Tag Archives: education

Race-Based Admissions at UNC

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The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is under fire and in the courts over its fundamentally racist admissions policy.  Plaintiffs are arguing that UNC violates Supreme Court rulings by giving too much weight to applicants’ race. The problem, though, is that any weight to race is too much, is fundamentally racist.  The Supreme Court’s rulings don’t go far enough to bar this behavior.  As things stand, though, the plaintiffs have a case IMNSHO.

UNC admissions readers frequently highlight the applicant’s race, citing one reader’s comment that even with an ACT score of 26, they should “give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.” Another reader wrote, “Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid,” the plaintiffs said.
Steve Farmer, the university’s vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, said in response: “Language in this exchange does not reflect Carolina’s values or our admissions process.”

Farmer is being disingenuous. The language clearly reflects both UNC’s values—emphasizing race as they do—and that language equally clearly reflects the fact that UNC does use race emphatically in its admissions process. The notes are right there on the applicants’ forms.

UNC says it has studied race-neutral approaches to admission for many years….

The only race-neutral approach possible for admission—or for any other purpose anywhere—is to not consider race at all. Any inclusion of race (or gender, or…), even as a “plus” factor, necessarily segregates in favor of one group at the direct expense of another.

If UNC truly wanted diversity, it would achieve it by admitting the best students regardless of race, or ethnicity, or gender.  The resulting student population would be a microcosm of the underlying population from which it was drawn.

If that didn’t produce a diversity reflecting the more general population, the correction would not be to play race games with high school graduates, it would be to commit university personnel and resources to improving the K-12 education so those high school grads would more closely reflect the underlying demographics.  And to press other universities and colleges to do the same.

But that would take actual work and dirty hands, not virtue signaling.

Union Greed Realized

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Recall that the United Teachers Los Angeles union threatened to strike this week if they didn’t get their way.  Now they’ve gone ahead and done it, putting the education (such as it is in this district’s public—NTLA-manned—schools) of 500,000 children at risk.  For instance, at the Third Street Elementary School

[a] notice plastered on the school gate said that students will be gathered in the auditorium and the outdoor lunch pavilion area, instead of classrooms, during the strike, and overseen by administrators and teacher assistants.

No education allowed here, per the NTLA.

Recall the issue central to the union’s demands—the end of competition from charter schools that operate in the same district, sometimes in the same school buildings, and that attract students, who then do much better in school and get much better educations.

The union…cast the strike as a broader referendum on the growth of charter schools, which don’t have to follow some public-school regulations and whose teachers are largely nonunionized. Charter schools aren’t part of the contract bargaining….

In other words, charter school teachers have much greater flexibility in how they teach their students, and they aren’t bound by union demands regarding employment and employment parameters.  Charter school teachers also are regulated by the State rather than the union local jurisdictions.

Religious Bigotry?

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North Dakota wants to let its high schools teach a Bible studies class, and the ACLU (among others) has gotten its institutional panties in a twist over it. State Congressman Aaron McWilliams (R) has a bill moving through the State’s legislature that would achieve that.  He said

The intention of this bill is to provide an option to schools to teach a class on the bible from a historical perspective.  My position is that no religious text should be excluded from being taught as it relates to the historical or philosophical influences in our history or on our society today.

The class would be an elective amounting to 1/6 of the total social studies requirement for graduating from a North Dakota high school.

The ACLU thinks that teaching a religious document even from a historical or philosophical perspective, even when it’s not a required course, is somehow the State establishing or supporting a particular religion.  That plainly isn’t the case; even the august personages of the ACLU know that—or American history wasn’t a safe space for them and they were triggered to unconsciousness by their grade school lessons and their junior high civics lessons.

Heather Smith, Executive Director of the North Dakota chapter of the ACLU does have a point, though.  Sort of.

A school could teach comparative religious classes, or you could talk about the Bible’s relationship to literature, art, or music[.]

But not its relationship with our history or culture, or with western civilization’s history or culture generally?  Not its relationship with our national philosophy, such as it is, or with philosophy generally?  Apparently, Smith was triggered by her high school logic class, too.

