Tag Archives: education

Schooling

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Recently, some $35 million was raised to support private schooling, in particular Success Academy charter schools.  Naturally, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, thinks this is a terrible idea, an assault.

[It’s] part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling.  Wealthy donors and their political allies [are] pushing unaccountable charter growth in urban centers while stripping communities of a voice in their children’s education.

She’s wrong about the effort to decimate, even if what passes for schooling in the teachers unions’ public schools warrants it.

The unaccountable charter growth in one sense is entirely accountable: it’s due precisely to the failure of the public schools to actually educate our children.

In another sense, Weingarten is being utterly disingenuous with her unaccountable charter growth calumny.  The schools that are stripping—have stripped—communities (and parents, which persons she carefully elided) of their voice are those union-controlled public schools.

Irrationality or Censorship?

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Many of you have heard that George Mason University in Virginia is moving to rename its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  This, of course, has Democrats, especially those in the Virginia legislature, up in arms.

Delegate Marcus Simon (D) has even gone this far in his objection:

This is a big, in-your-face kind of a move…and trying to shape their young minds and train them in the Scalia way of thinking.  That’s troubling to me.

Because teaching law students the importance of our Constitution to our legal system and to our society is troubling to this…Democrat.  Because teaching law students the importance of the text and origin of our Constitution is troubling to this…Democrat.

Because teaching students to think differently from the Left’s approved paradigm is troubling to this…Democrat.

How irrational can Democrats get in their censorship of thinking?

Elections have consequences.

“Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education”

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That’s the title of a paper published at the end of last year by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln of Goethe University Frankfurt and Paolo Masella of the University of Sussex.

Here’s the abstract:

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students.  We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East Germany after reunification.  Our identification strategy utilizes cut-off birth dates for school enrollment that lead to variation in the length of exposure to the socialist education system within the same birth cohort.  An additional year of socialist education decreases the probability of obtaining a college degree and affects longer-term male labor market outcomes.

And yet, we’re getting just that sort of leftist “education” in our secondary schools, colleges, and universities.

Hmm….

 

h/t AEIdeas

The Play’s Not the Thing

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It’s all about the bear-baiters down front in the…pit.

A dispute over “viewing privileges” at a kindergarten play Wednesday in Menifee led to deputies being called to the scene and the cancellation of the play, according to police and school officials.

Because parental privilege in recording the little darlings is more important than the little darlings’ heart-felt efforts at putting on their play.  So the parents entertained themselves in a Shakespearean-esque bear pit arrangement down front by fighting among themselves instead of sitting back and enjoying the play.

Way to put the little tykes in their place, parents.  You showed them who’s important and who isn’t.

Precious Snowflakes

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A four-month investigation into a University of Kansas professor who used a racial slur in class has concluded the word was used in an educational context and not intended to be racist.

Assistant communication studies professor Andrea Quenette has been on paid leave since November, when a group of eight graduate students filed a discrimination complaint after she used the slur in response to a question in class.

Graduate students, no less.  Do they really let children into graduate school these days?

Quennette used whatever word it was—even Fox News shied away from saying what the word was as it reported the simple fact of its use in the article at the link (honky?  whitey? ??)—in the course of discussing events at another school in her—get this—communications class.

But the graduate school’s children—some of whom weren’t even present—spent their energies not on learning but on seeking out an excuse to feel offended.  They wrote in their…complaint…that

Dr Quenette’s deployment of racially violent rhetoric not only creates a non-inclusive environment in opposition to one of the University of Kansas’ core tenets, but actively destroys the very possibility of realizing those values and goals[.]

Apparently deploying actual education, arraying actual discussions of events, doesn’t produce safe spaces, but rather destroys the very possibility of realizing a serious education for these precious little ones.