graduates. There is some argument that single-sex schools are better for girls but not for boys. That would pose quite a policy conundrum</i><br/>
<br/>
Mr Albanese praised his old boys’ high school, St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney, for its decision to admit girls from Years 1 to 7, from 2025. “It’s a good thing they’ve made that decision,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“I think there’s something healthy about boys and girls not being separated until they hit uni is my own personal view.<br/>
<br/>
“My son went to a co-ed school, went through the entire system at Dully and what’s now known as Sydney Secondary College, but to me as Leichardt High and Glebe High.<br/>
<br/>
“From my recollection, I remember that there would be a bit of craziness when we’d have school dances with St Bridget’s at Marrickville or Holy Cross at Woollahra, and that probably wasn’t the ideal.‘’<br/>
<br/>
Mr Albanese’s comments came after two elite private schools began a war of the sexes, over plans for Newington College to become a coeducational school after a girls’ headmaster decreed his students would never play sport with girls from a rival college.<br/>
<br/>
Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) Sydney principal Dr Paul Burgis has cautioned that girls in coeducational schools risk being distracted by boys showing off, or joining in popularity contests to impress male classmates.<br/>
<br/>
In a note to PLC parents this month, Dr Burgis gave an assurance that their daughters would never take part in any sporting, public speaking or musical collaboration with the soon-to-be coeducational Newington College.<br/>
<br/>
“Pubescent girls benefit from being able to practice (sic) and play hard and freely, without an awareness of watching eyes,’’ he wrote.<br/>
<br/>
“No coeducational school is allowed to compete in the sport, speech or cultural programs with IGSA (Independent Girls’ Schools Association) schools.<br/>
<br/>
“I note this because if Newington is to become a coeducational school, it will need to look much further afield than the IGSA schools for its sport, public speaking and musical collaboration.’’<br/>
<br/>
The February 8 email refers parents to a link to a longer missive Dr Burgis wrote in 2022, when Newington College announced its divisive plan to become a coeducational school.<br/>
<br/>
Plans by the 161-year-old Uniting Church boys’ school to admit girls has upset an influential “old boys’’ network.<br/>
<br/>
Some “Old Newingtonians’’ have even withdrawn their bequests to the school in protest.<br/>
<br/>
Dr Burgis’s original missive – which was circulated among Old Newingtonians yesterday – noted that a successful co-ed school “needs to have a majority female population’’.<br/>
<br/>
“I hold this view because in your average group of boys, some will be likely to take on the role of gaining attention by acting counter to what it is the class is trying to achieve,’’ he wrote.<br/>
<br/>
“This may be outwardly disruptive behaviour, or it may be attention-seeking behaviour.<br/>
<br/>
“It could have the purpose of creating laughter or fun.<br/>
<br/>
“Girls are more likely to support the cultural project of the classroom, and would prefer to settle quickly, to be able to listen well, and to talk through any difficulties they might have.<br/>
<br/>
“The needs of girls can easily be set aside in a coeducational setting.’’<br/>
<br/>
The principal of PLC – which charges $42,000 a year in tuition fees for senior students – wrote that “girls learn better in single sex schools’’.<br/>
<br/>
He said the “toughest school for girls’’ is one with a “male-oriented culture’’.<br/>
<br/>
“Is it ethically a good idea to introduce girls because it could benefit boys?’’ he wrote.<br/>
<br/>
“Why … would a highly successful school for boys, with long waiting lists, choose to go coeducational?<br/>
<br/>
“They must have arrived at the belief that something in the culture of the boys is better if girls are about.<br/>
<br/>
“The change is being driven by a perception about boys, rather than the needs of girls.’’<br/>
<br/>
Dr Burgis wrote that “having boys about is an opportunity for distraction’’. “Some girls will seek to be ‘popular’ with the boys. “Others will feel the need to respond to this.’’<br/>
<br/>
Dr Burgis wrote that “it is easy for some of us males, when relaxing, to take up quite a bit of room on the lounge’’.<br/>
<br/>
“On average, we will take up more lounge space more often than our sisters,’’ he wrote. “The effect is that they will have to accommodate us. “In a girls school, girls get a comfortable seat on the lounge without even having to ask.’’<br/>
<br/>
Dr Burgis yesterday told The Australian that his memos to parents should not be mistaken for “us seeking to tell a different independent school what they should do’’.<br/>
<br/>
“Of course as a school which believes wholeheartedly in the education of girls in a single sex environment, PLC Sydney will communicate strongly and positively about the advantages of a girls only education to our families and the broader community,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“We will also explain how girls only sporting programs work.’’<br/>
<br/>
A Newington College spokeswoman declined to comment on the rival school’s critique.<br/>
<br/>
The Newington College website shows that it never intended to join the girls’-only IGSA sporting contests, but plans for girls to compete in the Independent Sporting Association (ISA) contests with co-ed schools Barker, Redlands and St Andrews.<br/>
<br/>
Newington College, which charges up to $42,000 a year, will admit the first girls to preparatory and Year 5 students in 2026, but will wait until 2028 to admit the first female high school students to Years 7 and 11 until 2028.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/newington-college-coed-plan-sparks-elite-private-schools-battle-of-the-sexes/news-story/233b905036c797f7d3f6ae633f0f771b">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/newington-college-coed-plan-sparks-elite-private-schools-battle-of-the-sexes/news-story/233b905036c797f7d3f6ae633f0f771b</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-10737164443995676442024-02-22T20:58:00.002+13:002024-02-22T20:58:33.310+13:00<br><br/>
<b> SCOTUS’s skittishness on race-based admissions suggests the left’s intimidation is working</b><br/>
<br/>
The left’s drive to intimidate the Supreme Court is working: Just witness the justices’ decision to blink on an open-and-shut racial-discrimination case.<br/>
<br/>
On Tuesday, the court declined to take on the question of race-based admissions at specialized high schools, effectively OK’ing policies that discriminate against Asian-American students.<br/>
<br/>
Parents brought the case, Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, after Fairfax County, Va., rewrote the rules for entry to elite Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology — ditching a process that relied mainly on race-blind standardized testing for one that auto-admitted students from each of the local middle schools and also considered factors like socioeconomic status.<br/>
<br/>
The school claimed the new policies were “race neutral,” but communication between school officials and board members made it clear that increasing racial diversity (by decreasing the number of Asian-American students) was a primary goal of the change.<br/>
<br/>
And, in fact, the change dropped Asian-American admissions from 70% to about 54% of the freshman class.<br/>
<br/>
This cuts straight against the high court’s ruling in two college-admission cases (centered on Harvard and the University of North Carolina) last year, which ordered a complete end to race-based quotas, with strong language about not making up excuses for continued discrimination.<br/>
<br/>
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a scathing dissent to the court’s decision to not to take up the Virginia case, saying that the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in the school’s favor “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”<br/>
<br/>
Correct. So why did Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett take a dive?<br/>
<br/>
Maybe they didn’t want to risk another controversial decision in a federal election year, after the Supremes’ strikedown of Roe v. Wade became a huge Democratic rallying cry in the 2022 midterms.<br/>
<br/>
And never mind that while elites fumed over the college-admissions rulings, the majority of Americans, 68%, said the decision was “mostly a good thing.”<br/>
<br/>
But perhaps the left’s long-term drive to delegitimize the court has the justices worried.<br/>
<br/>
That includes physical intimidations like the protests outside justices’ homes in the runup to the Roe reversal, as well hysterical smears — of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmations, and bogus ethics complaints against Justice Thomas.<br/>
<br/>
Not to mention the 2021 drive to pack the court with new liberal members.<br/>
<br/>
The left’s message: If SCOTUS won’t give us what we want, there will be hell to pay.<br/>
<br/>
Alito and Thomas deserve kudos for standing up to the bullies; too bad they seem to be standing alone.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/opinion/scotus-skittishness-on-race-based-admissions-shows-the-lefts-intimidation-is-working/">https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/opinion/scotus-skittishness-on-race-based-admissions-shows-the-lefts-intimidation-is-working/</a>
</p>
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<b> Chairwoman Foxx on Biden Transferring Billions in Student Loan Debt to Taxpayers</b><br/>
<br/>
Education and the Workforce Committee:<br/>
<br/>
WASHINGTON – Today, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) issued the following statement in response to the Biden administration transferring $1.2 billion in student loan debt to taxpayers as President Biden continues to implement his radical income-driven repayment (IDR) rule—known as “Savings on a Valuable Education (SAVE)” plan:<br/>
<br/>
“If President Biden spent half as much time working to address the root causes of our broken student loan system as he does peddling his illegal free college agenda, college costs would be lower, the student loan repayment process would be simpler, and students and families would be able to fill out the FAFSA.<br/>
<br/>
“Unfortunately, Biden believes that more government dependence means more votes come election day—and as a result—has focused his time and energy on harmful initiatives to bolster his ratings.<br/>
<br/>
“Don’t be fooled by this administration’s so-called free college agenda. It means less money in the pockets of hardworking taxpayers, more debt, and a continuing decline of an already failing student loan system.”<br/>
<br/>
Biden’s SAVE scheme:<br/>
<br/>
Is estimated to cost as much as $559 billion – making it the most expensive regulation in history and more than doubling the cost of the current IDR program.<br/>
<br/>
Exacerbates the problems of rising college costs and excessive borrowing.<br/>
<br/>
Subsidizes some graduate students’ loans more than what low-income households receive in federal housing assistance.<br/>
Guarantees that up to 80 percent of undergraduate student loan borrowers will never repay their loans fully.<br/>
<br/>
More on Republican solutions to lower college costs:<br/>
<br/>
Last month the Committee passed H.R. 6951, the College Cost Reduction Act. The bill includes bipartisan proposals to tackle widespread concern that the cost of postsecondary education has become insurmountable for too many Americans. This legislation addresses the issues of low completion rates, unaffordable student debt, and the inflated cost of obtaining a college degree. Specifically, H.R. 6951:<br/>
Ensures information about costs and return on investment is clear, accessible, and personalized for prospective students and families.<br/>
<br/>
Holds institutions financially responsible for overpriced degrees that leave students with unaffordable debt.<br/>
Provides targeted relief to struggling borrowers rather than blanket bailouts for those who don’t need them.<br/>
Funds colleges based on student outcomes and lifts excessive regulations that further increase costs to families.<br/>
<br/>
Press release<br/>
<br/>
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<br/>
<b> Harvard condemns anti-Semitic image circulated by student and faculty groups</b><br/>
<br/>
Harvard University issued a campuswide message Tuesday evening from its interim president condemning an antisemitic cartoon that was circulated – and then disavowed – by two student groups and a faculty organisation.<br/>
<br/>
“Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us,” wrote Alan Garber, the university’s interim president.<br/>
<br/>
“The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted.”<br/>
<br/>
The latest controversy at the prestigious university comes after a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism that played a role in the last president’s ouster, as well as recently launched federal investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim harassment on a number of campuses, including Harvard.<br/>
<br/>
The cartoon was featured in a recent post on Instagram attempting to link the Black and Palestinian “liberation movements.” The cartoon depicted a hand etched with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the necks of what appear to be the Black boxer and activist Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was a longtime president of Egypt. The three groups that posted the image issued apologies after it sparked criticism on social media.<br/>
<br/>
“The inclusion of the offensive caricature was an unprompted, painful error – a combination of ignorance and inadequate oversight,” wrote the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard’s African and African-American Resistance Organization in a joint statement. The groups said the cartoon had come from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an activist organisation from the 1960s.<br/>
<br/>
“We apologise for the hurt that these images have caused and do not condone them in any way,” wrote the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, which had reposted the image. “Harvard FSJP stands against all forms of hate and bigotry including antisemitism.” Walter Johnson, professor of History and of African and African-American Studies, resigned as a faculty adviser to the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.<br/>
<br/>
“Like many others, I was shocked and dismayed by the image,” he wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “I have stepped down from both my role as faculty adviser to the PSC and FSJP. I remain supportive of the work of those organisations in calling attention to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. My conversations with my students and colleagues, however, are private, and I won’t comment on them.”<br/>
<br/>
