Category Archives: education

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.

The 2nd Amendment and Campuses

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I confess to mixed feelings about mixing children, alcohol, and guns, and that’s the mix on college campuses that’s allowed under Texas’ new concealed carry law.

However.

UT Austin President Gregory Fenves is engaging in a naked, Obama-esque effort by to ignore the law through made-up excuses.

The law, passed by the Texas legislature in its latest session, allows individuals to carry a concealed handgun while on the campus of a public, private, or independent institution of higher education.

Fenves is manufacturing his very own safe space loophole: he’s trying to block handguns in the University of Texas Austin’s dorms. Because there’s a penumbra of a shadow of an exception for dorms in that while on the campus phrase.

Or maybe because Austin’s dormitories aren’t actually on campus.

Or something. Who knows what’s going on in Fenves’ fevered imagination?

He is wrong on this, though; he’s just engaging in another Liberal assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Two Mistakes

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One is by the Department of Education, and one is by “some college presidents.”

Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said he wants accreditors to “do more to address substandard and underperforming institutions” by focusing their efforts on weak schools while reviewing elite schools less rigorously.

Sure. Because the Harvards and Dartmouths of college-dom are such paragons of free speech, diversity of ideas, and quality teaching. Never mind that elite school elite professors spend more of their time doing government-funded research than they spend in the classroom doing actual teaching.

The “college presidents'” mistake is this:

[S]ome college presidents worry that judging schools by things like graduation rates could mean that high-risk students will have less access to higher education.

If these schools have poor graduation rates, to what education have their students had access? These college presidents are conflating access to higher education institutions with access to higher education. Apparently, they don’t take their own institutions’ Logic 101 courses seriously. Or those courses are poorly taught.

Left unaddressed by both is another matter, described by a college president who’s willing to be named. John Bassett, President of Heritage University, is on the right track.

I think you need a better measuring stick than how many diplomas you hand out. I think you have to be very careful of unintended consequences. If you focus on graduation rates, then you incentivize schools to target wealthy and middle-class kids and not go after anybody else.

Focusing on graduation rates also drives fudging standards in order to prop up graduation rates. There’s no higher education for students there, either.

Here’s a thought; bear with me, apparently I’m on new ground here. How about focusing on rates of employment in their chosen major field for graduating students in a period (say, six months to five years) following graduation?

Graduating students who do well and become employed will identify a number of useful trends for the schools who graduated them and the Federal government that hectors the schools: the schools are teaching well, the schools are teaching marketable skills, and the schools are producing graduates less likely to default on their student loans because they have actual jobs and an income that enables them to pay their debts.

Gross Incompetence?

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As if we didn’t need another reason to disband the Department of Education (see its Dear Colleague letter for an example of its gross dishonesty), here’s another, of utter failure to perform. DoE isn’t taking care of its digital data.

The Education Department doesn’t hold nuclear launch codes. But its vast data trove on student-loan borrowers and their parents—and the nearly $100 billion it disburses in new loans every year—are reason enough to want the bureaucrats to prevent digital intrusions. ….
The stakes go well beyond personal privacy. Federal student loans outstanding exceed $1 trillion, and Team Obama is trying to forgive those debts. It would add injury to injury if cyber-fraudsters were able to pile on for a taxpayer plundering.

It isn’t a matter of an isolated error, even a serious one, which can happen in any large enterprise, either.

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe reported in November that her team has been “finding the same deficiencies over and over again” regarding information security. Since 2009 independent auditors “have found persistent IT control deficiencies in key financial systems,” she said.

For six years, auditors have found persistent DoE IT failure. This is not an inability to achieve perfection in personal digital data handling; this is a conscious and deliberate refusal to bother.

We don’t need a Federal government Department of this sort. Not at all.