On the other hand, the comparative religion concern has some validity.  Perhaps McWilliams’ bill could include an option to teach an additional elective course, also worth 1/6 of the total social studies requirement, that teaches the Torah and the Talmud “from a historical perspective.”  After all, we are a Judeo-Christian nation, with a staunch Judeo-Christian history and underpinning.

Such a broadened perspective on who we are, how we began, and how we came to be where we are now—including these incessant attacks on our Christianity and Judaism—would strengthen our American culture, and it might inform even the members of the ACLU.

Side tidbit: the first Georgian patriot to die in combat in our Revolutionary War was a Jew.

Union Greed

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Teachers union style.  The Los Angeles Unified School District is so close to out of money that, under California law, the LA county is obligated to take the district into functional receivership under its own control if money gets much shorter.

It’s about to, and they’re about to.  The United Teachers Los Angeles union has said it will strike the school district, demanding more money—twice as much as it’s been offered—if it can’t get more money for its teachers and get rival, and educationally superior, charter schools capped on the State resources they receive.

In addition to putting those charter school children at risk, the union is willing to put 480,000 children in the school district in educational harm’s way, if the union can’t get its lucre.  Nor does this union care about the low-income families’ working parents—the bulk of the district’s children come from such families—who must find other means for monitoring their kids, much less educating them, which will add to those parents’ costs.

Sure, sure, the district wants to try to keep the schools open even without the union teachers. District leadership intends to employ “educational software and substitutes.” Two things about that: if the educational software actually is all that, the district will discover that it doesn’t need all of those union teachers after all.  The other is that substitute teachers are just that—useful for short term classroom monitoring and a modicum of teaching, but they’re not the real thing.

And just to drive the point home:

On the last day of class before winter break began, teacher Meg DeCoux packed six boxes of books, whiteboard markers and art supplies from her first-grade classroom. She and other teachers bought some of the supplies with their own money and don’t want them to be available to administrators or other substitutes during a strike, she said.

I bought this stuff.  It’s mine.  Mine, mine, mine.  If I can’t use it, nobody can.

That’s union selfishness on top of union greed.

Racism and Naming Schools

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Jason Willick had an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that recounted a failed effort to rename a Palo Alto, CA, middle school in honor of an American WWII war hero. That hero was PFC and Silver Star recipient Fred Minoru Yamamoto of the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team; he was killed in action in 1944 in the Vosges, in eastern France, by German artillery.

Chinese-Americans [sic] raised a huge hue and cry over the proposal—because Isoroku Yamamoto was an admiral of some…fame…in the Japanese navy from 1939-1943.  Fred and Isoroku shared a last name, and even though there was no relationship, familial or otherwise, whatsoever between the two, that similarity of sound in last names was enough, in those Chinese-American minds, to brand Fred with the same evil as Isoroku. No school would be named after Fred as a result of this uproar.

This is an example of identity politics in its full, racist bloom.  It goes further.

“Are we racist?” one Taiwanese-American mother asks incredulously. “Look at the history in Asia,” she adds, while preferring not to be quoted by name. “Taiwan was colonized by Japan for 50 years.”

Yeah. You are racist. The Republic of China [sic—it’s interesting you insist on using your misnomer] was not colonized by anyone related to Fred Yamamoto. Your insistence that all Yamamotos look alike—your refusal to see any difference among them—and your manufacture of hurt feelings over a partial name mark you racist, indeed. No wonder you hide in anonymity.

Do you agree, Madam, with Progressive-Democrat FD Roosevelt’s locking up of Americans with Japanese heritage in “internment” camps solely on the basis of that heritage?  Two of which incarcerated our Yamamoto before his enlistment?  Think about this entry from Fred’s diary, written while he was in the Heart Mountain “internment” camp. He made this entry on the occasion of his decision to enlist in the United States Army:

Because faith to me is a positive thing, I’m putting all my blue chips on the U.S.A. … In short, I’ve volunteered.

 

Separately, the identity politics obsession of Willick is equally evident: Taiwanese-American? Not American with Taiwanese [RoC] heritage? Really?