Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling ideological culture sports

Un-Sportsmanlike Conduct

college football, sports, education, money

Tonight, the undefeated Dukes of James Madison University will travel to play the Thundering Herd of Marshall University in a Sun Belt Conference college football game. My youngest graduated from JMU, so I feel heavily invested in the team. 

Duuuuukes!

One might think this sport and spectacle a welcome relief from politics — and surely it is — but not entirely. Because, of course, these great college football programs are attached to public universities financed by us, by our tax dollars. 

The problem? As The Athletic put it recently: “For the second consecutive year, James Madison looks like one of the best teams in the Group of 5. And for the second consecutive year, the Dukes are ineligible for the postseason.”

The Group of 5 are the five best football-playing conferences after the best five conferences known as the Power-5. That’s pretty impressive — especially considering this is only the second year since James Madison made the jump from the second division into the first division of football-playing schools of higher yearning and earning. 

JMU is in the big leagues; it can now play for the national championship. Well, not now. Again, this year, like last year, JMU’s football team is banned from playing in a bowl game or being declared the champion of the conference . . . even though last year they did win the conference . . . except for the rule that says they cannot win the conference.

This year, the Dukes are 6-0 and could perhaps go undefeated. What if College Football’s Magic Computers pick them as among the best? They would still be denied a chance to compete.

Why? Well, those are the rules the colleges and conferences have agreed on. The rationales don’t hold much water. It seems like a hazing ritual holdover to me. 

But, of course, the universities can do whatever they want.  

And suffering the harsh two-year punishment is not so terrible for the coach who will possibly have a decade-long career, or the university that will play on in perpetuity. 

All the unfairness is placed on the shoulders of the student athletes. Denied the conference honors and the post-season play they deserve, these unpaid players who’ve earned millions for their schools have at least learned a lesson. When it comes to sports and money, the kids come last. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bad Math Baltimore

Baltimore, schools, education, school choice, mathematics

You may have thought it couldn’t get this bad. 

“Not one student at 13 high schools in Baltimore City, Maryland, achieved proficiency in math,” informs the city’s Fox 45 News, “as indicated by state math exams.”

That’s 40 percent of the city’s high schools and we’re talking not a single soul managed to come in at “proficiency.” Not mastery, mind you. 

“Among those 13 high schools,” the report continued, “a total of 1,736 students participated in the test with 74.5% of them achieving the lowest possible score of one out of four.”

Okay, okay, but what about the city’s best schools?

Well, a Fox 45 News follow-up found that only “11.4% of students” even at “Baltimore’s five top-performing high schools” are “proficient in math.” 

Adding, “In fact, not one high school student in the entire city, last school year, achieved a top level of math proficiency.”

Jason Rodriguez, with People Empowered by the Struggle, an edgily named Baltimore nonprofit, calls it “educational homicide.”

“It’s not a funding issue,” says Rodriguez. “We’re getting plenty of funding.” He thinks “accountability is the issue” and has “been calling for the resignation of the school CEO.”

Young people in Baltimore can learn mathematics just as well as young people anywhere. That we know. But they also need functional families as well as functional schools. The government, plausibly the chief cause of the dysfunction of both, has only official responsibility for the latter.

Sure, it sounds like time to lop off the top brass. But also past time to give every parent of a school-age child in Baltimore (and everywhere) a choice about where to go to school — purchased with the tax dollars that taxpayers are already providing.

Currently, to no avail. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Campus Critic Defended

censorship, free speech, education, university, college

In an interim victory for freedom of speech that may lead to an important precedent, a court has refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the University of Texas.

According to Richard Lowery’s complaint, filed in February 2023, university officials threatened his “job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, [and] academic freedom” as part of a campaign to stop him from criticizing various stupid and/or horrific policies of the school.

An example of Lowery’s language that has the school’s administrators gunning for him is a College Fix piece, “At UT-Austin, teaching white 4-year-olds that they’re racist is funded by taxpayer dollars.”

Administrators repeatedly pressed a superior of Lowery, Carlos Carvalho, to “do something about Richard.” When Carvalho resisted, Dean Lillian Mills threatened to oust Carvalho as executive director of a Center at the school.

Officials also “allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee’s request that police surveil Lowery’s speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people.”

Professor Lowery is represented by attorneys at the Institute for Free Speech, whose senior attorney Del Kolde stresses what should be obvious to the administrators: “Professors at public universities have the right to criticize administrators and speak to elected officials. The First Amendment protects such speech and, in a free society, DEI programs and UT’s president are not above public criticism.”

The goal of the lawsuit is, in part, to enjoin University of Texas officials from further threatening Lowery’s liberty to speak . . . and from acting on their previous threats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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Don’t Tread on Jaiden

Gadsden Flag, freedom, slavery, snake, snek

The Gadsden Flag: “Don’t Tread on Me” — it is many an American’s favorite flag, for it expresses a sentiment, the most American of political sentiments: resistance to tyranny.

Other flags, including the Stars and Stripes, are symbolic without being explicit.

What American could be against it? To oppose the Gadsden Flag is to oppose liberty!

But, these days, there are a lot of people who try to impugn the flag and the concept as being, I kid you not, “white supremacist” and “pro-slavery.”

It’s absurd, of course. Slaves were tread upon. Those who demand not to be tread upon object to their own slavery. And, by extension, others’.

Tell that to the woke mob. 

And to public school administrators.

On Monday, a likely lad named Jaiden was removed from his class at Vanguard Elementary in Colorado Springs. He triggered his teacher with a patch on his backpack featuring the Gadsden. When his mother confronted the charter school’s administrator, recording the chat, the administrator defended the action on the usual woke grounds: its alleged “origins with slavery.” 

Oddly, not even the school rules gave grounds to remove him for it — even if it were “about slavery.” (To repeat: it’s about slavery’s opposite.)

I smell the stink of partisanship. Many teachers and administrators so object to some people who like the flag that they distort facts to enforce ideological conformity on students.

The story has a happy ending, though. Jaiden was exonerated, walking into school with the patch still visible.

To make the story better, however, the teachers and administrators who thought they could tread upon Jaiden should be severely reprimanded, if not fired outright. For violating his rights.

And for not knowing history.

Flunk ’em!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Students Strike Back

College Campus Commie Crybabies

In November 2021, at taxpayer-funded Clovis Community College, the group Young Americans for Freedom requested permission to post flyers. College officials assented.

The flyers attacked socialism. Uh oh. This was a grave violation of the alleged inalienable right of socialist students on the campus to never be exposed to disagreement with their views.

Some of the aggrieved students complained. We are offended, they told the school.

Administrators furrowed their brows and quickly determined that the school could not permit such offensive speech.

Suddenly censored, the YAF students who had posted the flyers went to court, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They quickly won a district court victory that has now been affirmed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the court’s ruling, “The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad.”

This means that the case can continue.

Clovis YAF Chair Juliette Colunga hopes that in response to the ruling, Clovis will finally decide “to explicitly protect the constitutional rights of its students to speak freely.”

The school has tried to forestall further litigation to require it to set forth an unambiguous policy protecting freedom of speech by conceding that the students may post the anti-socialist flyers.

That’s not enough for FIRE, though, which is proceeding with the litigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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