The university said in a statement Monday that it is reviewing the matter and referring it to the Harvard College Administrative Board, suggesting that disciplinary action could follow.<br/>
<br/>
Not everyone was satisfied with the apologies. Harvard’s Jewish Law Students Association issued a statement saying that the post of the cartoon was shared by several other Harvard student groups.<br/>
<br/>
“At a time when antisemitic incidents are at an all-time high and Holocaust denial is spreading both in the U.S. and abroad, Harvard faculty and students must understand and be held to account for the tremendous consequences of proliferating insidious tropes,” the group wrote. “Merely acknowledging that their content was ‘antiquated’ or removing their post does not remedy the harm they caused by lending credibility to antisemitic falsehoods.” Harvard has endured widespread scrutiny since some critics and donors accused the former president of not swiftly condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and not adequately addressing antisemitism on campus. In a December congressional hearing, its then-president, Claudine Gay, was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. She responded that it could, depending on the context. Gay resigned in January after she was later accused of plagiarism.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-condemns-antisemitic-image-circulated-by-student-and-faculty-groups-8ada8aae">https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-condemns-antisemitic-image-circulated-by-student-and-faculty-groups-8ada8aae</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-86212894125674512542024-02-21T11:56:00.000+13:002024-02-22T00:09:49.381+13:00<br> <br/>
<b> University of Chichester students launch discrimination claim after 'decolonising' black history degree is axed</b><br/>
<br/>
University students have launched a discrimination claim after a 'decolonising' black history course was scrapped. They say the University of Chichester breached the Equality Act as the course was created to encourage more black students into academia.<br/>
<br/>
The History of Africa and the African Diaspora Master's by Research (MRes) was set up in 2017 to 'decolonise the curriculum'. It was led by Professor Hakim Adi, who was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.<br/>
<br/>
Labelled the first African-British history professor in the UK, Professor Adi said the axing was an 'attack' on black history.<br/>
<br/>
He added yesterday: 'As a result of the MRes, we encouraged many black students to embark on PhD research. We established one of the largest cohorts of black postgraduate history students in the country. 'These students have been left without appropriate supervision and their studies have been completely disrupted.'<br/>
<br/>
Figures in the curriculum included Haitian independence leader Toussaint Louverture, South African human rights activist Alice Kinloch, and Amy Ashwood Garvey, co-founder of Jamaica's Universal Negro Improvement Association and wife of Marcus Garvey.<br/>
<br/>
Last summer, the university announced the course would be suspended because too few students signed up, which led to Professor Adi losing his job. It said the course was financially unviable to take on new applicants but existing students could continue.<br/>
<br/>
However, the 14 students taking action say they are not taught by a specialist and have launched a 'letter before action', alleging discrimination and breach of contract.<br/>
<br/>
Jacqueline McKenzie, of lawyers Leigh Day, which is representing the students, said the axing of the course 'stopped our clients' academic careers in their tracks', branding the decision 'clear discrimination'.<br/>
<br/>
Jabari Osaze, an MRes student said: 'Chichester should have focused its efforts on recruiting more students like me but instead it seems they undervalued the programme.<br/>
<br/>
'They have treated their students and the world-renowned expert historian who ran the programme extremely poorly.'<br/>
<br/>
An online petition has gained 14,000 signatures and an open letter has been signed by more than 300 academics and staff.<br/>
<br/>
In a linked case, the Black Equity Organisation is also bringing legal action and has issued a judicial review.<br/>
<br/>
A university spokesman said: 'The MRes programme has not been terminated for existing students but is suspended to new applicants pending a review.<br/>
<br/>
'PhD students study individual programmes of research and should not be conflated with the MRes programme.<br/>
<br/>
'The university is committed to ensuring that all existing students are able to complete their studies successfully and that alternative teaching and supervisory arrangements are in place for these students.'<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13106163/University-Chichester-students-launch-discrimination-claim-decolonising-black-history-degree-axed.html">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13106163/University-Chichester-students-launch-discrimination-claim-decolonising-black-history-degree-axed.html</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> California substitute teacher left elementary school students in tears after watching ‘inappropriate images’ in class</b><br/>
<br/>
A California substitute teacher was removed from his classroom after viewing “inappropriate images” in front of his elementary students — a traumatic event that left several students in tears, officials said.<br/>
<br/>
West Covina Unified School District Superintendent Emy Flores said that the disturbing incident occurred sometime before noon Friday, shortly before a concerned parent called Cameron Elementary School demanding to know why her son had called her sobbing.<br/>
<br/>
When the school’s principal Slyvia Fullerton checked on the boy, she instead found “several students crying,” Flores said in a statement Sunday.<br/>
<br/>
The substitute teacher — who has not been named — was ordered to leave the classroom while Fullerton tried to reassure the traumatized children before ultimately bringing them to the on-site Mental Wellness Room.<br/>
<br/>
According to the kids, the man was watching “naked people” on his phone, which was blatantly displayed within the young students’ line of vision, exasperated parents told NBC 4.<br/>
<br/>
Parent Stacy Mathews claimed many of the students huddled together in a corner because they felt uncomfortable. “He wouldn’t let them go to the bathroom,” Mathews told the station.<br/>
<br/>
After learning what had happened, Flores immediately alerted district administrators, Child Protective Services and local law enforcement to investigate the perverted claims.<br/>
<br/>
As of Wednesday, there have been no arrests in the case, but the West Covina Police Department said a probe into the incident is ongoing. “We want to reassure the community that the police department is treating these allegations with the utmost seriousness. An investigation is currently underway to thoroughly examine the situation and gather all the necessary information,” Chief Richard Bell said in a statement.<br/>
<br/>
Flores said the substitute teacher had passed a rigorous background check without alerting district officials to any red flags.<br/>
<br/>
Dozens of parents protested outside the elementary school Tuesday, demanding that law enforcement arrest the substitute teacher.<br/>
<br/>
“When we found out on Saturday that he wasn’t arrested, [my daughter] was scared thinking that he was going to come back and come back to get them for tattling, is how she worded it,” Mathews said.<br/>
<br/>
West Covina is a suburban city located roughly 19 miles east of Downtown Los Angeles.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/us-news/california-substitute-teacher-watched-inappropriate-images-in-front-of-elementary-kdis/">https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/us-news/california-substitute-teacher-watched-inappropriate-images-in-front-of-elementary-kdis/</a>
</p>
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<b> ‘We made the wrong decisions’: COVID-era mass school closures condemned</b><br/>
<br/>
Mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children, top education experts say.<br/>
<br/>
Governments have failed to examine the fallout from one of the most far-reaching decisions prompted by COVID-19, which disrupted the schooling of millions of students and resulted in an attendance crisis and persistent behavioural issues.<br/>
<br/>
A panel of pre-eminent Australian education experts has flagged the profound impacts that school closures during COVID-19 have had on students’ education and wellbeing.<br/>
<br/>
They called for a plan for future closures that puts the long and short-term needs of children at the centre of policy decision-making.<br/>
<br/>
The Sydney Morning Herald convened experts on education and child social development to assess the impact of COVID on students after the federal government failed to include the decision to close schools in its independent inquiry into how the nation managed the pandemic.<br/>
<br/>
They included the chair of the NSW education regulator, Peter Shergold, and the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.<br/>
<br/>
Schools in NSW switched to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. Strict infection controls continued to interrupt learning and social interaction for months on end.<br/>
<br/>
The COVID fallout: Education<br/>
<br/>
This month marks four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised.<br/>
<br/>
The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we plan to ask tough questions over the coming months about the pandemic’s impact on education, health, border closures and lockdowns and policing. This is the first of our three-part series looking at the impact of COVID on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining the wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption.<br/>
<br/>
The panellists warned the aftershocks of the decision to close schools are still being felt in classrooms, playgrounds and homes. Some of the worst aspects were the skyrocketing truancy rate, school refusal and significant issues with student discipline and distraction in the classroom, and self-regulation in the playground.<br/>
<br/>
Shergold, a former top public servant who led an independent review into the pandemic in 2022, said the lingering effects of school shutdowns on students, teachers and parents underscored the importance of scrutinising unilateral decisions by state governments to mandate remote learning.<br/>
<br/>
In September, the federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into the pandemic response, but school closures are not included in the terms of reference. Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has previously joined health experts in urging the inquiry to examine the social damage and repercussions of long periods of remote learning.<br/>
<br/>
“The danger of school closures, which we always knew, was that it was going to accentuate disadvantage,” said Shergold. “After the closures in early 2020, we made the wrong policy decisions about closing school systems.”<br/>
<br/>
In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in schools for more than five months. Schools were shut down between March and May in 2020, and then again in 2021 from July to the end of October. Hundreds of schools and childcare centres were closed again in the following months.<br/>
<br/>
Unlike in Victoria, there was minimal supervision at schools for students, but attendance was discouraged. Shergold said the unity of national cabinet fractured as state governments forged ahead with decisions to shut schools, despite the federal government urging parents to send their children to classes.<br/>
<br/>
State decisions were often politically driven, some panellists said, ignoring the risk of long-lasting impacts on young children and teenagers, especially the most disadvantaged students who were most affected by the closures.<br/>
<br/>
“It was clearly the Commonwealth position to keep school systems open,” Shergold said. “It was states that were unpersuaded, and that’s why this present inquiry seems so bizarre that we’re not going to address their policy responses. It’s a crucial part of the story and ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic.”<br/>
<br/>
He said early in 2020 there “was a fog of war, and there was ill preparation – in Australia between federal and state governments – for a pandemic”, noting it was understandable schools closed in the first months.<br/>
<br/>
But after evidence emerged that children were less likely to spread the virus, and schools were not transmission hotspots, the system-wide closures were unwarranted, he said.<br/>
<br/>
“We had Treasury pleading with us not to shut school systems. Part of the issue was that parents started to voluntarily withdraw their children from schools, and they were voting with their feet ... I think NSW reacted to that,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
The state government also faced persistent pressure from the NSW Teachers Federation to shut down in-person classes, leaving minimal staffing to support essential frontline services workers. Some of Sydney’s private schools began to defy official advice and close, putting pressure on other systems to follow suit.<br/>
<br/>
The advice provided by chief health officers was that attending school represented a low health risk to students, and studies in 2021 reaffirmed transmission between children in schools was minimal.<br/>
<br/>
Hollonds agreed the first closure early in the pandemic, which lasted seven weeks, was unavoidable, but the longer closure of 2021 was unnecessary.<br/>
<br/>
“Maybe they should have only been short term, where there was a ‘hot-spot’, not the 15 weeks we saw across all of NSW,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
She said the public debate over school closures not only ignored the needs of children, but demonised them as “germy super-spreaders”. “It felt Dickensian, some of that discourse,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
Shergold noted that the shift to online learning was implemented well across systems and schools, and effort was made to address the digital divide. But he emphasised that after the first mass closures a more targeted approach should have been taken to only close individual schools when needed.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-made-the-wrong-decisions-covid-era-mass-school-closures-condemned-20240214-p5f521.html">https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-made-the-wrong-decisions-covid-era-mass-school-closures-condemned-20240214-p5f521.html</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-30903761530562554982024-02-20T22:58:00.001+13:002024-02-20T22:58:05.942+13:00<br><br/>
<br/>
<b> Edinburgh University’s new rector must save it from gender ideology</b><br/>
<br/>
Simon Fanshawe has been installed as the rector of Edinburgh University. The arrival of the comedian and Stonewall dissident to the post will hopefully bring to an end a dismal episode in the life of one of Britain’s greatest academic institutions. But don’t bank on it. The campaign by transgender activists and others to uninstall Mr Fanshawe is already underway – and they know what they are doing.<br/>
