Tag Archives: education

A Good Beginning

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) wants random inspections of Texas’ schools focused on safety checks and protocols. In a letter of instruction, Abbott wrote Texas School Safety Center Director Kathy Martinez-Prather:

Your team should begin conducting in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts. Staff should approach campuses to find weak points and how quickly they can penetrate buildings without being stopped.

The inspections are intended to lead to a series of recommendations for legislation regarding security system improvements.

It’s a good start; although I would have thought such inspections already would have been de rigueur on individual school administrators’ initiative for some years, at least since the Columbine shooting.

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What’s the Logic?

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President Joe Biden (D) has decided to forgive all $5.8 billion of the loans outstanding still held by the folks who went to any of the Corinthian Colleges institutions.

[T]he remaining 560,000 borrowers will be eligible for automatic discharges of their remaining Corinthian federal student-loan debt. All remaining federal loans held by anyone who attended a Corinthian school between its founding in 1995 and its 2015 closure are eligible.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona:

As of today, every student deceived, defrauded, and driven into debt by Corinthian Colleges can rest assured that the Biden-Harris administration has their back and will discharge their federal student loans[.]

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A Bit More on Student Debt

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I wrote a bit ago about what colleges and universities should be required to do regarding student loans and student debt.  Here’s a bit more concerning why college and university management teams’ feet should be held to the fire. Mike Brown, writing for lendedu, has some data that compares, by school, student salary expectations with salary reality. In general,

median expected salary after graduating was $60,000, but the PayScale data showed that the typical graduate with zero to five years experience makes $48,400.

Brown published salary expectation vs reality for 62 schools; here are those data for the first 15 schools in his table:

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Close in Spirit

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…but wide of the mark. Wide of the target itself, even. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer offered this on the matter of student loan debt:

The solution is to hold academic institutions accountable. If they want government to give my money to their students, they need to prove the value of their product. Set parameters: an 80% graduation rate in five years, and the ability to secure a job at a reasonable salary one year postgraduation. Failure results in withdrawal of federal money available to future students until parameters are met.

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Local Control vs Federal Funding

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Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill

could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.

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Canceling Charter Schools

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The Biden-Harris administration is trying to. His Department of Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is proposing a cancelation rule, cynically called, in part, Expanding Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Program. The rule provides, among other things:

prov[e] there’s a demand for a new school—e.g., evidence satisfactory to Miguel Cardona that there is “over-enrollment” in existing public schools

Prove to the government’s satisfaction, that is. A government that the teachers unions, recall, heavily influence—lately regarding Wuhan Virus requirements for opening and operating in existing public schools.

show[] how they would ensure diversity

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Transparency in Schools

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Florida now has a significant measure of some.

As a part of the “Year of the Parent,” a commitment [Florida Governor Ron (R)] DeSantis has made to prioritize parental rights, DeSantis signed HB 1467, which includes several protections for parents, such as requiring school districts to allow parents to review all books in the school library, all required classroom book lists, and any instructional materials teachers use.

And

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Tear It Down and Start Over

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It turns out the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control acted enthusiastically and frequently in the absence of data on the outcomes of its diktats guidelines. In particular, the CDC chose to act even though it lacked—and knew it lacked—

data on students’ learning loss when the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its COVID-19 school reopening guidance[.]

Even that early icon of medical sensibility, Anthony Fauci (of d National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases directorship and Wuhan Lab gain of function infamy) was warning the CDC of the uselessness of such things as six feet of separation requirements.

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This, Too, Is a Start

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To paraphrase an old trope, transgenders are people, too. Whether gender dysphoria is truly the case in particular individuals, or it’s a sham claim by some boys and young men in order to gain access to girls’ and women’s sports competition (or just their locker rooms), or it’s the manufacture of woke “schooling,” transgenders, those victimized by that pseudo-schooling, even the cheaters, need a place to compete.

Just not a place where males transgendered into women compete against women. Nor should women transgendered into men be competing against men, but given the nature of transgendering, that’s not a problem.

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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….

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