Category Archives: education

A Tiny Step

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Senators Joni Ernst (R, IA), Chuck Grassley (R, IA), and Ron Johnson (R, WI) are proposing a law to modify how student loans are made. Their bill, the Student Transparency for Understanding Decisions in Education Net Terms, or STUDENT (aren’t we cute), Act

would provide student loan applicants with an estimate of the total amount of interest they would pay, based on a standard 10-year repayment plan, during or prior to taking out a loan….

It’s easy enough to calculate the amortization table, and the periodic and total interest paid, for any loan; there should be no problem in requiring the lender to include the tables in their student loan offers. But why wait until after the students have taken out the loan?

Aside from fixing that little fillip, though, more useful moves regarding the student loan industry include these:

  • get the government out of the student loan business altogether, including both extending the loan or guaranteeing one
  • privatize the student loan industry. Require the college/university that has the student who is taking out the loan in order to attend that college/university
    • co-sign the student loan, or
    • extend at least half of the total loan in partnership with the private lender

Of course, at the Federal level, enforcement of the second bullet would be limited to withholding Federal funds from those colleges or universities declining to satisfy either of the requirements. Further Federal enforcement would be limited to withholding a fraction of Federal transfers to those States who choose not to enact similar requirements and to otherwise publicizing and jawboning those States who choose not to go along. Those are strong incentives, though.

A Progressive-Democrat’s Morality

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The Arizona House of Representatives has passed and sent along to the Senate a bill that would require the State’s Board of Investment to divest from all companies that

[d]onate to or invest in organizations that facilitate, promote or advocate for the inclusion of, or the referral of students to, sexually explicit material in kindergarten programs or any of the 1st – 12th grades.

The measure was passed on party lines alone.

Here’s the Progressive-Democrat State Representative Morgan Abraham on why he voted against the measure:

This is about finance, and this is a terrible, terrible idea for our retirement system. Some people I’ve talked to think this bill would allow our retirement system to divest from 75% of the S&P 500.
… We should not be forcing our retired teachers, our retired police officers, whoever is involved with this public retirement system to not have the ability to have a diversified portfolio, regardless of the values you have on the underlying issue.

Diversified portfolio. Regardless of the values [we] might have…. Think about that. This Progressive-Democrat thinks it entirely morally acceptable to have a diversified portfolio of investments that includes child pornography.

This Progressive-Democrat thinks it entirely morally acceptable to build retirement funds, in no small measure, through the sexual abuse of our children.

 

Separately, the bill also would require divestiture from all companies that advocate abortion. From this, the bill as a whole is likely to fail on 1st Amendment grounds, regardless of how morally reprehensible abortion might be.

Questions Abound

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Enfield Public Schools District, in Connecticut, posted a “health” curriculum lesson for the District’s 8th grade classes.

…a “Pizza and Consent” assignment, where eighth-grade students were given a handout stating that pizza can be used as a “metaphor for sex,” which instructed students to list their favorite and least favorite pizza toppings “in relation to sex.”
“Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing,” the assignment states. “Dislikes: Olives = Giving Oral,” stated the assignment given to eighth graders within the Enfield Public Schools.

Now build your pizzas, boys and girls.

The lesson was discovered and objected to last Monday (7 February as I write this) by Parents Defending Education, which objection finally prompted the District Superintendent Christopher Drezek to go before the school board and address the matter.

The simple truth was it was a mistake. And I know that there are some who may not believe that. I know there are some who don’t necessarily maybe want that answer. In this particular case, I didn’t even get a chance to because the person who made the mistake jumped ahead of it before I was even notified that it had happened.

He went on to claim that there was no hidden agenda in this.

The unnamed (in the article) District Health and Physical Education Coordinator, according to Parents Defending Education, emailed parents and apologized for the error [emphasis added].

The incorrect version, as opposed to the revised version of this assignment was mistakenly posted on our grade 8 curriculum page, and was inadvertently used for instruction to grade 8 Health classes. I caught the error after our curriculum revision in June, but failed to post the intended version. I own that, and apologize for the error[.]

The incident begs a number of questions, though.

  • Why was the supposedly erroneous version created in the first place?
  • Why, then, was it “mistakenly” posted to the 8th grade curriculum page in the second place?
  • If the 8th grade curriculum page was the wrong target, for which curriculum page was it actually intended?
  • If the Coordinator caught the mistake so long ago, why didn’t he remove the “error?”
  • Why didn’t the Coordinator post the correct lesson at that time?

And this question: what is Drezek doing about his Coordinator and the person(s) who created the “lesson” and posted it? He needs to demonstrate the lack of any hidden agenda.

Government-Funded Pre-K Schooling

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Vanderbilt University has a longitudinal study of the effects of such a program on children’s academic success through the 6th grade.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.

The researchers found, in sum,

[C]hildren randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.
…
A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.

In a spate of academic integrity, the researchers also wrote,

…no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.

The Wall Street Journal offered one possible explanation:

One theory worth a hearing is that these programs expose children to more rigid academic settings before it is developmentally appropriate.

I offer another possibility, one that is not at odds with the WSJ‘s. It may be that the parents of children who got into the Pre-K program, thinking their children’s future is secured, relaxed their close and constant oversight of their children’s schooling, performance, execution of homework, and so on relative to that of the parents whose children didn’t get in. That parental oversight and supervision also is a Critical Item in children’s academic performance, especially in those first years of school.

Either possibility, especially in combination with the study’s outcome, suggests that, particularly from the Federal level, government funding of grade school programs is at best a waste of taxpayer money.

The study itself can be found behind this paywall.

More Chit-Chat

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Cynically done chit-chat, too.

Biden-Harris says he’s going to distribute bunches more Wuhan Virus test kits to schools to keep them open.

The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of free Covid-19 tests to schools around the country, part of the federal government’s effort to keep schools open amid a surge in coronavirus cases caused by the Omicron variant.
Later this month, the administration will begin shipping five million rapid Covid-19 tests to K-12 schools each month, White House officials said.

That’s in contrast to this:

The rapid tests for schools are in addition to the 500 million rapid tests the administration plans to begin distributing to the public for free in the coming weeks, a White House official said. The administration has faced criticism for testing shortages around the country that led to long lines and empty shelves at the start of the Omicron surge.

Which raises the question: where’s he going to get the tests, since he’s already unable to supply his previously promised tests? And that failure comes months after his decision to reject an industry offer to produce 700,000+ tests per month ‘way last October.

Or: are supposed to let the teachers unions keep our kids’ public schools closed for those months before Biden-Harris’ administration gets around to getting the tests and moseying them out to the schools?

Another question: how about the folks who might actually benefit from access to regular—and frequent, since each test is just a snapshot of the individual getting it, an individual who might get infected the next day, the next hour after the test—testing: folks in retirement and nursing facilities, health care workers, folks with comorbidities?

Promises, promises.