<br/>
For the past decade a collection of campus zealots has been allowed to run rampant in this supposed seat of higher learning. They have threatened the health and livelihoods of lecturers and banned freedom of speech – often with the tacit acquiescence of the university authorities.<br/>
<br/>
One of Mr Fanshawe’s predecessors as rector, the Labour Party activist and feminist Ann Henderson, became afraid to appear on campus following her intimidation by trans activists, annoyed that she wouldn’t utter the dogma that ‘transwomen are women’. With the endorsement of the University and College Union (UCU) these activists have been allowed to prevent the showing of films like ‘Adult Human Female’, which was regarded as transphobic because it questions gender ideology. James Kirkup shed light on this in The Spectator as the editor of Edinburgh’s student newspaper wrote about why she stood by her decision not to cover the film’s screening.<br/>
<br/>
This academic institution has been invaded by the curious quasi-religious belief that people can change sex by an act of the imagination.<br/>
<br/>
Liberal minded academics like the social scientist Dr Neil Thin have faced attempts to hound them out of their jobs. In Thin’s case, it was for simply making wry observations about student groups claiming to be anti-racist yet holding events that excluded white people. Dr Thin also criticised the lamentable decision by the University Court to cancel the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume on the basis of an allegedly racist footnote to an 18th-century essay.<br/>
<br/>
At the height of the recent campus culture war, university authorities shamefully agreed to rename the Hume Tower after they received a petition from students claiming that it offended the international student body. They couldn’t bear the pain of attending lectures in a building dedicated to such a racist, even though Hume was a lifelong opponent of racism. They were reportedly going to rename it the Julius Nyerere tower, until someone pointed out that the Tanzanian dictator and Edinburgh alumnus was a rampant homophobe. It is now called after its address, 40 George Square – which was built in 1766 and bears the name of the monarch, George III, who vastly extended the British Empire. It would take a stone not to laugh.<br/>
<br/>
Mr Fanshawe will find no shortage of comic material in Edinburgh University campus but the campaign against him is no joke. The black-balling bigots are well versed in the arts of covert intimidation and until now have gone largely unchallenged by a supine university administration that seems incapable of defending its own staff let alone freedom of speech.<br/>
<br/>
So who are these people? Edinburgh University Labour Students have leapt to condemn Fanshawe’s election because of his alleged views on transgenderism. An open letter has been set up by an anonymous user on Organise.com that accuses the new rector of being a transphobe and a bigot.<br/>
<br/>
Fanshawe is neither. Nor has he threatened ‘the legitimacy of trans people’ as has been alleged by Jonathan MacBride of the University’s staff pride network. Fanshawe was one of the founders of the LGBT campaign group Stonewall and has been a lifelong campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities. His crime however has been to be openly critical of Stonewall’s insistence on promoting the idea that ‘transwomen are women’ and demonising anyone who disagrees. He has also spoken in favour of ‘women’s sex-based rights and protections’, rather in the manner of the author JK Rowling who has been one of the biggest donors to the University in the past. Certainly, the group Edinburgh Academics for Academic Freedom can hardly believe what has happened: ‘We’re over the moon’<br/>
<br/>
The fact that the lecturers’ trade union, the UCU, has supported the curbs on free speech and thought in Edinburgh University, for example with the Adult Human Female showing, tells you all you need to know. This academic institution has been invaded by the curious quasi-religious belief that people can change sex by an act of the imagination.<br/>
<br/>
I am myself a former elected rector of Edinburgh University and I have been bewildered and appalled at what has happened to this institution since I stood down in 2012. I could never have imagined that this flight into obscurantism could have happened here of all places. But as Sir Tom Devine, emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh, said: ‘A sinister culture had been allowed to develop in Scotland’s greatest university.’ Hopefully Fanshawe, an open-minded rector and chair of the university court, will be able to guide this addled institution back to something resembling sanity.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/edinburgh-universitys-new-rector-must-save-it-from-gender-ideology/">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/edinburgh-universitys-new-rector-must-save-it-from-gender-ideology/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Drag as Subversive Education</b><br/>
<br/>
One element of the LGBTQ+ assault on childhood is Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), in which children are entertained by fat men dressed as prostitutes. These events have become common across the country in libraries, bookstores, schools, and (God help us) church.<br/>
<br/>
Since no child has ever asked to be read to by a freakish man bursting out of a spandex dress, woke parents presumably expose their children to DQSH to advertise their own progressive bona fides. Drag is, indisputably, “adult” entertainment for a hardcore sexual subculture, but the woke narrative maintains that the raunch is toned down for the kiddies. “It’s innocent fun!” “Kids love dressing up in bright colors and glitter!” “There’s no explicit stuff, so what’s the harm?” “It’s an entertaining family atmosphere!”<br/>
<br/>
But Big Drag (yes, DQSH has turned into an industry) is a bit more honest about what’s going on than are the welcoming venues and complicit parents. The home website crows that DQSH “captures . . . the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids . . . unabashedly queer role models. . . .” Presenting gender fluidity as an established fact and offering “queer role models” to children suggests that the goal isn’t just to entertain but to accomplish something that starts with “gr” and ends with “ooming.”<br/>
<br/>
And Big Drag’s aspirations go far beyond the occasional event at the local library. Academic literature from the realm of K-12 education now argues that drag should be considered a valid part of a child’s schooling. That literature, buried in journals the average person will never read, removes any doubt about what DSQH’s “family-friendly fun” is actually up to.<br/>
<br/>
A good example of the academic infusion of drag into schooling is a 2021 paper published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry and entitled “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” The paper is co-authored by a Canadian education professor and a New York drag queen who goes by “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” (Yes, that’s the name under which he published this supposedly professional paper.)<br/>
<br/>
This paper promotes “queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education” and describes drag as one of these components. Drag, it argues, is a way to teach children to be transgressive, to break rules and deconstruct norms. DQSH is thus part of what the paper advocates as “drag pedagogy” that “offers one model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to live queerly” (emphasis in the original). “This approach,” the paper says, “can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBG.”<br/>
<br/>
So drag helps children learn not just to empathize with people who identify as LGBT, but to live that way themselves. Further, this shattering of norms must extend beyond sex roles and behaviors to disruption of the racist, white-supremacist capitalist system itself (what the paper calls “coloniality and racial capitalism” that imposes “gender normativity” on children who just want to be free – to “live queerly”).<br/>
<br/>
The paper repeatedly emphasizes drag as a vehicle for deconstructing all aspects of normal society. While learning through play is a staple of early-childhood pedagogy, this paper argues that drag is an even better form of educational play because “it ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible! . . . [D]rag is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self-fashioning.” The drag queen’s presence announces that the focus will be on “bending and breaking the rules” with “a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred.” He will “foster collective unruliness” so that children will learn “strategic defiance” of all limits and norms.<br/>
<br/>
The paper also promotes what it calls “camp curriculum” – “embrac[ing] failure and shame.” For example, the picture book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish “encourages kids to move their hips in ways often coded as effeminate.” (This book was written by Lil Miss Hot Mess, of whose literary talents there apparently is no end.) And drag has a strong element of critical theory, encouraging the analysis and deconstruction of culture through a queer lens.<br/>
<br/>
An arresting admission in the DQSH paper occurs as a brief mention in the Conclusion section. Normal people are constantly assured that children are safe at LGBTQ events such as DQSH and pride parades because those events are designed to be “family-friendly” (see here, here, and here, for example). Is DQSH in fact family-friendly?<br/>
<br/>
"It may be that DQSH is 'family friendly,' in the sense that t is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is 'family friendly' in the sense of 'family' as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street," the paper offered.<br/>
<br/>
In other words, DQSH isn’t intended to offer children wholesome entertainment free of sexual imagery or innuendo; rather, it aims to welcome kids into the greater queer “family,” where they can shake off all conventions, norms, and values - including those of their parents. This “old-school queer code” is being used to snooker naïve parents into handing over their children to a very different, and very dark, world.<br/>
<br/>
From the queens’ point of view, perhaps the greatest advantage of DQSH is the simplest: It gives them physical access to innocent children. The paper agrees that “many queens reflect that DQSH allows them to build relationships with young people that otherwise might not be possible.” What is meant by “building relationships” is left unsaid.<br/>
<br/>
If woke parents understood what DQSH advocates are actually trying to accomplish, they might let their kids spend their free time playing in the back yard. But given the cultural lure of appearing more progressive than thou, maybe not. In any event, DQSH has a mission, and that mission extends far beyond bright colors and glitter.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/janerobbins/2024/02/20/drag-as-subversive-education-n2635455">https://townhall.com/columnists/janerobbins/2024/02/20/drag-as-subversive-education-n2635455</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> A Teacher Was Filmed Cross-Dressing at School. Here's What Happened Next</b><br/>
<br/>
A Texas teacher who was filmed cross-dressing at school was placed on administrative leave after a video of his extravagant Valentine’s Day outfit was circulated by Libs of TikTok.<br/>
<br/>
The teacher, Rachmad Tjachyadi, teaches chemistry at Hebron High School in Lewisville.<br/>
<br/>
According to the New York Post, Tjachyadi wore an “all-out pink dress and cowboy hat” on Valentine’s Day at the school. A video of the outfit was posted on X (formerly known as Twitter).<br/>
<br/>
Libs of TikTok claimed that the teacher has a fetish for wearing women’s clothing.<br/>
<br/>
In an email to parents, Hebron Principal Amy Boughton said, “the staff member has been placed on administrative leave while the district reviews the situation.”<br/>
<br/>
“It would be natural for our families to have questions about this situation, but because this is a personnel matter currently under review, there is no additional information the district can share,” Boughton added.<br/>
<br/>
Students at the school have created an online Change.org petition demanding that he be allowed back to school. So far, it has over 12,000 signatures.<br/>
<br/>
"Recently, Mr.Tjachyadi was put on blast on twitter for wearing a pink dress for a spirit day. He is being called a pedophile, among other names, however, this is NOT the case and he is beloved by many students at Hebron. He is a great teacher, he explains chemistry very well and has created a very fun and safe environment for his students. He does not deserve to be defamed and lose his job,” the description stated.<br/>
<br/>
“He has been an inspiration to many students, and has created a space where everyone can feel valued and safe. He is in no way a pedophile or publicizing a "fetish,” it added.<br/>
<br/>
Reportedly, Tjachyadi has been teaching in Texas schools since 2002.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/19/cross-dressing-teacher-placed-on-leave-n2635397">https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/19/cross-dressing-teacher-placed-on-leave-n2635397</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-48190502807993224352024-02-19T22:57:00.002+13:002024-02-19T22:58:06.293+13:00<br><br/>
<b> Texas High School Put Students on Panel to Review Sexually Explicit Books</b><br/>
<br/>
A high school principal in Texas slow-walked a review of nearly 200 books in the school library that parents flagged for sexually explicit material, setting a timetable of 22 years to reconsider them, according to documents and emails obtained by The Daily Signal.<br/>
<br/>
Parents in Llano, Texas, told The Daily Signal that they began expressing concerns to Llano High School’s principal in January 2023 about library books rated “adult” by the publishers. Several of the books include extremely graphic sex scenes.<br/>
<br/>
The parents shared their emails to Llano Principal Scott Patrick with The Daily Signal, which has not been able to verify their authenticity independently. The high school didn’t confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails, which also indicate that Patrick included students on a panel reviewing challenged books.<br/>
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Llano High School serves 529 students in Llano Independent School District, based in Llano, Texas.<br/>
<br/>
On Jan. 17, Bonnie Wallace, the mother of a former student, filed a detailed form, called a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” for the book “Call Me by Your Name” by Andre Aciman, which was available for students to check out of the high school library.<br/>
