Tag Archives: education

Education and Needs

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section expressed concern for a high school student who was suspended for violating his school’s hair length rule.

The state shouldn’t prohibit haircuts of one type or another and suspend students from school for violating the policy unless it can really show this is needed.

And

Schools need to focus on teaching kids and not worrying about [clothing and grooming standards].

Among the needs and teaching focuses in high schools, and in lower schools, is personal discipline. Clothing and hair grooming rules are badly needed milieus for teaching that badly needed skill.

There’s plenty of time for students to dress as they wish and to grow and groom their hair as they wish after they’ve graduated and are looking for work.

There’s Educational Opportunity…

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…and there’s educational obstruction. This is the contest between charter schools (and, larger, school choice) and union public schools.

Charter enrollment is up 9% since 2019, while the number of students in district schools is down 3.5%, according to a new study from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Families have discovered choice,” the report says, “and they like it.”

And

The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states.

Naturally, the unions that run the public schools don’t like it: reduced public school enrollment reduces the power of teachers unions, and that reduces the power of the unions’ managers, and those folks can’t stand that.

Which is why teachers union management teams are so strident in their opposition to State funding for charter schools, and for voucher schools, or even—as in New York City—to allowing unused public school buildings for charter schools. Better to leave those facilities empty than to use them for the betterment of children.

A Proposal for Harvard University

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Given the blatant antisemitic bigotry of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, as well as her dishonesty, demonstrated by her plagiarism—She plagiarized her acknowledgments—and the antisemitism demonstrated by the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, and its open condonement of Gay’s bigotry and dishonesty, when that body unanimously supported retaining her as President, it’s clear that drastic changes to Harvard University’s governance is badly needed.

A Harvard professor has suggested a pathway to that.

One faculty member, citing a carve-out in the Massachusetts Constitution that reserves authority over Harvard to the state legislature, has urged Massachusetts lawmakers to install a government official on the board to provide more transparency and public accountability.

Here is the relevant section of that constitution, from Chapter V, Section I, Article III:

…it is declared, that the governor, lieutenant governor, council and senate of this commonwealth, are and shall be deemed, their successors, who with the president of Harvard College, for the time being, together with the ministers of the congregational churches in the towns of Cambridge, Watertown, Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester, mentioned in the said act, shall be, and hereby are, vested with all the powers and authority belonging, or in any way appertaining to the overseers of Harvard College; provided, that] nothing herein shall be construed to prevent the legislature of this commonwealth from making such alterations in the government of the said university, as shall be conducive to its advantage and the interest of the republic of letters….

The professor is on the right track, but one government rep on a board of 13 or 14 won’t accomplish anything. The State needs to revamp the Corporation board altogether—maybe put on the board reps from the ministers of the congregational churches in the towns of Cambridge, Watertown, Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester in sufficient number that their aggregation outnumbers the remaining members, if they’re not, instead, to replace the incumbents. Additionally—these are Critical Items—the State needs to remove the President’s sole authority over the board’s agenda and to eliminate the board’s authority to select their own replacements.

 

Massachusetts’ constitution can be read in its entirety here.

A Brief Note

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The Wharton Board of Advisors—the Wharton is the business school of UPenn—is demanding leadership change at UPenn in light of UPenn President Liz Magill’s House of Representatives testimony in which Magill refused to say whether calling for genocide of Jews violated any of UPenn’s codes of conduct.

So far, so good. But then the Board wrote this in its demand:

In light of your testimony yesterday before Congress, we demand the University clarify its position regarding any call for harm to any group of people immediately, change any policies that allow such conduct with immediate effect, and discipline any offenders expeditiously.

But—if there are no current policies barring such conduct, what offenders can there be?

The failure of UPenn seems goes far beyond the university’s front office.

Federal Intimidation

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The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Aside from that deep immorality, the move also is illegal. South Dakota v Dole made clear that the Federal government cannot use threats of withholding funding in order to coerce compliance with Federal diktats regarding intra-State, or local, behaviors. Dole was a case in which the Federal government withheld a percentage of Federal highway funding from South Dakota over its refusal to comply with a then-recently enacted alcohol drinking age limit, and South Dakota objected to the withholding. The ruling held that the Feds could, indeed, withhold a percentage of Federal funding, but it could not do withhold a high enough fraction to be coercive. Withholding all of the school lunch funding is plainly coercive, and it’s intended to be so.