Tag Archives: education

Are Liberals Embarrassed by Patriotism?

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Or are they just afraid of it?

Fort Collins High School won’t allow its students to celebrate America and Americanism.  Full Stop.

Administrators’ pseudo-rationale is this:

  • they didn’t want to offend anyone from other countries or immigrants
  • they didn’t want to be exclusive to any other country
  • they just really did not want to make anyone feel uncomfortable

Yet the students are required to participate in Cinco de Mayo celebrations.  The students, though, aren’t as dumb as the high school’s…management team…thinks they are.  One student, all of 16 years old:

There are men and women fighting for our country and we should be able to celebrate that and be proud that we live in a country where we are allowed to vote—the right to free speech. They won’t even let us celebrate it.

Never mind that “anyone from other countries or immigrants” are here to be in American, to reap the benefits of American culture.

Never mind that there isn’t any other country here, so that exclusivity is a cynical red herring.

Never mind that these administrators make the rest of us Americans, including their own students, uncomfortable with their…attitude…or that their attitude is offensive to the rest of us Americans.

Americans don’t count in Liberal minds.

As Todd Starnes put it

shame on the administrators at Fort Collins High School for treating American school children like second-class citizens.

Update: Fort Collins High School Principal Mark Eversole may have seen the light, or at least he’s reversed course and is allowing the students to put on their ‘Merica Monday–renamed America day.  Here’s the letter he wrote to parents:

We apologize for our recent decision regarding My Country Monday and that it was seen as not patriotic. This could not be further from the truth. The original intent of Spread the Love week at Fort Collins High School was to unify the student body. When students first proposed “Merica Monday,” we felt that it was against this unifying theme and disrespectful to our country. Merica is a slang term that is often used in a negative stereotypical way to describe life in the United States. This is what led us to discuss alternatives with students. We were surprised that our community interpreted our actions as anti-American. We are a proud public school in America and support many activities to celebrate our great nation. Due to this outpouring of sentiment and misinterpretation of our intentions, we have decided to rename the first day of Spread the Love week to “America Day” as opposed to “Merica Day.” We look forward to enjoying the creativity and energy of our students as they celebrate their patriotism next week.

This doesn’t entirely settle the matter, but it’s a step–however grudgingly taken–in the right direction.  Todd Starnes has more.

As do I: Merica is a slang term that is often used in a negative stereotypical way….  Maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life, but I’ve not heard it in any way other than neutrally.  Be that as it may, there’s also a so what factor, and another one: so were Yankee and Yankee doodle slang terms used in negative stereotypical ways.  Eversole would do well to review some American history the next time he thinks about deprecating American patriotism.

Income Inequality and Education

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Senators Lamar Alexander (R, TN) and Tim Scott (R, SC) are proposing legislation that would address income inequality (while acknowledging that income inequality by itself is not, of necessity, bad) by addressing a critical aspect of opportunity equality (or inequality): education.

While I disagree with the details of the plans, the two Senators most assuredly are on the right track.

Alexander’s proposed bill, the Scholarships for Kids Act, would transfer Federal dollars to States, and each State then would determine how parents could apply the funding.  Scott’s proposed bill, the CHOICE Act, would use Federal transfers to States to facilitate each State’s ability to supplement existing scholarship programs for “military families, those with children facing physical challenges, and students in impoverished areas.”

I remain adamantly opposed to using our Federal tax code for social engineering; that simply distorts the market being engineered.  Such Federal transfers have two additional seriously negative aspects: they maintain State addiction to Federal handouts, and they transfer citizens’ Federal tax dollars from, for instance, those of bankrupt Illinois to those of more flush Iowa.

It is encouraging, though, to see Alexander and Scott acknowledging the need for each State to be responsible for its own education spending (albeit with OPM) and for identifying and addressing its unique education needs.  We just need to eliminate Federal involvement (and resulting Federal diktats) from the equation.

For all that, the proposed legislations are steps in the right direction, and I don’t oppose them outright—but we need to take care in the next Congressional session to move these programs, and other programs involving Federal transfers, in the direction of eliminating the transfers altogether by eliminating the taxes that produce the funds being transferred.  Those funds should not be taken out of the pocketbooks of those who earned them.

Equality of opportunity will inevitably lead to unequal incomes (and to unequal outcomes, generally), but that opportunity will allow everyone to prosper to the extent each one is willing to work and has the talent to do so.  Education is one of a very few critical aspects of that opportunity.

College for Everyone?

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Maybe not.  I’ve written about the question of college for everyone elsewhere.

A report on a different subject, The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, posted at Knot Yet, has this in its “Conclusions and Implications:”

2 – How do we improve the job prospects for young adults who will not get a college degree but are willing and able to receive vocational training?
Surely improving the economy overall will help young adults without college degrees, as a rising tide lifts many boats, but how can these young adults be better prepared to enter the labor market even when the economy isn’t booming?  Even during recessions, there are decent jobs that go unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants.  How can education and industry leaders work together more closely to target high-demand occupations that pay good salaries and formalize pathways into jobs in these sectors?  Countries like Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom are achieving good success with vocational training, apprenticeship programs and placements for their young adults in industries as varied as nursing, information technology, and advanced manufacturing.  There certainly seems to be untapped potential for the United States to follow in their footsteps….

