Tag Archives: education

Part of the Problem

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US News & World Report Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Gertler, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, accidentally exposed a significant part of the problem in higher academia management and that management’s failure to provide for an open learning environment for the students (and too many pupils) attending their institutions.

Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory, and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees, and community members.

This is a basic misunderstanding of what the job of a college president is.

The interest of students is to learn how to think critically and how to debate positions—including, as an important pedagogic tool, in favor of those with which they disagree—learn their course material, and learn how to get along with fellow students who have different beliefs. They have no other legitimate interest while attending the college or university.

Faculty members have no interest other than to teach those things to their students and those pupils who deign attend a class. They have no legitimate school governance interest and they have no legitimate political interest once on the school campus. That they’ve gained so much influence in school governance is a failure amply demonstrated by the disruptions and riots at their institutions over the last few years.

“Community members” have no interest in the school’s operation other than that they are paid on time and fully by the school and the students and pupils for services rendered.

The only interests to which a college president need be responsive are the following. Donors, who have an interest in their money being used as they’ve designated. Alternatively, the school’s management team is free to reject a donor’s money if the designated use is antithetical to the school’s education mission.

Alumni, to the extent they recognize that their role is to support the school’s mission and not to try to impose their personal political agenda on the school.

Trustees, who are the senior managers of the institution.

The mission of a college or university to provide an environment conducive to educating all of its students, regardless of their religious belief, and then to provide that education as outlined above.

A president who cannot do those things, or who disagrees with the narrowness of those things has no business being a president of that institution.

Separately, but closely related, Gertler identified an additional major impediment to a college’s/university’s ability to satisfy its mission.

Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members.

Leave aside the enormous charge to students for tuition and living expenses by an institution with an endowment of nearly $51 billion and growing. That endowment, by the way, would pay for 596,470 student-years, or more than 23 years for class cycles of those 20,000 students, longer if we’re doing dynamic scoring on that growing endowment.

The larger problem embodied by Gertler’s statistic are those 20,000 “employees” compared with those 2,500 actual teachers. That’s badly out of whack.

Pseudo-Support, Two Ways

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Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor Josh Shapiro claims to be pro-school choice, yet when the State’s Republican legislature passed a $100 million voucher program, he vetoed it: his fellow Progressive-Democrats in the legislature objected, and their opposition would have “complicated” passing the State’s upcoming budget bill. Shapiro used his Party opposition as cover for his closet opposition to support for non-public school programs. Never mind that the same Republican legislature could have passed the State’s budget bill over continuing Party opposition.

Then there’s this claim by an organizer of a letter to Progressive-Democrat Vice President and likely Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris opposing any thought of her nominating Shapiro to be her running mate:

He is far too supportive of school privatization to be the vice president. We don’t need to be soft on this issue because public education is the cornerstone of our democracy.

Education certainly is a cornerstone of our (republican) democracy. There’s nothing magic about public education, though, especially in today’s world where public education districts, run for the most part by teachers unions, are so badly failing our students.

Pseudo-support for voucher schools and pseudo-support for education in general, each with the same Progressive-Democrat at the center—these are the positions of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

AP Grade Inflation

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College Board, the nonprofit folks who bring us the SAT exams many institutions use for college/university entrance assessment and the Advanced Placement exams used by many high schools to assess how well students have done in their advanced placement courses, has dumbed down made it easier to pass its AP tests. A passing score on the AP exam is a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5; as a result of the changes, it’s easier now for a student to score at least that 3.

AP US History teacher Mark Reindl said that, after the change, 76% of his students passed the AP History exam, against his prior years’ average 40%.

That was an eye opener. One thing I’ve read a lot in military history is to train like you fight[.]

For College Board, though, there’s this:

The College Board has spent years lobbying state legislators to require public universities to offer credit for students who do well on its 40 AP exams, which include the core subjects of math, English, science, and social studies, as well as foreign languages and electives like psychology and art history.
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Each exam requires a fee of just under $100, paid for by students’ families or, in some cases, school districts or states seeking to expand access to the programs.

But the nonprofit’s move is not a business move, it insists. The organization argues its courses are still more difficult than some entry-level college classes. Isn’t that a sad commentary on the rigors of colleges and universities.

Jon Boeckenstedt, Oregon State University Vice Provost of Enrollment Management:

 It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college[.]