<br/>
Wallace said the book contains explicit sexual scenes that are unsuitable for distribution to minors by a taxpayer-funded school, such as this one on page 144:<br/>
<br/>
I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard c***… and gently press the soft overripe peach on my c*** till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s a**.<br/>
<br/>
A Texas bill passed in June 2023, the READER Act, requires public schools to remove books that include material that is “sexually explicit, harmful, pervasively vulgar, or educationally unsuitable” from classrooms and libraries accessible to minors. The law reinforces existing Texas Education Agency policy forbidding schools from providing explicit materials to minors.<br/>
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Through January, Wallace filed reports on four other books with similar issues for concerned parents.<br/>
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Patrick didn’t remove the books or respond to the vulgar, sexually explicit paragraphs that Wallace cited in her reports. It appears that the high school’s principal also ignored or disregarded books’ changed statuses as “adult” by publishers and distributors.<br/>
<br/>
The book “A Court of Silver Flames” by Sarah Maas contains multiple scenes in which the narrator describes a character’s request to “f*** me … on this table, on this chair, on every surface in this house.”<br/>
<br/>
Other sexual scenes in Maas’ book are too vulgar for The Daily Signal to print, yet students may read them in Llano High School’s library.<br/>
<br/>
The publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, changed the rating of the Maas’ entire “Court of Thorns and Roses” series from “young adult” to “adult” in September 2020, as Wallace pointed out to Patrick in an email. As of publication of this story, the designation for “A Court of Silver Flames’” remains “young adult” in Llano High School’s library.<br/>
<br/>
In a January 22 email obtained by The Daily Signal, Patrick laid out for Wallace and other parents how the school district would review the cited books. The principal said he anticipated that process would take “roughly 30 days” for each book. His email suggests that the committee would review books one at a time.<br/>
<br/>
Parents have reported 198 books in Llano High School as violating the Texas Education Agency’s regulation and the Texas READER Act. At a rate of nine working months per year, Patrick’s email suggests that the Llano school district would spend over 22.5 years reviewing the cited books.<br/>
<br/>
On Friday, exactly 30 days later, Patrick informed Wallace of the reconsideration committee’s decision on “Call Me by Your Name,” the first of the concerning books in line.<br/>
<br/>
“The reconsideration committee has voted to remove the book from circulation by a vote of 7:0,” the principal wrote.<br/>
<br/>
Patrick didn’t provide a reason in the email for removing the book, nor did he respond to The Daily Signal’s question about why the book remained on the shelves of his school’s library during the review.<br/>
<br/>
The other books with explicit passages, cited in forms shared by parents, appear to remain accessible to students in Llano High School’s library. The Daily Signal sought to confirm this with Patrick and the school district, but neither responded by publication time.<br/>
<br/>
According to Patrick’s emails, the “book reconsideration” committee included students until a lawyer recommended their removal from the process. It isn’t clear when the school district or the high school selected students to review the sexually explicit books, nor how many students of what ages were recruited.<br/>
<br/>
Neither Patrick nor any other administrator in the Llano school district answered The Daily Signal’s questions about how students found out about the book review committee and were added to it, or why Patrick suddenly removed them.<br/>
<br/>
Patrick told Wallace in a Jan. 31 email: “Students were placed on the committee after the district received parental consent for them to participate.”<br/>
<br/>
In a Feb. 6 email to Wallace, Patrick said of the students on the review committee: “Although their participation is allowed by policy, the district determined it is in their best interest to be removed from the process so that they are insulated from any potential controversy.”<br/>
<br/>
The Llano school district did not confirm the authenticity of the emails and forms sent between Patrick and Wallace.<br/>
<br/>
Assuming the emails are authentic, Patrick may have recognized a potential controversy in asking students, some perhaps minors, to read “adult” books with passages detailing sex, gore, and drug use in vulgar fashion.<br/>
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The school district’s 2023-2024 Student Handbook bans the use of “profane language” in class and on clothing, which presumably includes vulgar slang for male and female genitalia and sexual acts.<br/>
<br/>
According to parents, Patrick acknowledged receiving complaints highlighting sexual passages in the books. The principal didn’t explain why he didn’t immediately remove the books from the school library until they had been reviewed, given parents’ concerns.<br/>
<br/>
Parents told The Daily Signal that the books remain available in the school library while under review.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/16/texas-high-school-put-students-on-panel-to-review-sexually-explicit-books/">https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/16/texas-high-school-put-students-on-panel-to-review-sexually-explicit-books/</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> The fight for civilization in higher education</b><br/>
<br/>
Hatred of Western civilization is the bittersweet of the college curriculum. It is an invasive idea that once ensconced in the classroom strangles every other idea in the minds of many students. It reduces the world into a neat division between the Evil West and the Innocent Rest. In this arrangement, the latter maintain their innocence no matter what they do. Hamas is but the latest beneficiary of this indulgence. Montaigne found nobility in his 1590 essay, “Of Cannibals,” in the Brazilians who cooked their enemies for food. Western intellectuals been busy ever since devising excuses for those who prize primitive appetite over civilized rule.<br/>
<br/>
This romancing of the barbaric is helped along by the ease of finding plenty of episodes in the Western past — and present — in which civilization failed to prevent our descent into horrific acts, or worse, the perpetrators of horrors announced they were indeed the agents of civilization. Were the Argives at Troy civilized? The Athenians of the Peloponnesian wars? There is no shortage of savagery in Western history, up through and including slavery, genocide and world war.<br/>
<br/>
So by what stretch do we call ourselves civilized and mean by that something good? That question is the seed of the bittersweet vine that will strangle all education if we let it in.<br/>
<br/>
Therefore, it is best to answer the question. We are civilized because we recognize a sovereign God of justice and mercy. We are civilized because we recognize that the universe is governed by laws that can be discovered through rational inquiry. We are civilized because we have harnessed the powers of literacy and mechanical innovation. We are civilized because we conceive all of humanity as possessing fundamental dignity. All of these are perfectly good answers and, of course, they are all part of endless and unresolved dispute. To be civilized is to take that dispute seriously. Whether we are under God’s laws or a godless nature’s laws; whether we possess spiritual kinship or merely biological affinity; whether we are accidental “winners” by virtue of guns, germs and steel, or the purposeful champions of higher values, we the civilized are always struggling to say what that means.<br/>
<br/>
The uncivilized are those who sneer at the whole idea. They go for the easy answer that civilization is just the exercise of brute power by those in a position to exert it, though they typically disguise their domination by spreading lies to control the minds of those they oppress.<br/>
<br/>
This is, I confess, a hurried lesson in how the anti-civilization forces have gained ground in higher education. Their primary teaching is that Western civilization is a terrible thing, but its terrors can only be seen clearly by those who have learned how to see through the illusions by which it shields itself from critical examination. The purpose of higher education, in this view, is literally to dis-illusion students. They need to acquire sufficient cynicism to free themselves from Western civilization’s constant efforts to raise itself up as good. “Wokeness” is acquired by spitting at those efforts.<br/>
<br/>
Anti-civilization now has a strong grip on most of our colleges and universities. In what I will venture to call the post-Gay era — as in Claudine, not LGBTQ — however, we are seeing some signs of civilization getting back on its feet. The latest of these is a bill introduced in the Utah legislature, SB-226, which would, to quote Stanley Kurtz, “restore the kind of Great Books curriculum centered on Western civilization, American history, and civics that was central to American higher education until the past few decades.”<br/>
<br/>
The bill, the “School of General Education Act,” has a long way to go before becoming law, but as far as I know, it is the first serious attempt in our era by a state legislature to insist that all students in a state’s public university system take a prescribed sequence of courses that will take them through most of Western history from Homer to Hannah Arendt and beyond. Kurtz’s explanation is better than any I can provide, so I will leave that to him. But I should acknowledge that one of my staff at the National Association of Scholars, David Randall, a historian of Western civilization, is among those who drafted a model curriculum that the Utah legislators appear to have studied.<br/>
<br/>
The prime mover of the Utah legislation is Senate education committee chairman John Johnson, who is an economist and a professor at the John M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Senator Johnson’s academic position is worth noting because economics — and his specialty, management information systems — is far enough away from the humanities and (the soft) social sciences to be insulated from the worst of anti-Western hysteria that pervades so much of higher education. Who would have thought that an economist would lead the charge to restore the West? That’s easy. Anybody paying attention.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-fight-for-civilization-in-higher-education">https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-fight-for-civilization-in-higher-education</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive critical race theory</b><br/>
<br/>
Schools are just teaching honest history.<br/>
<br/>
That’s been the lie educators, teachers unions and the mainstream media have parroted for three years in response to the growing chorus of parents of all political stripes asserting schools are indoctrinating the nation’s children in critical race theory and leftist politics.<br/>
<br/>
Now the paper of record concedes we parents were right.<br/>
<br/>
In a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times, “Ethnic Studies Collides With Israel-Hamas War,” education reporter Dana Goldstein exposes the truth about K-12 education.<br/>
<br/>
The article is ostensibly about the blatant antisemitism embedded in California’s ethnic-studies curriculum, which must be in all public high schools by 2025 and a graduation requirement by 2030.<br/>
<br/>
The legislation was pushed, of course, by the 310,000-member-strong California Teachers Association, the largest affiliate of our country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.<br/>
<br/>
As Goldstein reports, pro-Palestinian activism is a core component of the ethnic-studies discipline.<br/>
<br/>
California’s curriculum likens Palestinians to Native Americans, refers to Israel’s founding as “settler colonialism,” categorizes Israeli Jews as “European settlers” and oppressors and harps on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.<br/>
<br/>
Goldstein quotes University of California, Riverside, professor Dylan Rodriguez equating teaching Zionism to teaching creationism and climate-change denialism; he “would analogize” learning about Israel’s creation to “learning the history of slavery.”<br/>
<br/>
While the antisemitism embedded in ethnic studies is newsworthy enough, it’s not the big story here.<br/>
<br/>
In a 2022 white paper, “The Very Foundation of Good Citizenship: The Legal and Pedagogical Case for Culturally Responsive and Racially Inclusive Public Education for All Students,” the NEA defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of the United States’ diverse racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic studies helps foster cross-cultural understanding among both students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”<br/>
<br/>
Goldstein exposes this as a lie.<br/>
<br/>
Ethnic studies, Rodriguez explains, is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences.”<br/>
<br/>
It’s “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”<br/>
<br/>
Goldstein herself confesses ethnic studies is indeed “ideological” and California’s 700-page model curriculum “retains the discipline’s leftist, activist bent,” asking: “How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?”<br/>
<br/>
And now the kicker: Critical race theory and systemic racism are “key concepts in the discipline,” and California’s curriculum includes “gender expression.”<br/>
<br/>
The New York Times — on its cover no less — just confirmed everything parents have been ridiculed, shamed, silenced and labeled domestic terrorists by our own federal government for saying.<br/>
<br/>
Lest one think the discipline is confined to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s progressive paradise and its 1.9 million public high-school students, the Times reports that states across the country are planning legislation to introduce K-12 ethnic studies.<br/>
<br/>
Nor is ethnic studies confined to a single class.<br/>
<br/>
California schools can “incorporate ethnic studies either as a stand-along course or by adding an ethnic studies lens to subjects such as history or literature.” This is key.<br/>
<br/>
American education has been thoroughly corrupted. Schools say they teach English and history, but they don’t.<br/>
<br/>
They use these subjects as props to promote a political agenda.<br/>
<br/>
Math and science aren’t unaffected.<br/>
<br/>
Uber-prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy offers a course on Mathematics of Social Justice.<br/>
<br/>
Rice University, often called the Harvard of the South, recently made headlines for its new offering, Afrochemistry.<br/>
<br/>
