Category Archives: education

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

It’s Not Up To Them

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Or it shouldn’t be. Harvard may be moving to control grade inflation for its students—everyone gets an A—by capping the number of A’s a professor can hand out in his classes.

The whining and bellyaching from the students are loud and hysterical—”crude and absurd” they caterwaul. That shouldn’t matter to school management, though; the kiddies are there to learn in what should be a challenging environment, not to get stars on their calendars and Blue Ribbons for showing up.

A frenzied debate has gripped campus, with students protesting that the changes would increase stress, fuel competition, and discourage academic exploration.

Bunch of crybabies. Stress, as much as happiness and ease, are a part of life and is much more productive than celebrating unearned plaudits and partying. It’s cowardly of them to fear competition; aside from strengthening them for life in the world, competition is how progress is made—good ideas, mechanisms, techniques, et al., survive, even flourish, while bad ideas fall by the wayside. Without competition, the latter simply clutter to the point of pollution everything else. Finally, only the timid would be discouraged from exploration, and the stress and competition would only strengthen the timid, or move them out of the school altogether. Those pupils don’t belong in school, anyway; they’re only wasting their parents’ money and whatever school financial aid they’ve been getting.

“The fact that this policy even MIGHT go into effect with 94% student disapproval is absurd and goes to show how much this administration cares about us,” said one commenter on a Harvard discussion forum.

Crybabies, indeed. The school’s caring would be coming—if management has the backbone to proceed—in the form of badly needed tough love.

If the students put as much energy into their studies as they are in protesting having to work at those studies, they’d be doing better and be stronger graduates for that.

There’s another aspect to this, though:

Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a proposal to cap the number of A’s per course, which now comprise more than half of undergraduate grades after years of inflation. The plan also suggests getting rid of GPA as an internal metric, instead using percentile rank to calculate honors like cum laude recognition.

It shouldn’t be up to the faculty, either. Their input would be useful on something like this, but they work, at least nominally, for the school management team, not the other way around, and this sort of thing more properly belongs as a management decision.

In the end, three things need to happen. The first is to implement the system without hesitation while recognizing, and acting on the recognition, that this is only a first step (capping A’s but not A-‘s is just silly). Second is to recognize that the decision is management’s not faculty’s and proceed with or without faculty “approval.” Third is handling the pupils and faculty members who can’t handle this academic culture change: expel the students who don’t adapt, and send the faculty members who don’t adapt (including by slow-walking implementation or finding ways to weasel-word around the change) on their way to another enterprise’s payroll.

Not Just Vetting

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The headline and subheadline laid out the problem; the article expands on it.

Naturalized but radicalized: Recent terror attacks expose glaring problems with citizenship vetting
After four attacks on the U.S. with one common thread—immigration—the time may have come to make transformative changes to the system that decides who comes in.

That’s a mostly accurate description, but only that; Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R, WY) identified the other critical dimension of the problem.

Throughout history, we have expected people who immigrated here to become assimilated to the American culture. And I think over the last 30 years or so, there’s been this idea that we no longer need to do that, and this is an example of the consequences of those kinds of bad policies[.]

Our vetting does nothing to assess a potential immigrant’s interest in or willingness to assimilate into American culture, a culture that prizes individual initiative, individual responsibility, and acceptance of, or at least willingness to, live under American values of free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, and the rest as illustrated in our Bill of Rights.

Once in the US—legally, mind you—and on what amounts to probation, remaining here on a green card or while on the green card working toward citizenship, potential immigrants are not pushed to learn American English (or even British English) beyond taking a few simplified English as a Second Language courses, nor are they required to learn about American culture and values beyond what it takes to pass a dumb-downed citizenship test.

English needs to be specified as our official language, and government officials at all levels of our hierarchy need to interact with citizens and immigrants in English. Beyond that, their children need to be taught in American English in school, not in their native language, and that schooling needs to include more American history and civics (as it must for the children of us citizens, come to that).

With no incentive to assimilate anywhere along the way, potential immigrants, staying separate from us, gain a sense of isolation even in their enclaves. Of course they’re easily radicalized.

“Who Do You Work For?”

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The stereotypical Chicago question applies to the governorship of Kentucky. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put the question to the State’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Andy Beshear.

Will he listen to parents or unions on federal tax credit scholarships?

The State’s legislature passed legislation that would opt the State into the Federal government’s school choice program, which would be the only school choice program the State has. That was over a week ago, but Beshear still has it on his desk, unsigned.

Beshear’s…hesitation…answers the question. Kentucky’s parents don’t pay his salary. Neither do the unions directly, just through their political donations and their votes.

On top of that, the fact that the legislature could easily override his veto serves only to give him cover for his inaction: “The legislature made me do it (apologies for the opening ad).”

It Isn’t Enough

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DoJ has filed suit against UCLA over the school’s overt antisemitic bigotry in the immediate and ensuing aftermath of Hamas’ atrocities inflicted on Israel 7 October 2023 and subsequently.

The school “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination against Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA…by failing to prevent and correct antisemitic workplace discrimination,” the complaint says. For all the incidents of anti-Jewish harassment, “not a single student, staff member, or faculty member was…formally disciplined for antisemitic behavior—including those who were arrested for illegal conduct.”

UCLA has lied about cleaning up its act:

UCLA said in a statement that the school had “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies and combat antisemitism.”

The lie is demonstrated:

UCLA didn’t discipline or expel students for behavior that crossed into threats and harassment.

DoJ’s suit “asks,” according to the WSJ,

the school to stop tolerating a hostile work environment based on race, religion, and national origin.

If that’s an accurate summation and the extent of the call, it’s badly deficient. The personnel who perpetrated this bigotries would seem to remain in place. Any words they might fall past their lips or out of their keyboards claiming to stop such misbehaviors cannot be trusted given their empirically demonstrated bigotry. As part of any outcome of the suit—and there should be no settlement—these personnel must be fired for cause and any educator licenses they might possess be revoked with prejudice. Any students involved who are still present must be expelled with prejudice, and any since graduated must have their degrees rescinded, also with prejudice.