Education and Needs

A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section expressed concern for a high school student who was suspended for violating his school’s hair length rule.

The state shouldn’t prohibit haircuts of one type or another and suspend students from school for violating the policy unless it can really show this is needed.

And

Schools need to focus on teaching kids and not worrying about [clothing and grooming standards].

Among the needs and teaching focuses in high schools, and in lower schools, is personal discipline. Clothing and hair grooming rules are badly needed milieus for teaching that badly needed skill.

There’s Educational Opportunity…

…and there’s educational obstruction. This is the contest between charter schools (and, larger, school choice) and union public schools.

Charter enrollment is up 9% since 2019, while the number of students in district schools is down 3.5%, according to a new study from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Families have discovered choice,” the report says, “and they like it.”

And

The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states.

A Proposal for Harvard University

Given the blatant antisemitic bigotry of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, as well as her dishonesty, demonstrated by her plagiarism—She plagiarized her acknowledgments—and the antisemitism demonstrated by the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, and its open condonement of Gay’s bigotry and dishonesty, when that body unanimously supported retaining her as President, it’s clear that drastic changes to Harvard University’s governance is badly needed.

A Harvard professor has suggested a pathway to that.

One faculty member, citing a carve-out in the Massachusetts Constitution that reserves authority over Harvard to the state legislature, has urged Massachusetts lawmakers to install a government official on the board to provide more transparency and public accountability.

A Brief Note

The Wharton Board of Advisors—the Wharton is the business school of UPenn—is demanding leadership change at UPenn in light of UPenn President Liz Magill’s House of Representatives testimony in which Magill refused to say whether calling for genocide of Jews violated any of UPenn’s codes of conduct.

So far, so good. But then the Board wrote this in its demand:

In light of your testimony yesterday before Congress, we demand the University clarify its position regarding any call for harm to any group of people immediately, change any policies that allow such conduct with immediate effect, and discipline any offenders expeditiously.

Federal Intimidation

The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Not Radicalized

Recall the…incident…a few days ago in which a Hillcrest High School teacher was terrorized, solely for her support of Israel during the current Hamas-instigated war against Israel, and driven into a locked room for her own protection when 400 of the high school’s students rioted and targeted her, threatening to kill her, while waving Palestinian flags.

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks is vociferously denying that those students were radicalized; he’s insisting, instead, that

This is a really good school with wonderful young people. And I’m so taken aback by this notion that these kids are terrorists…or radicalized.

Who Needs Knowledge?

Plainly not teachers union teachers, at least according to the union. The New Jersey Progressive-Democratic Party-run State legislature agrees with them, too, which says volumes about the contempt Party has for ordinary Americans.

A major New Jersey education union is pushing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy to sign a bill into law that would eliminate the basic skills test requirement to become a teacher in the state.
The New Jersey Senate and state Assembly passed a bill in June that would allow the State Education Board to issue an alternative certificate to a teacher candidate who meets all eligibility requirements except for the requirement to achieve a minimum basic reading, writing and math skills test score.

91%

That’s the outcome of a Freedom Economy Index survey of 70,000 small businesses, of whom 905 responded, producing a survey with a 3% margin of error and a 95% confidence interval for the outcome.

And having delayed the lede, here is that outcome.

Fully two-thirds of the respondents think college graduates have educations that are useless to business needs, and another quarter of them think those graduates don’t have very useful educations. Here are some of the comments from respondents, which the survey reported verbatim:

  • The Talent shortage will just get worse because high schools and colleges produce no talent.

Selfish

And from that, a Texas bill that would create universal/State-wide school choice—paid for by Education Savings Accounts of $10,500 per K-12 student—is on the brink of failure to pass. Much progress has been made, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott (R) having convened a special session of the Texas legislature for the purpose. However, here we are on the last day of that session (as I write), and the failure brink is caused by a few rural Republican representatives.

The bill would let any Texas parent withdraw his student child from a public school that parent deemed unsuitable or failing to educate his son or daughter and transfer him/her to a different school (typically charter, voucher, or private) more to his liking.

Intrinsically Inferior

The Oregon State Board of Education has waived, essentially, all high school graduation requirements—demonstrated competency in reading, writing or math—and is allowing anyone and everyone who had the initiative simply to enroll in a high school to graduate with a high school diploma.

Board members said the standards…harmed marginalized students since higher rates of students of color, students with disabilities, and students learning English as a second language ended up having to take the extra step to prove they deserved a diploma, The Oregonian reported.