Tag Archives: education

Senator Collins Misunderstands

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Senator Susan Collins (R, ME), in explaining her decision to vote against Betsy DeVos’ confirmation as Secretary of Education, said

She has, no doubt, done valuable work.  Her concentration on charter schools and vouchers, however, raises the question about whether or not she fully appreciates that the secretary of education’s primary focus must be on helping states and communities, parents, teachers, school board administrators, school board members, and administrators strengthen our public schools.

What a monumental lack of understanding of the primary focus of the DoEd.  The DoEd, to the extent the Federal government should be involved in non-secondary education at all, must be focused on aiding states and communities, parents, [and] teachers improve the quality of education available to the local jurisdictions’ children.  That will include, necessarily, public schools and their management, but it cannot—just as necessarily—be limited to public schools.

Full stop.

Federal Education Fail

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Reason enough to gut, if not dismantle altogether, the Department of Education is this bit of waste [emphasis in the original].  I disagree, though, that there was no effect.  Those $7 billion clearly had an effect of Arne Duncan’s cronies and those of his staffers in the upper reaches of the DoE.

Despite its gargantuan price tag, [School Improvement Grant program] SIG generated no academic gains for the students it was meant to help. Failing schools that received multi-year grants from the program to “turn around” ended up with results no better than similar schools that received zero dollars from the program. To be clear: billions spent had no effect.

From The Washington Post:

Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program—the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools—than in schools that did not.

Suspiciously,

The Education Department did not track how the money was spent, other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.

Andy Smarick, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow:

Think of what all that money could have been spent on instead.

Indeed.

Dumbing Down our College Pupils

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This from College Fix:

George Washington University recently changed its requirements for history majors, removing previously key courses for the stated purpose of giving students more flexibility.

The department eliminated requirements in US, North American and European history….

More flexibility.  Now, in GWU’s infinite wisdom, it’s possible for a pupil there to get a degree with a history (small ‘h,’ now) major without so much as a survey course—a 100-level Freshman course—in US history, Western history, or any idea at all about how we got where we are today: a nation that allows children to study unvarnished history at all.  This statement from Katrin Schultriss, GWU’s Department of History Chair, comes without any sense in her of the irony of her remark:

Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.

A GWU History degree is now a participation award.

Unfortunately, GWU isn’t a standout on this; they’re just joining the mediocrity of our secondary “education” system.

…fewer than one-third of the nation’s leading universities require history majors to take a single course in US history.

No knowledge of who we are or how we came to be.

Dumbing down, indeed.

Students of Color Conference

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This one at the University of California encountered the reality of identity politics.  It collapsed into, as one of the conference-goers called it in her op-ed for the UCLA Daily Bruin, an oppression Olympics.

From the first link:

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East[.]

And

Above all, conference participants each wanted to focus on their own particular minority issue[.]

And the whole thing apparently turned a series of microaggressions, unsafe safe spaces, and canceled workshops.  UCLS student Robert Gardner:

I am very unhappy about how this conference was ran. There needs to be accountability for the trauma some of the organizers made. And I didn’t appreciate my workshop being cancelled….

Apparently grammar isn’t a safe space for young Master Gardner, either.  But he continued:

It was really hurtful to have other marginalized identities silenced because a small fringe of organizers decided that their oppressions are more important (talk about Oppression Olympics. …)

Stop oppressing me with your superior victimhood!

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.