Tag Archives: education

Snowflakes

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A New York University chemistry professor—at NYU after four decades at Princeton—has been fired because his students, many of them doctor wannabes, circulated a petition complaining about how hard his class was. Their petition read in pertinent part,

We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class….

Neither should grades be a reflection of the time and effort; they should be a reflection of actual performance and learning. Imagine a patient whose illness was prolonged, or who was maimed, by a botched treatment being told “So sad, but I tried really hard.” Or the survivors of a patient who died from that botched treatment being told, “Too bad, but I put in a lot of time on your son.”

The seemingly unjustified firing because some precious snowflakes didn’t want to work is not the only problem here, though. The other problem is NYU itself.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who had New York University on his resume. NYU appears unconcerned that its graduates cannot think critically, or that its graduates are afraid of the hard work the real world contains, even as it appears to take student whining seriously. NYU graduates would seem to be a waste of any enterprise’s payroll.

Duplicity

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The American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center are at it, this time.

‘Way back in 2019 the Tennessee legislature created Education Savings Account pilot programs for Davidson and Shelby Counties. The ESAs grant money to students accepted into the programs; the funds facilitate students’ departure from poorly performing schools in favor of better schools.

The two county governments promptly sued to block the ESAs from taking effect, and the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately ruled, last May, that the ESAs were jake, and in June that court denied the counties’ petition to reconsider.

Now the ACLU and SPLC are suing on the legally frivolous (IMNSHO) premise that that delay, manufactured by the county governments, is sufficient reason to further delay implementation of the ESA pilot program.

That’s how desperate the Left is to keep poor and minority kids—especially in Shelby County, although Davidson has a significant poor and minority population—trapped in bad schools instead of letting them transfer and actually get an education.

Nor am I sympathetic to the county school districts’ imagined plight. Those school districts really did have all that time since 2019 to prepare their budgets: they had no reason to ignore the possibility that the ESAs would be upheld and to prepare accordingly. It’s also not at all beyond the districts’ capabilities to have prepared two budgets, with one being centered on no ESA impact and one centered on an ESA impact.

A Thought on Money-Follow-the-Child Programs

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters had one.

Quoting Toni Jennings, retired teacher and former Florida Lieutenant Governor, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute CEO, wrote

The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, “Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.” Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.

Absolutely, and those public schools are not only failing those children, they’re defrauding those children’s parents, whose tax money is paying for those schools.

Here’s another thought, this one from me, flowing from this bit in Trabert’s letter:

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math, and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse….

Even if that achievement gap didn’t exist, and those minority children also were at that 31% rate, the rate is unacceptably bad and illustrates the magnitude of the failure of our public schools.

We need vastly more competition in our K-12 system, not less, in order to both eliminate that achievement gap and to bring the college-ready rate up to acceptable levels. That means the Federal government must butt out of the business [sic] or be butted out by the States rejecting Federal funds; it means that State and local education funding must follow the child not the institution; and it means that State and local jurisdictions must stop, or be stopped from, using their regulatory powers to obstruct the opening of charter and voucher schools or of the nascent homeschooling pod alternative.

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.

Those inspections, though, need to go unpublicized at the individual school level, although results aggregated to the school district level should be readily available to the public.

The goal should be to help individual school administrators and school district administrators identify and correct weaknesses (as well as provide those legislative recommendations, which should center on systemic weaknesses) rather than to embarrass the administrators.

Of course, publicizing district aggregations of findings will tend to contradict that last, but here’s where the parents’ need, and right, to know must take precedence over administrator embarrassment. And parents aren’t stupid; they’ll recognize whether a district administrator takes prompt action to correct weaknesses or weasel words his way around them or otherwise blows them off.

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[.]

Either the Corinthian students were cheated, or they were not; I have questions. Notice that I’m eliding the question, here, of why us average American taxpayers should be on the hook for the misbehaving Corinthian Colleges’ pecadilloes.

Why does only some of the debt—the unpaid balances—get canceled? Why don’t the amounts already paid by those students with remaining debt balances also get returned?

Why aren’t the Corinthian students who paid off their debt—and there are quite a number—eligible for recompense?

Is Biden actually saying, with a straight face, that the students were cheated only to the extent they still owe money?

Help me understand the logic of this.