Ethnic studies’ ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country.<br/>
<br/>
It’s the foundation of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion regime implanted in our corporations, military and federal government.<br/>
<br/>
It took the horrific events of Oct. 7 and the explosion of antisemitism in its aftermath for many to wake up to the toxic progressive ideology that’s corrupted our institutions and education system.<br/>
<br/>
Even The New York Times has spoken.<br/>
<br/>
Just as it finally gave us permission to question lab leaks and masks’ utility, acknowledge the harms of school closures and gender-transition surgeries and discuss President Biden’s mental acuity, we now have clearance to talk about our kids’ political indoctrination in polite company.<br/>
<br/>
Let’s hope this spurs more of us to find the courage to speak up and join the fight to take back our schools.<br/>
<br/>
Our country’s survival depends on it.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/16/opinion/the-nyt-finally-admits-it-schools-are-teaching-our-kids-divisive-critical-race-theory/">https://nypost.com/2024/02/16/opinion/the-nyt-finally-admits-it-schools-are-teaching-our-kids-divisive-critical-race-theory/</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-20740575013185773402024-02-18T23:26:00.002+13:002024-02-18T23:26:49.657+13:00<br><b> The Poison Ivy League: How Taxpayers Subsidize Wealthy Universities</b><br/>
<br/>
The federal government provides enormous subsidies to the wealthiest universities in the country. People may imagine that the bulk of these subsidies assist low-income students in covering the high and rising costs of attending these universities, but that is not what the federal government primarily funds. The largest type of subsidy that wealthy universities receive is in the form of payments for overhead costs on federal research grants. During fiscal year (FY) 2022, Ivy League universities received $1.8 billion for overhead on government-funded research grants. That represents 84 percent of the total amount of government subsidy those universities received.<br/>
<br/>
Research grants are not subsidies, because every dollar received has to be spent according to the terms of the grant. But for every dollar Ivy League universities receive for research, they charge the government an additional 64 cents, on average, for overhead. Ostensibly, overhead covers things such as the cost of the building where the research takes place and the electricity that keeps the lights on. But universities do not have to account for the use of these funds for overhead. They can be used for virtually any purposes that university administrators prefer, and, as past research has demonstrated, these discretionary uses of overhead funds include building diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies and indulging whatever other ideological activity they wish..<br/>
<br/>
The money that directly funds research may not be a subsidy, but the overhead—or, as it is often called, “indirect” money—is clearly a subsidy, because it is almost entirely fungible and unaccountable.<br/>
<br/>
The eight universities in the Ivy League receive $1.8 billion each year from taxpayers despite the fact that these universities are sitting on $192 billion in endowment funds. If they need money for buildings and electricity, donors have already given them plenty. There is no need for taxpayers to give the richest universities $1.8 billion each year to cover the costs of buildings that their donors have already enabled them to maintain and update.<br/>
<br/>
It makes no sense for taxpayers to continue to subsidize the construction of new research infrastructure at wealthy universities unless there is a specific justification, such as supporting the construction of a particular telescope, laser, or particle accelerator. Giving taxpayer money to wealthy universities that already have plenty of resources for buildings, laboratories, and maintenance is simply providing those institutions with a slush fund that they can use for any purpose, including those hostile to taxpayers’ preferences and interests.<br/>
<br/>
Just as the tax code often phases out subsidies such as the child tax credit for wealthier individuals, governmental programs that fund university research could phase out the provision of overhead funding for wealthier universities. Arguably, universities with more than $5 billion in endowment do not require any money from taxpayers to build and maintain their research infrastructure. And perhaps the rate for overhead could be capped at 15 cents for every dollar meant for research for universities with more than $2 billion in endowment—significantly less than the overhead rates in excess of 60 cents now common at universities.<br/>
<br/>
There is no reason to fear a mass abandonment of research if taxpayers fail to lavish extra money for overhead on universities that already have the research infrastructure. Those universities have reputational reasons to conduct research even if doing so does not generate a slush fund for administrators. And there is reason to hope that redirecting overhead subsidies outside of the few dozen universities that are too rich to need it might help spread research expertise more evenly around the country, improving educational and economic opportunities in large parts of the country that currently have their best researchers hired away to the coasts by the richest universities.<br/>
<br/>
Capping and eliminating overhead subsidies is likely to be broadly popular. The only opposition is most likely to come from the highly paid administrators and researchers at wealthy universities. But universities and researchers at other institutions would be helped or unaffected, because their overhead funding would not change or might increase. Those interested in maximizing the benefits of government-funded research would also be helped or unaffected because the nation’s total capacity to produce research would remain unchanged or expand. And most importantly, taxpayers would benefit by no longer having to pay for unaccountable slush funds at wealthy universities that do not need that money to do their jobs.<br/>
<br/>
The Origin and Purpose of Overhead on Research Grants<br/>
The federal government began systematically funding scientific research at universities following World War II. Several federal agencies pay for this research, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, and U.S. Department of Education. From the beginning, federal sponsors of research provided some funds for overhead with their research grants.2<br/>
Greene and Schoof, “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.”<br/>
<br/>
At first, the rate was capped at 8 percent, meaning that for every dollar supporting itemized research costs, universities could get an additional 8 cents to cover the fixed costs of building and maintaining a research infrastructure. That cap was raised to 15 percent and then 20 percent. In 1966 the cap was removed and universities were simply allowed to set rates based on an arbitrary cost formula that is easily inflated but provides a “patina of objectivity and technical respectability.”<br/>
<br/>
Once the cap was removed, the rate universities charged for overhead rose dramatically so that by 1990 the rate at Stanford was 70 percent. A series of scandals revealed that these overhead funds were being used for things such as yachts and redecorating the offices of university administrators. Rates dropped below 50 percent before creeping up over 60 percent in recent years.<br/>
<br/>
There is no question that research activity involves both direct costs that can be attributed to the specific project and indirect costs that have to be spread across the entire set of research activities at a university. The amount required for these indirect or overhead costs is ambiguous and has clearly varied dramatically across time.<br/>
<br/>
Universities that have less private support may need public assistance in building and maintaining their research infrastructure if it is a priority to increase total research activity. But universities that have generous private support, as indicated by very large endowments, do not require public assistance to have significant research capacity. To put in perspective how rich U.S. universities can be, Harvard’s endowment of $53 billion exceeds the gross domestic product of 124 countries, including Tunisia, Uganda, Bolivia, and Estonia.<br/>
<br/>
With endowments that big, they have enough funding to build and maintain research infrastructure. And given the nonprofit status these universities have been granted to pursue the discovery and dissemination of knowledge, they have an obligation to use their resources to build and maintain research infrastructure even if taxpayers do not provide them with additional funds for that purpose.<br/>
<br/>
Data and Methodology<br/>
<br/>
Information on the resources Ivy League universities have at their disposal from private donations as well as from government funding is readily available.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-poison-ivy-league-how-taxpayers-subsidize-wealthy-universities">https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-poison-ivy-league-how-taxpayers-subsidize-wealthy-universities</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Reversing the Department of Education’s Anti-Market Orientation in Higher Education</b><br/>
<br/>
For two decades, during the tenures of the Obama and Biden Administrations, the Department of Education has tried to curtail access to for-profit colleges and universities (known as the “proprietary” sector in higher education) through a growing tome of federal regulations.1<br/>
U.S.C. § 1002(a)(1)(A).<br/>
<br/>
Oversight of the nonprofit and public sectors has been much slower in coming. Indeed, rather than cast a critical eye at the return on investment of traditional higher education, the Biden Administration is pursuing every possible avenue for student loan debt amnesty, a massive handout to nonprofit and public colleges and universities. Rather than singling out the for-profit sector, which is meeting the needs of non-traditional students in particular, the department should hold all sectors to the same standards instead of expressing the anti-market biases described in the following.<br/>
<br/>
Furthermore, while it continues to exist, the department should strive to encourage innovation in postsecondary education. Nascent technology companies—in whatever ways they intend to serve postsecondary institutions—cannot easily take the financial risk of building partnerships when the department’s regulatory regime stifles them and threatens their finances. Instead, the next Administration should rescind many of the anti-market regulations promulgated in recent years.<br/>
<br/>
Summary of Anti-Market Regulations Under Secretary Cardona<br/>
The U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Miguel Cardona, has taken a heavy-handed approach against for-profit enterprises in postsecondary education, whether those enterprises are institutions or simply for-profit partners of nonprofit institutions. This Backgrounder summarizes the policies that have been explained in more detail elsewhere.<br/>
<br/>
“Gainful Employment.” The Higher Education Act defines a proprietary (for-profit) institution primarily as a “school” that is neither public nor nonprofit and “provides an eligible program of training to prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.”2<br/>
U.S.C. § 1002(b)(1).<br/>
<br/>
From this one reference, the department has produced a significant cascade of “gainful employment” regulations. These rules set alumni income and debt standards almost exclusively for proprietary institutions. Meanwhile, the agency has not produced similar regulations to hold public or nonprofit institutions accountable for the outcomes of their students. Gainful employment regulations were promulgated under President Obama, but the Trump Administration rescinded them, correctly arguing that the set of regulations “wrongfully targets some academic programs and institutions while ignoring other programs that may result in lesser outcomes and higher student debt.”<br/>
<br/>
“Borrower Defense.” The Higher Education Act authorizes the Department of Education to “specify in regulations which acts or omissions of an institution of higher education a borrower may assert as a defense to repayment.”5<br/>
U.S.C. § 1087e(h).<br/>
<br/>
Since the 1990s, such regulations have focused on “any act or omission of the school attended by the student that would give rise to a cause of action against the school under applicable State law (the State law standard),” and only 10 claims were recorded prior to 2015.<br/>
<br/>
But the “borrower defense” regulations today extend far past the department’s authorization to describe possible defenses that a borrower may assert against repayment. A traditional borrower defense would be, for instance, that an institution intentionally misstated material information about future employment prospects or the license required to accompany a degree in order for a graduate to be allowed to work in a state. But the department has also asserted its own authority to “initiate a proceeding to collect” loan amounts from the school on behalf of the student even in the absence of a successful claim in court.7<br/>
C.F.R. § 685.206(c)(4).<br/>
<br/>
Once the department successfully collects the funds, it cancels the student’s debt. These regulations make the department judge, jury, and executioner in order to cancel student loans and claw back student aid funding.<br/>
<br/>
During the Obama Administration, the department went a step beyond its alleged authority to “collect.” The department required institutions to have the money available just in case the department came to collect it. This requirement took the form of astronomical letters of credit (certifications from banks that the money would be provided, if needed), which successfully knocked proprietary institutions out of the education market.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/report/reversing-the-department-educations-anti-market-orientation-higher-education">https://www.heritage.org/education/report/reversing-the-department-educations-anti-market-orientation-higher-education</a>
</p>
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<br/>
<b> Australian university chiefs lecture schools on maths and science teaching</b><br/>
<br/>
University chiefs have caned schools for failing to prepare “Zoomers” for tertiary education, with domestic enrolments diving 10 per cent as Gen Z teenagers shun study for gap years, jobs and travel.<br/>
<br/>
As the Albanese government prepares to launch its landmark Universities Accord reforms, cash-strapped universities are demanding more financial assistance for students struggling to pay the rent during a cost of living crisis that is pushing poorer teenagers straight from school into the workforce.<br/>
<br/>
