Category Archives: education

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.

Union Failure

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The Chicago Teachers Union has decided—carefully at the last minute—to not report for work for in-person teaching. They’ve decided to reimpose remote “learning” protocols out of their fear (or so they claim) of the Omicron variant of the Wuhan Virus. And this time it’s not just union management making the decision, it’s the rank and file:

The vote was approved by 73% of the union’s members, calling for no in-class learning until “cases substantially subside” or union leaders approve an agreement for safety protocols with the district.

School district leaders—even Mayor Lori Lightfoot—are terming the CTU’s job action a “walkout” and an “illegal work stoppage.” They’re right, and the CTU needs to be decertified and the teachers who won’t teach fired for cause (which would deny them unemployment benefits, even in Illinois). Let these…persons…refuse to work on someone else’s payroll. Allocate the funds presently sent to the schools closed by this union job action instead be used for vouchers for the parents to use to send their children to other schools and to generate additional voucher and charter schools in the city.

But the CTU’s misbehavior goes far beyond this. During and after the last bout of “remote learning,” it became clear that the practice severely damages children’s social development and their mental health. With this knowledge widespread, it’s now clear that the CTU is actively engaging in child abuse, and the union managers, along with the business that is the CTU, should be prosecuted accordingly.

There’s no excuse for this.

Assess or Not?

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Jason Riley had some thoughts in his Wall Street Journal op-ed concerning Harvard’s decision to not bother with any serious assessment of prospective students before choosing which to admit and which to…not. The subheadline on his piece summed up his column:

How do you help young people move forward without honestly assessing where they stand?

I had some thoughts in answer of that question, too, and they’re rather more pithy than Riley’s.

“You” don’t, but that’s not the point of the Left’s identity politics, most explicitly seen in academia. This is just the utter contempt Leftist identity politics purveyors have for blacks and Hispanics, considering them intrinsically inferior and so, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson’s infamous words, they should be grateful for the protections of no assessments. It’s also the raw jealousy the Leftist identity politics purveyors have for Americans with Asian heritage, viewing them as intrinsically superior to the rest of us.

It’s a completely disgusting and dishonest display, and in a moral world, it would get institutions that employed such as these cut off from Federal and State funding, and alums with any sense of propriety and self respect would stop donating to them.

Student Loan Responsibility

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Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller wrote about student loan burdens in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, using New York University as a worst-case illustration. Their subheadline made a good summary of their thesis.

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt….

A female graduate sold her eggs to cover some of her NYU costs even as she borrowed to cover more; she’s still selling her eggs to cover expenses and try to pay on her student loan debt as she remains essentially unemployed five months after graduation. In another example, a single mother of three had a $40,000/year income when her son started school in 2018. The mother still has her own $34,000 in loans from her own bachelor’s degree and she’s borrowing another $140,000 in Parent Plus loans to help her son pursue his degree.

And this:

An NYU master’s in publishing leaves recent graduates with median debt nearly triple that of the school with the next highest loan burden for which the Education Department released data. At NYU, the graduates borrowed a median $116,000 and earned a median $42,000 two years out.

And this:

NYU’s 2015 and 2016 public-health graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $106,000 for the degree, the Journal’s analysis of Education Department data found; half earned roughly $61,000 or less two years after graduation.

And this deflection from NYU spokesman John Beckman:

Not everyone seeking an advanced degree is going into a lucrative field, and universities have no control over how our society values particular professions.

NYU is especially bad in this arena, but only by a matter of degree. The problem itself is both widespread and very serious.

The overall situation is one more argument for getting government all the way out of the student loan business, whether making the loans or guaranteeing them. That and the alternatives below are perfectly straightforward to implement, if exceedingly difficult to effect politically. But that just requires us sovereign citizens to put our foot down and fire the politicians who won’t go along and elect those who will.

After getting government out of the way, do these things:

  • make the schools publish the average and median 5-yr-after-graduation salaries for each of its majors
  • make the schools publish the per centages of their graduates finding employment in their major areas of study within one year of graduation
  • make the schools be the ones extending loans to their students or serve as co-borrower on any private financial institution student loans
  • let graduates discharge their loans through bankruptcy—stop disguising the risks from the lenders (and borrowers), and stop inuring the lenders from those risks.

One more Critical Item; although this is a change in mindset for all of us, not only school managers and politicians. Recognize for whom college is most appropriate. There’s a crying need for a whole lot of tradesmen, and good livings to be made there—and nothing an architect draws up or an engineer designs gets built without tradesmen. Doctors and lawyers have no place to ply their trades, other than in their homes, without tradesmen. Those homes don’t get built without tradesmen. And neither do the roads/bridges, power grids, communications grids, and on and on that connect those homes to those offices and office buildings—or mines and farms to anywhere—without those tradesmen.

“Threats of Violence”

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Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.