Indeed. But maybe if this sort of exam is useful for assessing a student’s readiness for college, College Board could structure its exams along the lines of this 1895 8th Grade Final Exam that Salina, KS used. It’s a straightforward 4-hour exam across several subject areas (which College Board could break out into several exams for assessing high school student performance and readiness), and it’s one that requires examinees to think about each answer, not just regurgitate some parcel of rote learning.

Grammar (Time, one hour)

  1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
  2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
  3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
  4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
  5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
  6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
  7. 7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

  1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
  2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
  3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
  4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
  5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
  6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
  7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
  8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
  9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
  10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

  1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
  2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
  3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
  4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
  5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
  6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
  7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
  8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?

Orthography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
  2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
  3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
  4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
  5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.
  6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
  7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
  8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
  9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
  10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
  2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
  3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
  4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
  5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
  6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
  7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
  8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
  9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
  10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

It is, indeed, highly useful to the extent of being critical that students train—learn—like they’ll fight—perform in the real world of adulthood. To the extent students can’t pass this older jr high exam, or a collection of them based on this exam, that’s the extent of the failure of the teachers and school districts to insist on actual knowledge and thinking skills; it’s not a failure of the students, although they’re the ones who suffer the consequences.

Trump’s Education Plan

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Former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a 12-point plan (actually, 8 points, the last of which has 4 sub-points) for revamping and improving our nation’s public education system. He deserves large credit for laying out a specific plan. No one in the Progressive-Democratic Party has been willing to do anything of this specificity, especially including Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, other than tightly hewing to the teachers union line and denigrating voucher and charter schools.

For all that, much of Trump’s plan will be difficult to achieve. The dozen points, together with my august comments (in italics), are listed below.

  • Cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. These, especially CRT, will be hard to enforce, beyond getting rid of public verbiage on Web sites. Florida provides a good example of how to do this. That’s at the State level, though. South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which this can be implemented at the Federal level. That ruling held that while Federal funds could be preferentially withheld, they could not be withheld to a coercive extent.
  • Direct the Departments of Justice and Education to open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination, including discrimination against Asian Americans. There need to be sanctions identified, also, though.
  • Because the Marxism being taught in schools is aggressively hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. Better would be to enforce teaching Judeo-Christian material alongside.
  • Find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and get Congress to reaffirm the president’s ability to remove recalcitrant employees from the job. The former will be hard to define. The latter needs to be done wholly separately, and Executive Branch-wide, not just in DoEd.
  • Veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. And teach civics far more than in just a single 8th grade semester.
  • Keep men out of women’s sports. In parallel, make a Title IX case, or amend Title IX, to require separate athletic programs for transgender athletes in the same manner that Title IX mandates for men and women sports programs.
  • Create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them. The new credentialing body also needs to emphasize subject matter expertise, not merely “teach how to teach.”
  • Implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education: These are local control matters; see my remark above for how South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which “funding preferences” can be implemented. Reward funding, though, will be easier to implement than coercive defunding.
    • Abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 and adopt Merit Pay.
    • Drastically cut number of school administrators, including the “DEI” bureaucracy.
    • Adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.
    • Implement the direct election of school principals by the parents, as the ultimate form of local control.

On the whole, this is a plan worth pursuing with all speed.

Lies of Teachers Union Managers

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This one comes from the Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates. She told WBBM‘s Political Editor, Craig Dellimore, in their Sunday interview,

Conservatives don’t even want Black children to be able to read. Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing Black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter. So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, Black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.

Not so much. Pushing for alternatives to public schools—voucher schools, charter schools, pods, homeschooling—is what Conservatives do explicitly to make it possible for black children, other minority children, all children trapped in failing public schools to learn to read and to learn to do arithmetic.

Conservatives championed Black codes during Reconstruction? Apparently, Davis Gates is a product of her public school American history: she’s utterly ignorant. It was the Democratic Party that was creating Black codes during Reconstruction—and that created the Ku Klux Klan to prey on freed Blacks and their White supporters—and it was Party that pushed for gun control laws aimed at keeping those same Blacks and White supporters unarmed and helpless against the KKK.

Now Party is adamantly opposed to those alternative schools, and Davis Gates is right there with them, doing her best to keep black children, other minority children, all children from learning much of anything by keeping them trapped in those public schools.

Davis Gates is just one more example of the intrinsic dishonesty of teachers unions and of the failure of public schools, including in Chicago.