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott – a former teacher and director-general of the NSW Education Department – said schools were struggling with a shortage of maths and science teachers to prepare teenagers for university.<br/>
<br/>
“Students at some schools are being discouraged from attempting that more demanding maths, perhaps not linked to the ability of the student, but more the availability of staff,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“There’s a chronic, entrenched shortage of mathematics teachers around the country now. I think the true shortage is often concealed because … there are plenty of PE (physical education) teachers who are being retrained in maths to just try and get a qualified teacher in front of the class.’’<br/>
<br/>
Professor Scott said universities might need to offer more summer schools and intensive tutoring to get school leavers “up to speed’’ for university degrees.<br/>
<br/>
“We are increasingly concerned, as we target students from low SES (socio-economic) backgrounds, that they are not getting the opportunity to study maths at a level that has been an important prerequisite for entry to some of our courses,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“There are a range of courses, from economics and business to science and engineering, that have required maths prerequisites, that we can see fewer and fewer students reaching because fewer students are doing maths at that advanced level.’’<br/>
<br/>
Australian National University deputy vice-chancellor Grady Venville, a former high school teacher, said schools must ensure more students were taught maths and science at the highest level.<br/>
<br/>
“We’ve got kids coming right through from primary school and falling behind, and when they get to high school … they’re often not encouraged or supported to do the higher level mathematics,’’ Professor Venville said.<br/>
<br/>
“We don’t have enough highly qualified maths teaching staff (in schools), so that means it’s easier for the school to encourage the students to do an easier maths. What that does is narrow down the pipeline of students who can go into things like physics or engineering, pure mathematics and even our science subjects.’’<br/>
<br/>
Professor Scott said his sandstone university – renowned for its medicine and engineering faculties – was considering removing the prerequisite for advanced high school mathematics for some degrees. “We wouldn’t be decreasing the standards for our programs, but providing more help for students … without watering down our courses,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“Perhaps more summer programs, more introductory programs, where the university takes on a greater responsibility to get students up to speed.’’<br/>
<br/>
Professor Scott said the high cost of living was discouraging students from enrolling at university, or studying full-time.<br/>
<br/>
He said the University of Sydney was lobbying the NSW government to grant it social housing development concessions to build more student accommodation.<br/>
<br/>
“When I was a student here in the 1980s, some of the cheapest accommodation anywhere in the Greater Sydney area was surrounding the university,’’ he said.<br/>
<br/>
“You could live cheaply in Glebe and Redfern and Newtown in a way that is often not possible now at all. We’re talking to our alumni about making more scholarships available that provide accommodation support.’’<br/>
<br/>
Professor Venville said university students were taking longer to finish degrees as they juggle study with part-time work or travel. She said Gen-Zs, known as “Zoomers’’, seemed less mature than previous generations of university students and were keen to take a “gap year’’ after school.<br/>
<br/>
In Brisbane, Griffith University vice-chancellor Carolyn Evans said schools were encouraging too many students to take vocational subjects, rather than the more difficult academic subjects.<br/>
<br/>
“(This) means perhaps not as many people are as well prepared for university as they used to be,’’ Professor Evans said. “We’re quite concerned about the decline in the number of students taking high-level maths and some of the harder science subjects. There are a lot of applied subjects being done at school level, which are appropriate for some students. But they don’t necessarily get a really strong foundation to go on and do some of the things that we critically need in this country … like engineering, medicine and some of the health disciplines.”<br/>
<br/>
Professor Scott noted that teenagers were dropping out of high school at the highest rate in 30 years. In public schools, 26.4 per cent of high school students had left before finishing Year 12 last year – up from 17 per cent in 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed this week.<br/>
<br/>
The latest federal Education Department data shows the number of students starting a degree fell 10.4 per cent last year to a nine-year low. First-year enrolments by domestic students fell 5.5 per cent between 2018 and 2022 – a trend that is sabotaging the federal government’s ambition to increase student numbers by one-third, to 1.2 million, over the next decade.<br/>
<br/>
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said skilling school-leavers for work was “not just the job of universities’’. “We need more people to finish school,’’ he said. “We need to fully fund all schools and tie that money to the reforms that will help kids who fall behind to catch up, keep up and finish school and then be able to go to TAFE or university.’’<br/>
<br/>
Mr Clare said that “going to university opened up opportunities and makes you money’’.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/university-chiefs-lecture-schools-on-maths-and-science-teaching/news-story/0a581ae127f2d26218310f05967065d3">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/university-chiefs-lecture-schools-on-maths-and-science-teaching/news-story/0a581ae127f2d26218310f05967065d3</a>
</p>
******************************************************<br/>
<br/>
My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
<br/>
******************************************************<br/>
jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-65375956263374098432024-02-15T23:17:00.003+13:002024-02-15T23:19:56.966+13:00
<br/>
<b> Teacher Strike in Los Angeles Underscores Need for Education Choice</b><br/>
<br/>
Public school teachers in Los Angeles are on strike, affecting half a million children attending some 900 public schools in the district.<br/>
<br/>
Although students in the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest school district in the country—can still access the schools, classes are being taught by substitute teachers while teachers outside are striking.<br/>
<br/>
Many students are staying home—leaving some parents scrambling for child care.<br/>
<br/>
Students who are going to school during the strike are passing the day playing games on iPads. Missing school or being relegated to busy work as a result of public education employee strikes are critical learning days lost.<br/>
<br/>
Students in Los Angeles can ill afford that: Just 18 percent of fourth-graders can read proficiently, a figure which jumps just one point to 19 percent for eighth-graders. Only one-quarter of Los Angeles fourth-graders score proficient in math, a figure that declines to 18 percent for eighth-graders.<br/>
<br/>
Among the striking teachers’ demands are increased pay and smaller class sizes, along with regulations on charter schools and a push to increase the number of nonteaching personnel, such as librarians and counselors.<br/>
<br/>
Yet since 1992, nonteaching staff in California has increased nearly 50 percent, greatly outpacing the 24 percent increase in the number of students.<br/>
<br/>
As economist Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University in Georgia found, had California just kept the nonteaching staff levels on par with increases in student enrollment, the state would have saved nearly $3 billion—which could have gone toward unfunded pension liabilities.<br/>
<br/>
The state’s unfunded pension liability—the gap between benefits owed and funding available for that purpose—was $107 billion in 2018.<br/>
<br/>
That $3 billion also could have funded 373,000 children with $8,000 education savings accounts.<br/>
<br/>
The increase in nonteaching personnel only exacerbates existing spending issues in the district.<br/>
<br/>
As Chad Aldeman points out, from 2001 to 2016, the Los Angeles Unified School District increased overall spending by more than 55 percent. Public employee benefits in the district increased 138 percent.<br/>
<br/>
My colleague Jonathan Butcher closely followed teachers union strikes, which last year disrupted learning in Colorado, Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. He draws three important lessons from those strikes.<br/>
<br/>
First, Butcher notes, strikes are hard on families, and send parents scrambling. Strikes can test parents’ patience, even when they support the demands of the strikers.<br/>
<br/>
Second, it’s school districts, rather than state lawmakers, who are ultimately responsible for teacher salaries. Third, tax increases on California taxpayers will not necessarily lead to increased teachers’ salaries.<br/>
<br/>
Ultimately, school districts should be transparent in their spending, making administrators’ salaries publicly available, and they should reduce—not increase—the number of nonteaching personnel.<br/>
<br/>
Furthermore, they should reward excellent teachers by basing teachers’ compensation on job performance.<br/>
<br/>
During the strike, more than 117,000 students in Los Angeles are still able to attend school without being affected by the walkouts; namely, those in charter schools.<br/>
<br/>
So, most critically, parents should be empowered with choice, including more charter school options and private school choice options.<br/>
<br/>
Increasing spending and the number of nonteaching personnel, and further regulating education choice options, such as charter schools, will only amplify a failed status quo in California.<br/>
<br/>
Instead, California should immediately empower families to choose learning options that are effective and meet their needs by moving toward increased school choice opportunities.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/teacher-strike-los-angeles-underscores-need-education-choice">https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/teacher-strike-los-angeles-underscores-need-education-choice</a>
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<b> Why Universal Access to Education Freedom Accounts Is the Best Choice for New Hampshire</b><br/>
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Nearly 1 million American students participated in a school-choice program last year, according to data compiled by EdChoice. Across the country 72 choice programs operate in 32 states. And who has the most popular program in the nation? New Hampshire.<br/>
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With an Education Freedom Account (EFA), parents can customize their child’s education. Families can use EFA funds for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, special-needs therapies and more.<br/>
<br/>
According to EdChoice, New Hampshire’s EFA policy is the most popular education choice policy in the nation. It has had the most growth per capita nationwide over the past academic year—a whopping 58%. The number of ESA students has grown from 3,025 in 2022–23 to 4,770 scholarships awarded in 2023–24.<br/>
<br/>
Those numbers show that a lot of New Hampshire families want an education that better fits their children’s individual needs. No New Hampshire student who needs a better educational fit should be denied access to this popular and effective program, especially because of politics.<br/>
<br/>
Unfortunately, politics is keeping most students out of the program right now.<br/>
<br/>
Expanding Education Freedom and Choice to All<br/>
<br/>
Though EFAs were intended to be accessible to all students, legislators agreed initially to enroll only children from lower-income families. That was necessary to address concerns that the program would struggle to succeed in its early years or, conversely, would prove too popular to manage effectively.<br/>
<br/>
Now that New Hampshire’s EFAs are an undeniable success, it’s time to take off the training wheels.<br/>
<br/>
Currently, fewer than half of students in the state are eligible for an EFA, which is limited only to students from families that earn no more than 350% of the federal poverty level. That comes to $109,200 for a family of four—less than the average annual household income of a firefighter married to a registered nurse in New Hampshire. Three House bills this year would expand access to the program. One, House Bill 1634, would remove that income cap so that any student eligible to enroll in a K-12 public school in the state could qualify for an EFA.<br/>
<br/>
That income cap suppresses participation. Though New Hampshire’s EFA program ranks first in the country in administration and popularity, it ranks just 42nd in eligibility nationwide.<br/>
<br/>
Other states have been expanding educational opportunities. Over the last three years, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia all either enacted new universal education choice policies or expanded existing choice policies to all K-12 students.<br/>
<br/>
Some people fear that universal education choice will cause a mass exodus from public schools. But that’s not what’s happened in other states. Though roughly 20 million students nationwide are eligible to participate in a school-choice program, fewer than 1 million students do.<br/>
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The two largest school-choice programs in the country are Florida’s and Arizona’s. In both states, 100% of students are eligible for school choice. But only 10% of Florida students and 9% of Arizona students participate.<br/>
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Here in New Hampshire, where 48% of students are eligible for EFAs, only 3% of students participate.<br/>
<br/>
Education Freedom Accounts Save Taxpayers Money<br/>
<br/>
Critics claim that making EFAs available to every student is unaffordable. That’s not true. U.S. Census estimates from 2022 (the most recent available) put the state’s school-age population at 189,600. How many of those students can be expected to use an EFA if all students become eligible?<br/>
<br/>
Florida has the highest school choice take-up rate in the country, at 10%. Every other state with an education savings account or scholarship program has a lower take-up rate. New Hampshire’s rate of EFA use is about 3%. If we use New Hampshire’s current rate as the baseline and Florida’s as the high end, we could see a range of somewhere between 5,688 and 18,960 students enrolling in the program, though the higher number would take years to achieve and certainly would not happen overnight.<br/>
<br/>
