Tag Archives: education

School Choice, Public Schools

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section is opposed to Educational Savings Accounts that Texas parents could use to send their children to private schools.

School choice in Texas will benefit no one except those who already pay for private school. Moving to public funding of private schools will also tend to resegregate society. Our state-level elected officials are doing the bidding of billionaires in- and out-of-state who have other agendas than excellence in our public schools.

School choice will greatly benefit the children, especially those in families on Texas’ lower economic rungs, by letting them escape from failing public schools. Nor is it an either-or choice; the one leads to improvements in the other. School choice, from that competition, will greatly benefit those children remaining in public schools.

That success, far from increasing segregation, will contribute to decreasing it. The majority of those kids on the lower rung are from minority families. Being increasing their ability to compete academically, they’ll be better able to compete for jobs, and for promotions once employed, as adults. That more even competition is the stuff of desegregation.

The idea that no one but a few billionaires will benefit is just so much irrational hype.

He concluded with:

Let’s put public funding of private schools to a statewide vote.

We just did. In the Republican primaries and the runoffs in some of those primaries, public funding won very widespread support. We will again soon: school choice will be on the ballot again this November. Those State-level elected officials, elected in the primaries and will be elected in the general election, having campaigned on the matter, are much more likely to do the bidding of those who hired and will hire them—their constituents—than were Texas to maintain the status quo with its politicians in November.

Trust

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Harvard’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, has overruled the recommendation of the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to confer graduation on 13 students who were suspended over their participation in riots protests in support of Hamas as Israel committed the heinous sin of defending itself against Hamas’ war of extermination against Israel. Harvard Corporation has decided not to allow the 13 to graduate—at least not yet. Both the students and the FAS have chosen, so far, not to go through the school-mandated process of appeal of the suspensions, which could result in one or some (or all) of the suspensions being lifted, thereby allowing those students to graduate.

Then, there’s this response by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government in the FAS:

I would expect a faculty rebellion, possibly a faculty rebellion against the entire governance structure, because there’s already a fair amount of mistrust toward the Corporation to begin with….

Trust is a two-way street. It’s not possible to trust faculty members who so openly support terrorists and who so openly disdain Israel and, apparently, Jews in general. And who appear to disregard school procedure when the procedure becomes inconvenient. If there is the faculty rebellion, the participants will be self-identifying as ready for termination for cause. Hopefully, the Harvard Corporation will have the moral, as well as legal, courage to carry out the firings promptly.

Deadlines

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Columbia’s management team gave terrorist supporters a deadline to clear their campus “encampment,” and when the campers ignored the deadline, managers issued them a new deadline. When the terrorist supporters seized and occupied a school building, managers gave them a deadline by which to clear out. And then another.

Terrorist supporters seized a Rhode Island School of Design building, and that school’s managers have issued a deadline. As seems typical of school management teams, the design school’s administrators have yet to announce consequences for demonstrators if they do not comply with the 8 am deadline.

And at MIT:

Anti-Israel agitators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took back their campus encampment after it was initially cleared by police.
…
Protesters at MIT were given a Monday afternoon deadline to voluntarily leave or face suspension. Many cleared out of the area, according to the school spokesperson. Dozens of protesters remained at the encampment through the night.
No arrests had been made as of Monday night, according to the MIT spokesperson.

This sort of thing is all too common, and it’s not unique to today’s school disruptions. As far back as Vietnam War college and university protests, disrupters would occupy school buildings, and school managers would issue deadlines to clear out after deadlines to clear out.

In all those cases, it became necessary, ultimately, for campus and local police, augmented in some cases by State police, to go in and forcibly root out the occupiers.

Enough. It’s time—long past time—for school managers to learn what should by now be the obvious lesson. Deadlines are useless except to the occupiers; all the deadlines do is demonstrate the timidity of school managers.

The correct answer to all of these test questions is to send the campus and local police right in immediately after the campers have encamped and the occupiers have occupied, and root them out. And apply suitable corrective action: expelling the students participating, firing professors (tenured or not) participating, and charging those who’ve committed crimes—vandalism, for instance, is rampant among occupiers—with the relevant charges, and then taking them to trial—no settlements, no plea bargains.

Doublespeak

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MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth, the school’s Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans say they’re doing away with the DEI commitment the school had been requiring of prospective employees as a hiring criterion. Through a university “spokesperson,” they told the New York Post,

Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT[.]

Kornbluth expanded on that.

…compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression…they don’t work.

And more of her expansion:

We can build an inclusive environment in many ways….

There’s the doublespeak with which we’re so used to coming from the mouths of the Left. Kornbluth and her MIT management team will continue their DEI hiring criteria; they just won’t be up front about them regarding loyalty pledges.

The Planned Racism of the Illinois State Legislature

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An Illinois legislatively created commission established…to come up with ways to make appropriations to state universities more “equitable” has issued a report delineating how to achieve that.

…lawmakers would determine how much funding a school deserves. They would do this using a variable called the “adequacy target,” which takes into account the school’s mission and enrollment as well as the programs it offers. … Larger amounts would be set aside for groups the commission considers underenrolled—say, with a $6,000 bonus for each enrolled black student, $4,000 for each enrolled low-income student, and $2,000 for each enrolled rural student.

And

The commission pretends that universities charge different prices for different races. Specifically, the plan wants lawmakers to assume that universities will charge minority students a lower tuition rate than whites and Asians, regardless of income.

And so on.

No. This intrinsically racist plan will only codify the inability of minority students to compete in higher ed and subsequently in the work force and in the managerial teams that manage enterprise work forces.

To increase minorities’ educational opportunities and improve their education in Illinois’ colleges and universities, these legislators must lose their DEI sewage. Beyond that, they must take the currently politically unpopular steps of divesting themselves of their teachers unions yokes, and then move decisively to expand parents’ school choices by making K-12—kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school—charter and voucher schools, whether privately or publicly run, ubiquitous throughout the State.

And this: to the extent that Illinois insists on using its tax code for social engineering purposes, it should reallocate its existing tax collections toward having school-directed taxes follow the student rather than remaining trapped—along with minority students—in failing public schools. Beyond that, additional existing tax collections should be placed into a fund for providing education scholarships to all students whose parents wish to transfer their children out of failing schools and into different, better performing schools.

Waiting until post-high school to begin even to pretend to address educational failure is far too late to have any serious effect.

For Illinois, I’m not holding my breath.