Category Archives: education

Students’ Decline

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American students—pupils, really—continue to decline in reading skills, and their math skills remain far too low.

The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.

And

In math, fourth-grade scores ticked up, while those for the eighth grade were flat. Math scores in both grades remained substantially below prepandemic benchmarks….

There is considerable angst regarding methods for teaching reading.

The results come in the midst of a wave of attention on how to teach students to read. Many school districts and states have emphasized phonics-based instruction, known as the science of reading, and shed other reading methods that focused more on using context to deduce the meaning of words.
Federal officials and researchers say there are no definitive explanations for the latest scores.

The angst is misguided. There’s no reason, for instance, why phonics and context can’t be taught together. They were, in fact, taught if not together then closely sequentially—phonics in first grade, context in second and third grade when I was in grade school. Nor is the Wuhan Virus Situation, often offered as an excuse for these failures, actually involved. The decline in reading and math skills has been going on since long before the virus appeared.

There’s also this bit of gaslighting, from the Denver school system honcho:

Denver Public Schools overhauled its reading curriculum in 2022. Simone Wright, the district’s chief of academics, said the move is making a difference. Denver’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress increased in both grades, though the gains weren’t considered statistically significant.

“Not statistically significant” has a very clear meaning to anyone who can do his sums. That meaning is that it’s not possible to tell whether there were any gains at all, or even whether there was actual decline. Or, maybe not gaslighting so much as she’s as arithmetically illiterate as the pupils in her district.

I offer one definitive solution to the failure—which is a teaching failure, not a student failure (they’re pupils at that age because they’re so young; they remain pupils as they go up the grade ladder because teachers don’t teach them how to be students): stop passing the pupils up the grade ladder until they can read and do math.

This business of social promotion, which itself isn’t entirely on the teachers—parents play a role in “not letting Johnny and Susan fall behind”—is destructive, abusive of the children, and actually accelerates and deepens Johnny’s and Susan’s lag.

Here’s a sample of a high school graduation test from the end of the 19th century. Not only are today’s high schoolers wholly unprepared for such a thing, they have no hope of getting prepared without the basic teachings of reading and math from pre-school on up, and the discipline that comes from teachers (and parents) insisting on actual performance rather than social promotions.

Update: [Sigh]. Added the missing link to the test.

Indeed There Is

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River Page, writing for The Free Press last Sunday, objected to any proliferation of “Tiger Moms.” However, she’s wholly misinterpreted the concept of and the goals of tiger moms.

There are more important things in life than making a six-figure salary and going to Yale goes her subheadline. She concluded her piece with this:

There’s no point in living in a prosperous country if you can’t enjoy it[.]

The one is not the aim of tiger moms, and the other isn’t possible without achieving their goal. Vivek Ramaswamy, of DOGE, has laid out the situation, using the H-1B visa debate as the backdrop.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

He added, as paraphrased by Page, that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.

That’s what tiger moms are working against, and we need more of them, not the coddled snowflakes of too many of our current offspring and their children.

That more important thing, toward which tiger moms try to raise their children, is a work ethic that prides work and that produces the overriding satisfaction of a job well done. The self respect that comes from that is what powers full enjoyment of leisure time and the full enjoyment of the plethora of leisures available in a prosperous country.

Indeed, there isn’t a prosperous country without the work required to produce, maintain, and defend it. Six-figure salaries fall out of all of that; they aren’t the goal of any of that. Neither is going to Yale instead of any other school. Students get out of their higher education institution—whichever it is, and it need not be a so-called elite school—what they put into it, and what they put into it is what they learn to put into it during their pre-school and K-12 years. That’s where tiger moms earn their stripes and the respect of us otherwise average Americans, their peers.

Not Entirely

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The Wall Street Journal‘s headline lays out the claim:

Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem

The article goes on:

[T]here are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted.

And this:

…Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix.

We all could have done better. That’s irrelevant. The bare fact is these endowments, as the table of Ivy League endowments below shows, are plenty big enough, and they’re still growing, for all the temporary losses of the Panic of 2008.

