Public Schools and Parent Options

The Supreme Court ruled that parents could, indeed, opt their children out of parts of public school curricula that violated those parents’ religious belief. In Mahmoud, et al. v Taylor, et al., the Court held

the public-school system in Montgomery County, Md, had placed “an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” according to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.
“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill[.]”

The three “liberal” Justices demurred:

Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools[.]

The problem isn’t that chaotic, however:

Some parents from several religious backgrounds—Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox—objected to [a collection of books with LGBTQ themes and characters]. The school board said in court filings that it initially tried to accommodate opt-out requests, but doing so became “unworkably disruptive” due to “unsustainably high numbers of absent students.”

In other words, the school board was inconvenienced by not being able to dictate to parents how the school board would treat those parents’ children. Never mind that the objections were so widespread that the school board was unable to impose its will on all but a relative few. That clear cut a separation is hardly chaotic.

The chaos about which those three Justices bleated was caused by the school board and would be caused by other school boards who object to parents not meekly rolling over and kowtowing to the Know Betters of school boards more interested in their Leftist ideologies than they are in teaching the parents’ children.

These three Justices know this. They claim to worry about Court decisions deprecating respect for our court system, but it’s attitudes like those of these three that lead to that deprecation.

An aside: such chaos as might occur from enforcing parental rights, religious and otherwise, would be virtually eliminated were State and Federal governments to get out of the way of school choice, illustrated by voucher and charter schools, parochial schools, and home schooling. Parents could freely exercise their [religious beliefs] vis-à-vis the parameters of their children’s education if they had unfettered access to such a range.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

A Noble Man

The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.

Is Harvard Worth Saving?

That’s the question The Wall Street Journal asked, ironically, on D-Day. The news outlet also asked “How?” but I’m setting that aside as irrelevant: Harvard doesn’t need saving, at least not financially.

Harvard has that $53+ billion endowment, with its annualized return on that endowment of roughly 11% over the last 50-ish years. The question proceeds from the false premise that it needs saving.

Harvard doesn’t need our taxpayer money. More than that, if it no longer gets our money, it’ll be free of government strictures on what it does with the money it receives—the school can do whatever it wants, politically and scholastically, including reforming itself and ridding itself of its institutional antisemitic behavior and ridding itself of those in its employ or student population who act overtly on their own antisemitic behavior, illegalities like seizing and occupying buildings, denying its owners their own property; vandalizing those buildings and others on campus; openly denying Jewish students access to their classes; overtly threatening Jewish students with violence and delivering that violence; and actively denying those who disagree with them their own rights to free speech. That’s the short subset of a very long list.

Or Harvard can choose to continue those bigotries, absent government funding and attached strings. With either choice, though, it cannot continue—must not be allowed to continue—the illegal behaviors in which so many of the school’s bigots openly engage. A school that chooses to continue those behaviors and to condone them among its population doesn’t deserve saving, even with its own money.

Yes, Do That

A letter-writer in Friday’s WSJ Letters section wants us to stop calling degrees useless and, instead, encourage students to follow their bliss in their courses of study.

He cited principles of education that learning thinking is as important as learning facts and arithmetic. He’s right on this. He also cited statistics that indicate that most formally trained STEM graduates find work in other than STEM fields. Stipulated.

He closed, though, with this:

But if most STEM students leave their field, shouldn’t we stop labelling programs as “useless” and instead encourage students to develop their intellectual strength by studying whichever field they find most interesting?

Yes, do that. But also do this: require each college (including colleges within universities) to publish the median and mean wage/salary incomes at the five year post graduation mark for each major offered, and require each college to be the primary lender to its students or sole guarantor of other lending facilities’ loans to the college’s students.

Let each student know in advance his likely income from following his “most interesting” course of study along with his cost for pursuing that course.

Blue Books

They’re making a comeback on campuses as a way to get around student cheating via ChatGPT and other AI packages. I say good for those profs and schools that are requiring them for assignments and exams. Blue books make the student do his own work at the moment of truth: writing down, in class, their own answers to the varying assignments.

There is a valid beef to requiring blue books [emphasis in the original].

Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces.
“They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,” said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. “It is strange to say you won’t be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.”

There’s an obvious solution to that problem, though, and assignments and exams easily can be used to teach the use of AI. This would apply as well to STEM courses as humanities courses.

The professors can issue assignments and exams that mandate using AI to generate answers, then in class use blue books to require the students to critique the AI answers, identify AI “hallucinations,” and to improve the AI answers. To short circuit attempts to do the critiquing and editing in advance and simply writing down nearly memorized answers, the profs could require specific edit types of specific paragraphs or blocks of code or certain arithmetic sections or…. Alternatively, the profs could do the above as Part I of the assignment or exam, and then in Part II, provide his own AI-generated answer to a question and require the students to do the critiques and edits de novo. Then, returning to/maintaining basics, use Part III to pose questions that the students will not see until that point in the in-class exercise or exam and that the students must answer via blue book on the spot.

That last, especially, is how things work IRL.