Category Archives: education

Blocking CRT in Schools and Teachers’ Feigned Fears

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The Trump administration is moving to deny Federal funding to K-12 schools that have Critical Race Theory in their curricula. Teachers are claiming to be in a panic about that. For instance,

[s]ome New England teachers are worried the new restrictions on teaching CRT could cause teachers to self-censor out of fear that any discussion on race would make them a target of the new administration….

No, those are supposedly grown adults sulking and threatening to throw toddler-level temper tantrums, planning to hold their breaths until they turn blue in the face, if the don’t get their way.

There’s nothing at all in banning CRT indoctrination—which in its overt bigotry insists on racially intrinsic oppressor/oppressee status depending on the skin color of the individual, which further insists that victimhood is inherent in one race or one gender and not at all a frame of mind with an inherent ability to overcome being a victim (including taking coherent effective action in those instances where a person really has been victimized)—that prevents teachers from discussing race, or teaching its effects, with such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or any of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing.

These pseudo-teachers would be no loss at all, were they to carry on their tantrums by quitting teaching altogether.

Eliminating DoEd, or Not

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As part of the ongoing…discussions…regarding the elimination or broad curtailment of the Department of Education, even news writers are getting in on the gaslighting. One such example:

It [the Department of Education] has released guidance saying it would evaluate claims of sex discrimination based on the “objective immutable characteristic of being born male or female” as opposed to gender identity. This effectively ended Biden-era protections for gay and transgender people in education.

Of course, it ended no such thing. What the guidance did—all that it did—was restore protections for boys and young men and for girls and young women, especially the latter, in spaces that must be reserved for girls and young women: restrooms, locker rooms, girls and women athletics. The Biden-era actions actively attacked with intent to destroy precisely these protections for girls and young women.

Protections for gay and transgender students remain in place where moves against discrimination matter: the selection or non-selection based on sexual orientation in the classroom, in discipline, in in- or after-school job opportunities, and on and on.

Students’ Decline

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American students—pupils, really—continue to decline in reading skills, and their math skills remain far too low.

The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.

And

In math, fourth-grade scores ticked up, while those for the eighth grade were flat. Math scores in both grades remained substantially below prepandemic benchmarks….

There is considerable angst regarding methods for teaching reading.

The results come in the midst of a wave of attention on how to teach students to read. Many school districts and states have emphasized phonics-based instruction, known as the science of reading, and shed other reading methods that focused more on using context to deduce the meaning of words.
Federal officials and researchers say there are no definitive explanations for the latest scores.

The angst is misguided. There’s no reason, for instance, why phonics and context can’t be taught together. They were, in fact, taught if not together then closely sequentially—phonics in first grade, context in second and third grade when I was in grade school. Nor is the Wuhan Virus Situation, often offered as an excuse for these failures, actually involved. The decline in reading and math skills has been going on since long before the virus appeared.

There’s also this bit of gaslighting, from the Denver school system honcho:

Denver Public Schools overhauled its reading curriculum in 2022. Simone Wright, the district’s chief of academics, said the move is making a difference. Denver’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress increased in both grades, though the gains weren’t considered statistically significant.

“Not statistically significant” has a very clear meaning to anyone who can do his sums. That meaning is that it’s not possible to tell whether there were any gains at all, or even whether there was actual decline. Or, maybe not gaslighting so much as she’s as arithmetically illiterate as the pupils in her district.

I offer one definitive solution to the failure—which is a teaching failure, not a student failure (they’re pupils at that age because they’re so young; they remain pupils as they go up the grade ladder because teachers don’t teach them how to be students): stop passing the pupils up the grade ladder until they can read and do math.

This business of social promotion, which itself isn’t entirely on the teachers—parents play a role in “not letting Johnny and Susan fall behind”—is destructive, abusive of the children, and actually accelerates and deepens Johnny’s and Susan’s lag.

Here’s a sample of a high school graduation test from the end of the 19th century. Not only are today’s high schoolers wholly unprepared for such a thing, they have no hope of getting prepared without the basic teachings of reading and math from pre-school on up, and the discipline that comes from teachers (and parents) insisting on actual performance rather than social promotions.

Update: [Sigh]. Added the missing link to the test.

Indeed There Is

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River Page, writing for The Free Press last Sunday, objected to any proliferation of “Tiger Moms.” However, she’s wholly misinterpreted the concept of and the goals of tiger moms.

There are more important things in life than making a six-figure salary and going to Yale goes her subheadline. She concluded her piece with this:

There’s no point in living in a prosperous country if you can’t enjoy it[.]

The one is not the aim of tiger moms, and the other isn’t possible without achieving their goal. Vivek Ramaswamy, of DOGE, has laid out the situation, using the H-1B visa debate as the backdrop.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

He added, as paraphrased by Page, that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.

That’s what tiger moms are working against, and we need more of them, not the coddled snowflakes of too many of our current offspring and their children.

That more important thing, toward which tiger moms try to raise their children, is a work ethic that prides work and that produces the overriding satisfaction of a job well done. The self respect that comes from that is what powers full enjoyment of leisure time and the full enjoyment of the plethora of leisures available in a prosperous country.

Indeed, there isn’t a prosperous country without the work required to produce, maintain, and defend it. Six-figure salaries fall out of all of that; they aren’t the goal of any of that. Neither is going to Yale instead of any other school. Students get out of their higher education institution—whichever it is, and it need not be a so-called elite school—what they put into it, and what they put into it is what they learn to put into it during their pre-school and K-12 years. That’s where tiger moms earn their stripes and the respect of us otherwise average Americans, their peers.

Not Entirely

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The Wall Street Journal‘s headline lays out the claim:

Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem

The article goes on:

[T]here are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted.

And this:

…Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix.

We all could have done better. That’s irrelevant. The bare fact is these endowments, as the table of Ivy League endowments below shows, are plenty big enough, and they’re still growing, for all the temporary losses of the Panic of 2008.

*Per Wikipedia, a/o June 2023
**Calculated from undergrad + grad student enrollment

It’s all crocodile tears. If the schools were truly worried about their dwindling endowments—just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students—they could cut the claptrap and waste out of their expense structures. Those structures include such…foolishnesses…as bloated management teams that include a plethora of DEI staff and Inquisition bureaucracies designed to convict a male student on the basis of a female student’s bare accusation.

No, these schools have rich endowments; they’re not financially challenged. They just might lose their access to the Federal feedbag. Which they should anyway.