The Urban Institute‘s report, “Expanding Apprenticeship: A Way to Enhance Skills and Careers,” identified in a footnote to the above quote, points out that apprenticing—a natural extension of VoTech training (and given the modern responsibilities of office occupations—these aren’t your grandmother’s secretarial jobs—to Office Occupations training, also)—offers significant economic benefits to non-college graduate graduates (using middle-skill jobs as the baseline):

Looking at earnings impacts during the first 2.5 years after exiting [an apprenticeship] program, [Kevin Hollenbeck] estimated that the net social benefits to apprenticeship were about $50,000 per apprentice, far more than minimal gains accruing to community college students and WIA trainees.  In other words, it takes little time for a significant payoff to apprenticeship training to accrue to the worker and society at large.  On a lifetime basis, Hollenbeck projects the present value of earnings gains less costs at $269,000 per apprentice, compared to $96,000-$123,000 per community college attendee, and about $40,000 per WIA trainee.

We need to bring the VoTech and OO programs—updated to today’s technologies and business needs—back into our high schools, including public, private, parochial, charter, and make all of these programs voucher-accessible to the extent the programs are not already.

The UI report is well worth reading in its entirety, as is the Knot Yet report for its separate, main subject.

A New Phase

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…in the Obama administration’s war on education.

The DoJ and the Department of Education have sent out another of their Dear Colleague letters, this time concerning the disparate impact of punishing minority students in our public schools.  Investor’s Business Daily summarized the letter,

Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wednesday issued “recommendations” urging schools to find ways to avoid suspending or expelling students who act out.  …

The two Cabinet members argued that suspensions deny minority students time in the classroom….

And suspensions of “majority” students don’t have the same effect?  No, that’s not Eric Holder’s and Arne Duncan’s argument.  They argued in their 32 pg letter that “minority” students get the treatment disproportionately—disparately.  Never mind that these students misbehave…disparately.

The danger of applying this pernicious and racist disparate impact meme is clearly identified by Commissioner Gail Heriot of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in her remarks on the Commission’s School Discipline and Disparate Impact report:

There are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin.  Secretary Duncan focuses only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students.  By failing to consider the other side of the coin—that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms—his policy could easily end up doing more harm than good to the very group he is attempting to help.

Indeed.  This disparate impact policy on school discipline will have a disparate impact on minority students’ ability to get an education in a classroom full of disparate impact-protected misbehavers.  All while carefully ignoring the underlying causes of one group having a higher misbehavior rate than another group.

More, a footnote in Heriot’s remarks also hints at the fundamental lawlessness of the Obama administration [emphasis added]:

4 [page 98 of the report, the same page as the portion of Heriot’s remarks quoted above] I agree with Commissioner Gaziano that Title VI simply does not permit the Department of Education to proceed against schools on a disparate impact theory and that the Department’s regulation nonetheless adopting that theory, 34 CFR sec. 100.3, is therefore unauthorized by law.  It requires actual discrimination.  See Section 601 (Title VI) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC sec. 2000d (No person shall “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).  See also Alexander v Sandoval, 532 US 275 (2001). I also agree with Commissioner Gaziano that the problem with disparate impact analysis is not simply that it goes beyond what Congress authorized in Title VI; it actually contradicts Title VI.  If one group receives more school discipline than another because (for whatever reason) its members violated more school rules than the other, race-conscious efforts to alter the “disparate impact” are usually themselves discriminatory.

Sadly, this phase, in addition to denying minority students access to their education, is also another example of the unconscious racism of the Left.

Union…Hubris

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Neal Erickson, was convicted last spring of the repeated rape of a young boy from 2006-2009.  He was, at the time of his crime, a teacher at Rose City Middle School in Rose City, MI.

Erickson’s fellow teachers and his/their union, the Michigan Education Association, think that’s no big deal: they argued for leniency at the time of last spring’s sentencing, and now they’re looking for severance pay–$10,000—for Erickson.  Fellow teacher Sally Campbell wrote a letter to the presiding judge:

Neal made a mistake.  He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more.

Much more.  Yeah.  For three years, Neal made his “mistake.”  Hey-ho, nothing serious though, nothing to see here, says the union.  Even the district’s school board condones Erickson’s behavior; that body has refused to take any action against the teachers who rallied to Erickson’s excusal—not even public condemnation of their behavior.

When it became clear that the other teachers in the school were actively supporting Erickson, downplaying his rape behavior, and that the school board was refusing to do anything on its own, parents started taking their children out of the school.  Enrollment is down some 87%.

West Branch-Rose City School Superintendent Daniel Cwayna is all wide-eyed innocence:

I can’t speculate as to why the students have left, but there were certainly parents who vocalized that they were pulling their children out of school because of the teacher’s support[.]

Here’s a thought: maybe it’s because a teacher crew, a union, and a school board that condone child molestation can’t be trusted with children.