Tag Archives: education

Racism in K-12 Schools

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It’s rampant in the San Diego Unified School District, even as it claims to be “combatting racism.”

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. …
… Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.

Because most of the poor grades went to minority students, and figuring out why that might be and fixing the underlying problem(s) isn’t something for an educational institution to concern itself with.

Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student’s citizenship grade, not their academic grade.

Because academic discipline has no relationship with academics. Nor does any other sort of discipline. Nor is there any interest in figuring out why there might be poor discipline and addressing those underlying problems. (Aside: There also seems to be no interest in the poor grammar of journalists.)

Nor are any consequences or rewards associated with feel-good ratings like “citizenship.” Especially in a public school system that doesn’t teach the civics of citizenship.

This is nonsense.

This is a matter of the school system deciding to not do the work of bringing minority children up to speed so they can compete.

This is a matter of San Diego thinking either that minority children are inherently inferior and simply can’t compete, and their deficiency must be papered over, or of San Diego thinking minority children just aren’t worth the effort, and the district’s laziness must be papered over.

This is the bigotry (I don’t agree that it’s in any way soft) of low expectations at its most insidious.

QOTD

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Or maybe it’s the quote of the week. Or the month. Or the year.

It seems that

[a]t least 44 schools in San Francisco could see their names changed, as officials believe some were named after those with potential connections to slavery, genocide, and colonization, according to a report on Thursday.
The San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee researched school names and identified certain ones for renaming.

The move isn’t sitting well with the folks and their children who will have to live with the outcome of this move. Here’s one concerned parent:

Principals are devoting resources to this. We’re not actually helping disadvantaged children by changing the name of the school they can’t attend.

Unfortunately, though, this is typical of the vapidly saccharine pseudo-policies of the virtue-signaling Left. Worse, it’s all the Left seems to have; there’s nothing substantive or practical to their claims.

“Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19”

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That’s the title of a medRxiv preprint (unpeer-reviewed) paper that looked at the risk to adults—in particular, Scottish NHS healthcare workers, NHS-contracted general practice service providers, and members of their households—of contracting the Wuhan Virus (my term) when they lived in households with children with ages ranging from new-born to 11 years old. Total participants numbered more than 300,000 adults and children.

The results are correlative rather than causative, but the strength of the correlation is strongly suggestive.

The risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in those with one child and lower still in those with two or more children….

And the money quote:

Conclusion[:] Increased household exposure to young children was associated with an attenuated risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and appeared to also be associated with an attenuated risk of COVID-19 disease severe enough to require hospitalisation.

That suggests, also (my conclusion; the authors didn’t address the matter), that putting children back in school (at least grade school) poses no serious risk of spreading serious illness from the virus.

The preprint abstract can be read here.

American Education

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Our public school establishment has grown enormously over the last two-and-a-half generations, even as the public school student population has grown not so much, and public school performance as measured by student testing performance has not improved a single minim. The graph gives, as of 2017, the total change of the indicated personnel and student populations; you can see the changes year-by-year here [there’s a replay button at the top of that graph].

Mark Perry put his conclusion succinctly:

Bottom Line: Despite the significant increase between 1970 and 2017 in the number of public school teachers (57%) and non-teaching staff (151%) relative to the 10.4% increase in students, the significant 30% decrease in the pupil-to-[teacher] ratio in public schools and the significant 154% increase in inflation-adjusted spending per pupil attending public schools over that period, there was basically no change in academic achievement. More spending + more teachers + more administrators + no change in education outcomes = a failing public school monopoly that benefits entrenched unionized teachers who vigorously try to squash competition from charter schools and educational choice at the expense of taxpayers, parents, and students.

What he said.

Which puts a premium on two distinct, but each necessary, actions: defanging the teachers unions and expanding parental access to schooling alternatives like voucher schools and charter schools.

Critical to that second item is this: per-student school funding via taxpayer monies needs to stop being school funding and be transformed into student funding: the monies need to accompany the student to the school the parents select for him. If the parents choose home-schooling as their alternative, they should get, in lieu of full-up per-student funding, an allowance to cover teaching material and supply expenses. And, conditioned on performance on State-mandated testing, a serious honorarium for their teacher labor, with the allowance plus honorarium not exceeding the per-student funding rate.

Joe Biden, Black Lives Mattering, and Education

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Daniel Henninger explored the inkblots of the Trump-Biden Presidential contest. One of the blots he mentioned was this:

If Joe Biden wins on the basis of his current policy course, those young black lives will have next to no chance of their schools improving in the next four years.

Indeed. We’ve already seen the Progressive-Democrats’ attitude toward the lives of black children and their education. Eric Holder, the AG under Biden’s heavily touted BFF Barack Obama—and with Biden’s clear knowledge and at least tacit approval—sued Louisiana to block that State’s effort to let black children escape from failing public schools and go to voucher schools for an actual education.