*Per Wikipedia, a/o June 2023
**Calculated from undergrad + grad student enrollment

It’s all crocodile tears. If the schools were truly worried about their dwindling endowments—just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students—they could cut the claptrap and waste out of their expense structures. Those structures include such…foolishnesses…as bloated management teams that include a plethora of DEI staff and Inquisition bureaucracies designed to convict a male student on the basis of a female student’s bare accusation.

No, these schools have rich endowments; they’re not financially challenged. They just might lose their access to the Federal feedbag. Which they should anyway.

Schools in Contempt of Court

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Despite a variety of court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, far too many still schools are using race and gender in their admission standards and for other performance criteria metrics.

The Equal Protection Project, founded and led by Cornell professor William Jacobson, has released a deep-dive report on the prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at Ivy League universities.
In his comprehensive report, Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League, Jacobson examines programs the eight Ivy League institutions use and require for students.

Jacobson:

The review of Ivy League practices by our CriticalRace.org project reflects substantial efforts by Ivy League schools to purport to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, while maintaining work-arounds and DEI practices that continue the obsession with racial identities

One set of TL;DR findings, focused on our oh-so-cool Ivy League schools, as summarized by Fox News:

  • Four require DEI training in student orientation programs (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale)
  • Six require faculty or staff DEI training in some capacity (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI offices at the institutional and/or department level
  • Five have a strategic plan devoted to DEI or anti-racism (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI or CRT (critical race theory) topics in classes and curricula
  • All eight have bias reporting systems

For those schools—not just the Ivy Leaguers; the report highlights 26 schools—so evidently contemptuous of court rulings, the Federal government should cut off all Federal funds to those schools and reduce funds transfers to the States in the amount of their own continued funding for those schools until the schools cure their functional contempt of court status by complying with the rulings rather than weasel-wording their way around them.

Ending Racial Disparities in Education

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has big plans for America’s education system, including expanding school choice opportunities and eliminating the Department of Education.

Good riddance to the DoEd, I say; it has fatally poisoned itself in two ways, either of which alone is fatal. One is with its emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of actual education. The other is with its moves to end due process regarding student sex offense allegations, insisting instead that the girl should be believed on the face of her allegations, attempting to deny the boy legal representation in what at bottom is an accusation of a crime, attempting to deny the boy the opportunity to bring his own witnesses and to cross examine the girl’s witnesses and the girl.

I strongly urge, should the effort to abolish DoEd succeed, that all DoEd personnel (that’s 100% of them for those following along at home) be returned to the private sector rather than reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. Yes, yes, one proposal being considered is simply to consolidate DoEd with the Department of the Interior. This is unnecessary, and as a sidelight, would continue the bloat in the Federal Civil Service ranks. If it’s reasonable that Interior can do DoEd’s erstwhile job, it has plenty of otherwise excess personnel who can be repurposed to the function. There is no need to import from DoEd.

That’s at the top of our education system. The real progress, the real improvements, will come from addressing racial disparities from the bottom up—pre-school on up through the 12th grade. Those disparities range from excusing misbehaving minority students because students who happen to be white or Asian heritage misbehave at lower rates to grading minority students more leniently than their counterparts on the basis of “culture.”

Throwing money at teachers union-run public schools while maintaining their monopoly in some jurisdictions and near-monopoly in others has been an utter failure. It’s those schools that have the greatest racial disparity in education outcomes. Public schools do not provide the same quality education across the spread of the variety of majority and minority students; the economically poorer students are consigned to the poorer schools.

School choice programs, generally centered on committing public moneys to students rather than to the schools they attend, and getting bureaucracy out of the way of putting charter and voucher schools into operation, would allow those economically poorer students (who are primarily but not exclusively minority students) to be able to afford to leave the public school system in favor of one of those alternatives or to home schooling milieus. Each of these three have shown themselves to be, on the whole, superior in educational outcome to the public schools in their districts. That competition, too, has improved the outcomes at the public schools; although so far, that outcome improvement is only just measurable, it’s not as great as the improvements provided by those alternatives.

Too, discipline is stronger in the alternatives, and that discipline contributes to the improvements in student education: the misbehaving students either stop misbehaving and so do better academically or they are more easily suspended or expelled. Beyond that, the misbehavers don’t disrupt the other students’ learning opportunities and so their performance also improves.