Currently, about 28% of EFA users were previous public-school students. As they received their per-pupil allotment from the Education Trust Fund before taking an EFA, they are not a new cost. Assuming the same switch rate if EFAs are expanded, a reasonable cost estimate would run somewhere between $21.5 million (at a 3% take-up rate) and $71.7 million (at a 10% take-up rate).<br/>
<br/>
That might sound like a lot, but New Hampshire taxpayers spend $3.4 billion a year on K-12 public schools, and the state’s current Education Trust Fund ended the 2023 fiscal year with a surplus of $161 million. State budget officials project the Education Trust Fund to end the current fiscal year with a surplus of $232 million. Even at the high-end estimate, New Hampshire can easily afford universal EFA expansion.<br/>
<br/>
And those figures don’t include local taxpayer savings. New Hampshire spends an average of $20,322 per pupil, with more than 60% of that coming from local taxation. That local portion will not be spent to educate students who use an EFA to purchase an education elsewhere.<br/>
<br/>
Based on take-up rates between 3-10%, taxpayers can roughly estimate local government savings of between $86 million-$286 million were all students to become eligible for EFAs. Subtract the state costs of $21.5 million-$71.7 million and taxpayers would be looking at a net annual savings of somewhere between $64.5 million and $214 million.<br/>
<br/>
Those are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but they give a general idea of the size of taxpayer savings possible if New Hampshire educates students for $5,255 per pupil instead of $20,322 per pupil. Far from a net loss for New Hampshire, Education Freedom Accounts are clearly a net gain.<br/>
<br/>
School Choice Improves Public School Performance<br/>
<br/>
Critics also falsely claim that school choice harms students who remain in traditional public schools. In fact, of 29 studies on the academic outcomes of public school students whose schools were faced with competition from policies, 26 found a net positive outcome for those students, one found no visible effect, and only two found a negative effect.<br/>
<br/>
Moreover, the families of lower-performing students tend to be more attracted to school choice programs than those of higher-performing students. Florida State University research on Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program found that students who chose to enter the scholarship program had lower test scores in the year before they took a scholarship than did their classmates who opted not to participate. But after just a few years of using the scholarship, those students were out-performing their demographic peers.<br/>
<br/>
Claims that school choice programs “cream” the best students and leave low-performing students behind in under-funded schools are false. Indeed, the reality is the very opposite: school choice benefits disadvantaged students most.<br/>
<br/>
Fulfilling the Promise of Public Education<br/>
<br/>
When they aren’t fear mongering about empty public schools, EFA opponents demagogue the issue by shouting that EFA expansion would have taxpayers foot the bill for educating the children of “millionaires and billionaires.”<br/>
<br/>
But, of course, that’s exactly what public schools do. Every child, regardless of income, is eligible to attend his or her district public school. No one argues that the public education provided by district schools should be means tested.<br/>
<br/>
Neither traditional public district schools nor public charter schools have income caps. Education Freedom Accounts shouldn’t either.<br/>
<br/>
The promise of public education is that every child should have access to an education that meets his or her individual learning needs. Education Freedom Accounts help fulfill that promise by empowering families with the freedom and flexibility to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.<br/>
<br/>
Expanding this opportunity to every child would improve outcomes for students, including those who prefer traditional public schools, while saving taxpayers money. For families, students and taxpayers, it’s the best option.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/why-universal-access-education-freedom-accounts-the-best-choice-new-hampshire">https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/why-universal-access-education-freedom-accounts-the-best-choice-new-hampshire</a>
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<b> More Sydney parents than ever opt for private schools</b><br/>
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<i> Many government schools are so dire that you can't blame them</i><br/>
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The state’s private schools are enrolling more students than at any time on record despite soaring cost-of-living pressures and fee hikes that have pushed tuition costs above $40,000 a year at numerous Sydney private schools.<br/>
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Official data released on Wednesday shows the proportion of students enrolled in NSW public schools has fallen for the fifth year running, dropping to 62.9 per cent in 2023. It is the lowest share of students attending state schools in the past two decades of reporting.<br/>
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The exodus from public schools in NSW is being driven in part by the establishment of low-fee private schools in Sydney’s north- and south-west growth corridors, where the construction of new public schools over the past decade has failed to keep pace with population growth.<br/>
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Most other states and territories have experienced a similar trend, the figures released by Australian Bureau of Statistics show.<br/>
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In NSW, 785,847 students were enrolled in public schools last year, 267,253 in Catholic schools and 195,356 in private schools. The proportion attending private and Catholic high schools is approaching half of all secondary students, rising to 43 per cent last year.<br/>
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University of Sydney education researcher Helen Proctor said the issues public schools faced were widely publicised, such as teacher shortages, which could be contributing to parents considering private options.<br/>
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“There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down,” Proctor said. “It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.”<br/>
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A separate snapshot of data provided by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW shows 65,000 students, or 28 per cent of those enrolled in the private system, are attending a school that charges $20,000 or more.<br/>
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About 60,000 pupils, or a quarter of all those enrolled in the private system, attend a school with fees below $5000 a year. Another 72,000 pupils attend a school that charges between $5000 and $10,000.<br/>
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Between April 2022 and March last year, repayments on a million-dollar mortgage increased by more than $2000 a month. A survey conducted by National Australia Bank in 2022 found one in 10 parents were relying on family members, including grandparents, to pay tuition costs.<br/>
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Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said systemic schools have grown at the fastest rate since 2013. They typically charge up to $3000 a year, with substantial sibling discounts.<br/>
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“These numbers are a huge vote of confidence from parents because parents know they get quality and affordable education, and that their children thrive in our schools,” McInerney said.<br/>
<br/>
“We provide high job prospects, further study pathways and create great citizens. It’s a massive contribution to society.”<br/>
<br/>
Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said the bulk of the growth in independent schools was in the lower and mid-fee bands under $10,000.<br/>
<br/>
“The main growth has been low and mid-fee schools, many in Sydney’s north-west and south-west growth areas. We’ve also seen increasing numbers in regional schools including in Tweed Heads. These schools are affordable for parents paying off mortgages, and appealing because they are kindergarten to year 12 campuses,” she said.<br/>
<br/>
“There are also almost 20 faiths represented in the independent sector across 350 schools, including Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish schools. These schools provide an education that reflects parents’ values and beliefs. Forty years ago, there weren’t any Islamic schools. There are (now) 29, with 22,000 students.”<br/>
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NSW Education Minister Prue Car said over the past five years, NSW has seen the biggest drop in the country when it comes to the share of students in government schools.<br/>
<br/>
“It is no coincidence that we have had 24,000 students leave the public system at the same time the previous Government oversaw a teacher shortage crisis,” she said. “The government is undertaking urgent work to repair the states’ education system, by investing in our teaching workforce and addressing the chronic teacher shortage facing our state.”<br/>
<br/>
Mother Jasmine De Leon chose to send her youngest two children to a local private school, Norwest Christian College, near her home in Quakers Hill, partly because it was a co-educational pre-school to year 12 campus.<br/>
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“My kids have been going to the same school since they were four years old, and having that pre-kindergarten year was what really interested us,” De Leon said.<br/>
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“There is also a big sense of community and a structured environment. They also offer smaller classes and a variety of extracurricular subjects.”<br/>
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She considered having her two children sit the public selective high school test, but after five years at their current school they “had become comfortable and had established strong friendship groups.”<br/>
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“It’s also at the lower end for private school fees, and it was affordable for us and worth it when considering what the school could offer”.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/more-sydney-parents-than-ever-opt-for-private-schools-20240213-p5f4jv.html">https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/more-sydney-parents-than-ever-opt-for-private-schools-20240213-p5f4jv.html</a>
</p>
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My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)<br/>
<br/>
<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
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jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8186400.post-81945880227921728072024-02-15T00:28:00.002+13:002024-02-15T00:28:42.617+13:00<br>
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<b> COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Mandates in Universities — Risk Benefit Analysis Leads to Net Harm</b><br/>
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A prominent group of physicians, epidemiologists and bioethicists based at the most prestigious academic medical centers and universities have gone on the record that after a systematic analysis combining risk-benefit assessments as well as ethical factors the mandating of COVID-19 booster jabs at university campuses will equate to an expected net harm.<br/>
<br/>
When forecasting serious adverse events as measured in cases of myopericarditis typically involving hospitalized young males as compared to the number of boosts required per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented. The net takeaway of this study: university mandates for COVID-19 boosters in the age of Omicron (milder version of the virus) cannot be orchestrated without a gross violation of ethical, moral and medical principles.<br/>
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The authors of this study have expressed mounting concern during the pandemic, minority critics in large, prestigious university systems that the current mRNA vaccines are not all that the medical establishment and media cracked them up to be.<br/>
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While by last August most all university mandates for COVID-19 boosters were all but gone, by August 2023, over 60 universities still mandated the COVID-19 jab.<br/>
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The authors of this analysis clearly seek to not repeat the same policies in the future.<br/>
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The present authors’ latest position in this essay published in Journal of Medical Ethics (BMJ) isn’t new. TrialSite reported back in September 2022, in “Bombshell Analysis: Risk-Benefit Analysis of mRNA Vaccines for You People Doesn’t Support Mandates” that the authors were essentially concluding the same recommendation—cease the COVID-19 vaccine mandates on university campuses.<br/>
<br/>
Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., from University of Washington (and University of Edinburgh), an applied medical anthropologist and implementations scientist, Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH University of California, San Francisco, professor epidemiology and statistics, Mary Makary, M.D., MPH, professor of surgery Johns Hopkins University, Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, Ph.D. physics-investigator at Acumen LLC as well as corresponding author, and bioethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Ph.D. University of Oxford Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and others go on the record again, even more forcefully declaring based on their analysis at this juncture in history more young men (age 40 and under) mandated to get the mRNA-based COVID-19 jabs face the risk of hospitalization due to myocarditis than will benefit by the vaccines as measured by per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented.<br/>
<br/>
While different academic researchers conclude with different data points, and the biases associated with this group could be argued are similar to the biases linked to groups arguing for mandates (they merely use differing assumptions, interpret some studies over others, etc.), it’s the latter that increasingly deviates from all commonsensical practice.<br/>
<br/>
According to the present authors, however, to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization over a 6-month period the critical collaborative estimates 31,207 -42,836young adults (age 19-29) must receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet that means that according to these authors’ math, 18.5 serious adverse events from the mRNA vaccines result, derived from 1.5 – 4.6 booster 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).<br/>
