Category Archives: education

Wisconsin Progressive-Democrats for Choice

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The newly elected Wisconsin Governor, Progressive-Democrat Tony Evers, has made plain the Party’s definition of “choice.”  Choose to do it our way.

Evers’ current budget proposal

caps voucher enrollment in 2020, entirely phases out the program for special-needs students and blocks the creation of new independent charter schools.

No need for all those charter schools.  Progressive-Democrats want to avoid confusing us with such a plethora of decisions to make; they’ll protect us by deciding for us.

With not too many apologies to a hypothetical Joseph:

My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many choices the mind can contemplate in the course of an evening. …there are simply too many choices, that’s all. Cut a few, and it will be perfect.

A Note on Polling

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In particular, single-question polls embedded in newspaper articles of the sort opinary.com does.  One example is embedded in a Deutsche Welle article on the key players in the Venezuelan people’s struggle with their government.

The poll question asks Do you think Juan Guaido was right to declare himself president?

Unfortunately, there are only two answers offered:

  • No, he has no legitimacy. This is a coup.
  • Yes, Maduro is a dictator. Guaido will save Venezuela.

Leaving aside the question of whether Guaido might save anything, the question and its allowed answers assume that coups must have no legitimacy, ever.  The pollsters should consult the series of English civils wars against tyranny, our Declaration of Independence, and the French Revolution (even if the latter became corrupted and turned out badly).  Sometimes

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them [mankind] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This is surely the case in Venezuela.

Such polls are amusing, but they can’t be serious.

The Teachers Union Strike in LA

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The subhead on Monday’s Wall Street Journal article on the United Teachers Los Angeles union strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District says it all.

Nearly one in five LA public school students attends charters unaffected by the strike; union wants a cap on them

Herein lies one more proof of the disingenuousness of the UTLA. While the UTLA is striking, demanding a cap on the number of charter schools (and money, money, money), all the while holding Los Angeles’ public school students hostage to their demand, the charters are open and actually educating their students.

With its strike demand, the UTLA is ignoring the enormous opportunity that should be available for the children of LA: the two systems of schools could complement each other.  Instead, the union has chosen to present the situation as a zero-sum game. The contrast couldn’t be sharper.

It’s no wonder the union wants to eliminate what it sees as its competition; it can’t stand the clarity the charters’ existence and performance provide in the union’s zero sum.

Cynically, the union’s demand for money, is nothing more than what unions do; although, here it’s also a smoke screen.

***

In the end, the LAUSD caved completely. In addition to a 6% pay raise and more than $400 million in additional money to be spent on the union, there’s this:

Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said the agreement goes beyond contractual issues and addresses “having accountability and regulations on charter schools,” including how to give traditional schools a bigger say when charters are given space on their campuses.

Never mind that that space was available to the charters because the union’s schools weren’t using it. No, contract matters, as Caputo-Pearl just confessed, had little to do with the union’s strike. Now they have near-veto say on what their competition will be allowed to do. That’s to the great harm of the children this union has pretended to want to protect.

Race-Based Admissions at UNC

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The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is under fire and in the courts over its fundamentally racist admissions policy.  Plaintiffs are arguing that UNC violates Supreme Court rulings by giving too much weight to applicants’ race. The problem, though, is that any weight to race is too much, is fundamentally racist.  The Supreme Court’s rulings don’t go far enough to bar this behavior.  As things stand, though, the plaintiffs have a case IMNSHO.

UNC admissions readers frequently highlight the applicant’s race, citing one reader’s comment that even with an ACT score of 26, they should “give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.” Another reader wrote, “Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid,” the plaintiffs said.
Steve Farmer, the university’s vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, said in response: “Language in this exchange does not reflect Carolina’s values or our admissions process.”

Farmer is being disingenuous. The language clearly reflects both UNC’s values—emphasizing race as they do—and that language equally clearly reflects the fact that UNC does use race emphatically in its admissions process. The notes are right there on the applicants’ forms.

UNC says it has studied race-neutral approaches to admission for many years….

The only race-neutral approach possible for admission—or for any other purpose anywhere—is to not consider race at all. Any inclusion of race (or gender, or…), even as a “plus” factor, necessarily segregates in favor of one group at the direct expense of another.

If UNC truly wanted diversity, it would achieve it by admitting the best students regardless of race, or ethnicity, or gender.  The resulting student population would be a microcosm of the underlying population from which it was drawn.

If that didn’t produce a diversity reflecting the more general population, the correction would not be to play race games with high school graduates, it would be to commit university personnel and resources to improving the K-12 education so those high school grads would more closely reflect the underlying demographics.  And to press other universities and colleges to do the same.

But that would take actual work and dirty hands, not virtue signaling.

Religious Bigotry?

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North Dakota wants to let its high schools teach a Bible studies class, and the ACLU (among others) has gotten its institutional panties in a twist over it. State Congressman Aaron McWilliams (R) has a bill moving through the State’s legislature that would achieve that.  He said

The intention of this bill is to provide an option to schools to teach a class on the bible from a historical perspective.  My position is that no religious text should be excluded from being taught as it relates to the historical or philosophical influences in our history or on our society today.

The class would be an elective amounting to 1/6 of the total social studies requirement for graduating from a North Dakota high school.

The ACLU thinks that teaching a religious document even from a historical or philosophical perspective, even when it’s not a required course, is somehow the State establishing or supporting a particular religion.  That plainly isn’t the case; even the august personages of the ACLU know that—or American history wasn’t a safe space for them and they were triggered to unconsciousness by their grade school lessons and their junior high civics lessons.

Heather Smith, Executive Director of the North Dakota chapter of the ACLU does have a point, though.  Sort of.

A school could teach comparative religious classes, or you could talk about the Bible’s relationship to literature, art, or music[.]

But not its relationship with our history or culture, or with western civilization’s history or culture generally?  Not its relationship with our national philosophy, such as it is, or with philosophy generally?  Apparently, Smith was triggered by her high school logic class, too.

On the other hand, the comparative religion concern has some validity.  Perhaps McWilliams’ bill could include an option to teach an additional elective course, also worth 1/6 of the total social studies requirement, that teaches the Torah and the Talmud “from a historical perspective.”  After all, we are a Judeo-Christian nation, with a staunch Judeo-Christian history and underpinning.

Such a broadened perspective on who we are, how we began, and how we came to be where we are now—including these incessant attacks on our Christianity and Judaism—would strengthen our American culture, and it might inform even the members of the ACLU.

Side tidbit: the first Georgian patriot to die in combat in our Revolutionary War was a Jew.