Tag Archives: education

What Do Teachers Unions and the NAACP Have Against Poor Children?

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Richard Whitmire, a contributor to The 74, offered some information that might bear on the question in his piece in The Wall Street Journal.  The National Education Association and the NAACP both oppose charter schools, the one because they don’t use union teachers and the other because they attract poor kids to charters and away from inner city public schools in which the NAACP is so politically invested.  In other words, because as Whitmire put it, charters upset the comfortable status quo of these adults.

Now some hard data via Whitmire’s piece; these are in addition to the rising test scores that charter school students are achieving (especially compared to comparable schools—which is to say public schools in poor districts).

Graduates from the top charter networks—those with enough high school alumni to measure college success accurately—earn four-year degrees at rates that range up to five times as high as their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Those traditional counterparts are low-income, minority students in public school systems in cities like Eric Garcetti’s United Teachers Los Angeles-run LA and Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Teachers Union-run city, cities where the NAACP also is highly influential.

There’s this datum, too:

Roughly half the graduates of Uncommon, YES Prep and the KIPP New York schools…earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. About a quarter of the graduates of the lower-performing charter networks earn degrees within six years.

This compares with 9% of “graduates” of low-income public schools.

One more: charters help their graduates succeed in college with active advice on course to take, how to manage the credit amounts within and across semesters, even such things as how to perform while being the only minority student, or one of a very few, in what used to be an all-white class.  Those public schools just shove their students out onto the street.

Actually, the teachers unions and the NAACP don’t have anything in particular against these charter children of low-income families.  The kids are just tools to be used for the benefit of union leadership and NAACP virtue signaling.

This is Why We Can’t Have Qualified Non-STEM Graduates

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Joyce Chaplin, Professor of Early American History and Chair, American Studies at Harvard—Harvard American history!—illustrated why that is with this tweet of hers:

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today

Think about that.  Don’t be distracted by her foolishness on things climate, just think about what the simulated expert on American history tweeted.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) did, also, and he had a couple of tweets.

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Just sad. Tenured chair at Harvard, doesn’t seem to know how USA was created. Not a treaty. Declaration+Revolutionary War+Constitution=USA.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Lefty academics @ my alma mater think USA was “created by int’l community.” No–USA created by force, the blood of patriots & We the People.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Treaty of Paris simply memorialized that fact, of our total victory at Yorktown. Her claim is like saying a plastic globe created the earth.

Not willing to accept the correction of her error, Chaplin expanded on it.

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

Sad. US Senator, Harvard Law degree. Doesn’t know that national statehood requires international recognition.

No, Madam (hard to address you as professor), international recognition only that—acknowledgment of a fait accompli.  Recognition creates nothing.

Holy cats.

The Rise of the PRC

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Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe.  Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.

In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).

A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.

Still, numbers have a quality all their own.  Let’s play a bit with these two.  Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education.  That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.

Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard.  That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing.  That’s something to take seriously.

This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.

Progressive Education

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The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Sunday in which it extolled Los Angeles voters for elected a majority to the Los Angeles Unified School District school board that openly favored charter schools and the independence of those charters.  The WSJ also described the hysteria with which the teachers unions and the ousted school board vilified these folks who so favored actually educating the city’s children over being a jobs factory for disinterested teachers and piggy bank for union coffers.

Last month the [now ousted] board voted to support three bills before the state legislature in Sacramento that aim to limit autonomy for charter schools. One would prevent charters from appealing rejections by local school boards to county and state boards. The appeals process is one reason charters in Los Angeles have been able to expand despite school-board resistance.

And

Unions tried to vilify pro-charter candidates Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez by portraying them as tools of Donald Trump, though both were endorsed by President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the state’s progressive former Senator Barbara Boxer.

The approbation of the one and the opprobrium of the other are well deserved.  However, the paper’s editors exhibited one misapprehension in the last sentence of their piece.

There’s nothing progressive about failing low-income minority kids.

On the contrary, this is completely progressive: it feeds the Progressive-Democratic Party position of nearly 100 years that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

It is through their form of education that the Progressive-Democratic Party seeks to produce Americans who are so deficient.

Safe Spaces and Clarity of Thought

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As The Wall Street Journal pointed out in an interview with Northwestern University’s President Morton Schapiro, the University of Chicago’s President Robert Zimmer has a view of the nature of safe spaces and the relationship between them and collegiate education.

incoming freshmen [should expect] to expect discomfort—not safe spaces—on his campus.

Schapiro, instead, wants to coddle his pupils as though they’re still two years old.

Northwestern President Morton Schapiro takes a gentler approach.

He believes that because learning is frequently uncomfortable, students need safe spaces—which for him means places where people who share an identity can retreat, relax, and recoup.

Of course, they already have that: their dorm rooms, where students of like mind gather along with the room’s occupants; the school’s student unions, where several groups gather, each one consisting in the main of students of like mind.  Forcing all of that into all of the other places that a school administer deems must be “safe spaces” destroys safety for all—especially those of whom demanders of “safe spaces” disapprove.

And Schapiro had this—and he was serious:

That might mean sharing a meal with students who are all of the same color or religion or watching a movie in a house designated for students from a certain background.

Back to segregation and separate but equal.

The interview continued in that vein.

In the end, though, there isn’t any safer space than the ability to think clearly, even if clear thinking often is uncomfortable.  School administrators who cannot understand both the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe and the critical dependency between safety and clarity of thought are unfit to sit in those chairs.  Their own inability to think clearly renders their entire campuses unsafe spaces.