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They anticipated that 1430-4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalization).<br/>
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COVID-19 Mandates in Universities—Unethical<br/>
Why? The authors delineate the following elements:<br/>
<br/>
Mandates are legacy from the pandemic, they are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group<br/>
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Based on the accumulation of medical evidence this result in a net harm to healthy young adults<br/>
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Such policies are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission<br/>
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The policy of mandates in universities violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes<br/>
The mandates may result in wider social harms<br/>
<br/>
But what about counterarguments?<br/>
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The present authors delve int countervailing view—such as benefits like improved campus safety, “but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support.” For example, the vaccines’ durability levels mean breakthrough infections are commonplace.<br/>
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The authors go on the record discussing how their analysis impacts COVID-19 primary series policy.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/covid-19-vaccine-booster-mandates-in-universitiesrisk-benefit-analysis-leads-to-net-harm-f1ed5fff">https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/covid-19-vaccine-booster-mandates-in-universitiesrisk-benefit-analysis-leads-to-net-harm-f1ed5fff</a>
</p>
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<b> The dangers of rugby football has led to some researchers calling for it to be banned from schools</b><br/>
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With some researchers labelling the sport ‘a form of child abuse’ and parents questioning safety, can rugby get the balance right?<br/>
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This story begins with a boy lying dazed and confused on a rugby pitch in Sussex last month. There are concussion symptoms that linger, days off school, and a stark revelation from a rugby-loving parent who provides first aid to the team. “It is not until you have cradled the head of someone else’s son, who is then unable to stand unassisted, that it really hits home how dangerous this game can be.”<br/>
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Those dangers have now led to some researchers to call for rugby in schools and clubs to be banned for under-18s as it is “a form of child abuse”. Their argument, published in the Times on Friday, is that the risk of brain injuries from high-impact sports – including rugby and boxing – runs counter to child abuse laws. And neither children, nor their parents, can give informed consent as they cannot be fully aware of the long-term risks.<br/>
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Once again rugby finds itself walking a tightrope: pushing the sport’s physical and mental health qualities, while facing pointed questions about safety.<br/>
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Does it always get the balance right? That is what some of those parents in Sussex are now asking, especially after a second player left the same match with a suspected concussion. Was this awful luck? Absolutely. But on the touchline, others flagged another concern.<br/>
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When rugby union in England returned after Covid, the Rugby Football Union extended the chance to combine age grades – in this case to under-14s playing in under-13s fixtures – to “sustain teams with lower player numbers who would otherwise not continue to play rugby”. In this match their opponents had several boys from the next age grade up.<br/>
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The RFU’s decision was understandable. Player numbers in grassroots rugby have dropped. Clubs were struggling to re-establish teams. As the RFU says, the sport has huge benefits, including boosting “confidence, self-esteem, self-discipline and character”. It sounds like something from a 1920s boarding school prospectus, but it is also true.<br/>
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The downside, of course, is that 12-year-old boys, many of whom have yet to hit puberty, are facing 14-year-olds, whose bodies are swimming in testosterone and other androgens which makes them taller, stronger, heavier and faster – and more dangerous. As one sports scientist told me: “We know that risk factors for injury are speed, power, strength, bulk and momentum in the tackle, so there is a fairly strong basis to say that widening the age bracket could increase risk. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. But you have to monitor the risk and try to understand it not just quantitatively but qualitatively.”<br/>
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Such a data-driven approach wasn’t in place when the RFU took its decision over combining age groups in 2020. Until this season, youth club rugby was not included in the RFU’s injury surveillance programmes, which focused on adults and some schools.<br/>
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That, thankfully, is shifting. However, there is still no accurate picture of what happens when the under-13s and under-14s play together. Have injury rates gone up? Without a baseline we don’t know. When I put this to the RFU, it said there was “a robust assessment and approval process in place in our regulations to ensure a balance between player safety and retention”. Those rules include ensuring not more than half the players are from the older age grade. It also stresses that coaches must prioritise player safety and enjoyment, and work together to reduce mismatches.<br/>
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But is that really enough to address parental concerns? Most 14-year-olds won’t be thinking about anything but running through defenders, regardless of whether they are younger. One idea would be to embrace the work of Dr Sean Cumming, who has argued for bio-banding in junior sport, where players are matched by maturation not their actual age. Other unions, including New Zealand, band players by weight.<br/>
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None of that, of course, will make the safety issue entirely go away. Only last week, I was sent an open letter from Ceri Shaw whose husband, Chris, died last year. Chris was a keen rugby player for more than 30 years and after he died, Ceri donated his brain to Prof Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, who found signs of CTE – a degenerative brain condition linked to head injuries.<br/>
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Given that rugby players with longer careers are more likely to develop the condition, Ceri asks why contact rugby is introduced at under-nine level in England and not, say, at 16. “During his life Chris was passionate about all aspects of rugby: the game’s ethos, the inclusive community and the conduct of fans globally,” she writes. “I would still like both my boys to play and enjoy rugby. There is research still to be done, but why risk the brain health of our children while we are waiting?”<br/>
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Those in rugby tell me that teaching safe tackling technique at nine is safer than at 15 or 16, when kids will be much faster and more powerful. They also point out that World Rugby’s recent Otago study found under-13 rugby to be less dangerous than higher age groups and the adult game. But tell that to the parents of those poor boys in Sussex who sustained suspected concussions.<br/>
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Even so, I still recoil at the idea of banning rugby for under-18s. The benefits of the sport still outweigh the potential costs, especially given the obesity and inactivity epidemic, which carries a different set of health risks. Ban rugby and where do we stop? Yet with every passing year, what we know about the dangers of head impacts continues to evolve. I strongly suspect rugby will have to as well.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/05/rugby-under-18-children-research-concussion">https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/05/rugby-under-18-children-research-concussion</a>
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<b> New anti-woke universities ‘the only way to cancel cancel culture’, says Niall Ferguson</b><br/>
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Setting up new and better universities is the only way to reform a sector riddled with entrenched, extremist left-wing ideology, and is even more important in the wake of the academic world’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, says historian Niall Ferguson.<br/>
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Aa senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Ferguson was in Austin this week to welcome the first cohort of students to enrol at the University of Austin, where he is a founding trustee along with US journalist Bari Weiss. The two have helped launch a private university in the Texan capital that will be permanently free of campus cancel culture and dedicated to free speech and academic rigour.<br/>
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“There came a moment (in 2021) when people were just being cancelled left and right at universities, and we decided we’ve got to do this,” Professor Ferguson said.<br/>
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The march of anti-Semitism at US universities and around the world, including in Australia, made Professor Ferguson more determined to make the University of Austin, which has already attracted $US200m ($307m) in donations and about 20 full-time faculties, a success.<br/>
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“After the events of October 7th, the strange responses we saw on campus, we no longer have to explain why we are building the university,” he said.<br/>
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The October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war triggered an explosion of anti-Semitic protests on and off campus that shook Americans’ faith in its elite institutions.<br/>
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Two Ivy League university presidents – Harvard’s Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill – resigned last year in the wake of a national outcry over their defence of anti-Semitic protests on campuses on “free speech” grounds.<br/>
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In Australia, 64 per cent of Jewish students said they had experienced anti-Semitism at university after October 7 – a greater than 20 per cent jump compared with the preceding year according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.<br/>
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While he would not comment directly on Australian universities, Professor Ferguson said the fall of the Ivy League presidents and some academic backlash to anti-Semitism did not mean the old institutions would markedly change course any time soon.<br/>
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“I don’t think the fact that two of those presidents have since left their positions means the end of wokeness,” he said.<br/>
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“It’s not in retreat but rather very well entrenched. Declaring victory because Claudine Gay has stepped down (is naive); there will not be any real change in institutions, such as Harvard, which is not an outlier, until not just the president but the whole bureaucracy of diversity, equity and inclusion has been dismantled.”<br/>
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Future students and their parents joined Professor Ferguson and other public intellectuals, including Michael Shellenberger and Harvard professor Roland Fryer, for a weekend of lectures and events. “The great thing about Austin is it’s cool, it’s a great place to build a university … We have a huge cluster of tech companies here, the economy is booming,” Professor Ferguson said.<br/>
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Elon Musk was considering setting up a STEM- based university in the city, too, according to reports that circulated late last year in the US.<br/>
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The University of Austin’s constitution, drafted largely by Professor Ferguson, explicitly enshrines free speech and includes disciplinary mechanisms for staff who contravene the free speech principles. “Universities have been perverted from their true purpose, which is not politics but scholarship,” he said.<br/>
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“We have a constitution that will make that impossible.”<br/>
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Professor Ferguson said cultural change at traditional elite universities, which he said had consciously chosen to transform themselves into hotbeds of radical politics under the moniker of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, would be almost impossible for a generation. “All those people have been appointed with tenure,” he said. “What are you going to do? Fire them all? It’s impossible.”<br/>
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British universities, he said, weren’t as political as those in the US. “The reason that they’re not as bad in the UK, at Oxford and Cambridge, isn’t that there are not people there with same motives,” he said.<br/>
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<p class="asset asset-link">
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/new-antiwoke-unis-the-only-way-to-cancel-cancel-culture-says-niall-ferguson/news-story/6f117406b2632c02aa5afe5b46a8e98b">https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/new-antiwoke-unis-the-only-way-to-cancel-cancel-culture-says-niall-ferguson/news-story/6f117406b2632c02aa5afe5b46a8e98b</a>
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My other blogs: Main ones below<br/>
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<a href="https://dissectleft.blogspot.com">http://dissectleft.blogspot.com</a> (DISSECTING LEFTISM)<br/>
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<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)<br/>
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<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)<br/>
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<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)<br/>
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<a href="http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html">http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html</a> More blogs<br/>
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