Category Archives: education

Hillary Clinton and Minority Students

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In another flip-flop evolution of belief, Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has decided she’s against charter schools, since she was for them before the unions the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers endorsed her.

Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation[.]

Of course, this isn’t true, but hey—union endorsement. The facts, though, as noted by The Wall Street Journal at the link are these [emphasis added]:

Charters don’t exclude difficult students. Like other public schools, they aren’t allowed to discriminate. Nearly every state requires a random lottery to choose students if there are more applicants than openings. The reason some charters turn away students is that they lack the resources to accommodate every desperate family trapped in a teachers-union compound.

Charters serve some of the most troubled students, including a higher percentage in poverty than all public schools, according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. In urban centers in particular, charters serve mostly minority students and include more who are learning English than do public schools as a whole.

The question arises: what has Clinton against minority students, students whose parents choose charter schools over other public schools in order to get an actual education?

The answer is clear: students don’t vote, and unions do.

Free Speech According to the Left

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On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University.

Dr Halbertal had been invited by the university to give the lecture, and after the disruption, he was able to proceed.

The gang of protestors bragged about it.

Today, this apologist for Zionist war crimes spoke only sporadically, as his lies were interrupted again and again by protesters who refused to listen to his anti-Palestinian hate speech.

And not only that. This gang did their best to deny everyone else their right to listen to the speech. The right of those others to determine for themselves what they will listen to is strictly in the hands of this gang. Free speech, according to these, is limited to the freedom to speak or to hear only that which these personally approve.

The silence of the rest of the Left—not even the Star Tribune, a newspaper local to the region, spent any column inches on the thing—is clear: the Left as a whole agrees with this view that only speech of which the Left approves may be freely spoken.

Teaching Arithmetic and Common Core

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Teaching arithmetic under Common Core Standards—teaching arithmetic at all—requires the teacher first to understand arithmetic. Teaching any subject requires the teacher first to understand that subject, come to that, but in this article, I’m interested in arithmetic.

Below is an image from a Fox News Insider piece about a third-grader’s math problem: solve the problem “5 x 3 = ?.” The student wrote his answer in pencil; the teacher marked the answer wrong and wrote his version of the correct answer in red.CommonCoreMath_Crop

Of course, anyone with an actual third grade education knows that both versions are correct. What’s the problem here?

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics has this suggestion for teaching a third-grade multiplication problem:

1.  Interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each.

Thus, 5 x 3 might be interpreted as five groups of three objects each, as our student’s teacher has written. Except that by marking the student’s representation of three groups of five objects each as wrong, the teacher has shown he’s interpreting Common Core’s suggestion as a requirement, as the only right way to solve the problem.

The fault here is not in Common Core Standards; those are just setting a performance standard and suggesting a mechanism for achieving it.  No, the failure here is in the shocking arithmetic illiteracy—innumeracy—of this person presuming to “teach” third-graders their numbers.