Tag Archives: education

Teachers Union Against Minority Child Education

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That’s the outcome of Nebraska teachers union opposition to Nebraska’s scholarship program to support families with children wanting to attend private schools, a program administered by Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska.

The union, through the Save Our Schools organization that the union backs got onto next week’s general election ballot a referendum aimed at repealing that scholarship program.

Currently, some 1,500 children benefit academically and their parents benefit financially from those scholarships. Of those families,

half…have household income below 213% of the federal poverty level, the measure used to determine eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Some 40% are nonwhite and 11.5% have special needs.

(For 2023, the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four was $30,000. 213% of that works out to a skosh under $64,000.)

But the teachers union says to Hell with those minority children and those special needs children. Their union-controlled public schools are the only schools acceptable. It doesn’t matter that those public schools are broad failures.

Another Reason for School Choice

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Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pushes its LGBTQ curriculum on its children down through pre-kindergarten—expose[ing] children as young as 3 to “Pride storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions, and elementary-age same-sex romance—the school district refuses to notify those children’s parents when this happens in particular classes, and the district refuses to allow those parents to opt their children out of such “lessons.” The 4th Circuit court upheld that atrocious and abusive behavior, so a coalition of parents across a range of religions is petitioning the Supreme Court to take the case and uphold the parents, reversing the 4th Circuit.

A plethora of friend-of-the-courts briefs are flowing in encouraging the Court to take up the case.

And

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.
…
The poll shows that almost three-quarters, 71%, of likely voters said a teacher should notify parents if their students say they want to go by a different gender.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision and subsequent ruling, if it takes the case, the way forward is clear. The 4th Circuit’s egregious error and MCPS’ enthusiastically aggressive child abuse and disregard of parents’ wishes illustrate the difficulty of getting public K-12 schools to do their job. Those schools no longer are worth the trouble or our tax money. Instead, this is just one more reason for parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of charter or voucher schools and homeschooling. And for pushing for more charter and voucher schools.

What’s Not Being Discussed

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Minority, particularly black, enrollment is flat to down in many of our more selective colleges and universities since the Supreme Court ruled in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc v President And Fellows Of Harvard College that colleges and universities no longer could use race as a factor in their admission selections.

Leaders of those institutions, a group that includes Washington University in St Louis and some Ivy League schools, are now trying to figure out why their numbers shook out the way they did. … They also say previous growth didn’t come at the cost of academic talent.

That last is an especially interesting claim, since those Leaders provided no data to support their claim, or at least the article’s author did not quote their data or provide any from her own digging.

I have two questions that bear on the matter. One is what are the minority-enrolled normalized majors of black admittees before the ruling compared with the majors after the ruling? What are the majors at graduation before and after the ruling? The latter will be the more dispositive datum since students change their majors, often more than once, over the course of their studies.

My other question is what is the normalized graduation rate before the Court’s ruling compared with after the ruling.

Since this is the first academic year after the ruling, it’s too soon to answer those questions. That, by itself, demonstrates the disingenuousness of those institution leaders: they have no data with which to compare, and so they have no data on which to base their claim “no cost of academic talent.” The questions still need to be asked, and the data collected, so substantiated assessments can be substituted for vapor claims.

Also not being discussed—it is a larger topic—is what, if anything, should be done about any enrollment disparities, assuming disparity is defined as enrollment percentages not well approximating population percentages. That answer, I claim, is independent of whether racist enrollment selection criteria are allowed or not. The answer, instead, centers on making available to all children opportunities for education and entry into the world post education. That, in turn, demands those opportunity availabilities must begin before kindergarten; extend through K-12 schooling, whether home schooling, public schools, voucher schools, or charter schools according to parent choices; and on through trade schools, community colleges, and colleges/universities according to parent and student choices.

That actual equality of opportunity will make those enrollment numbers look more like our population numbers.

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.