Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling ideological culture

Counterintuitive?

education, equality, egalitarianism

In this increasingly complex technological world, what can our school systems do to help students excel in advanced math?

Well, here’s a novel approach: “Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school,” The Boston Globe reports.

Hmmm. Rather counterintuitive: Take access away from students.

Silly me, helping students master advanced mathematics isn’t even on the list of concerns for this Massachusetts city’s “education” officialdom. “The district’s aim,” explains The Globe, “was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers.” 

By reducing the learning opportunities for all. 

“School districts throughout the country are moving to axe certain academic standards such as advanced courses, grades and homework in the name of equity,” The Daily Caller informs, “in California, a high school recently stopped offering honors courses because the courses were failing to enroll enough black and Latino students.”

The impetus behind these moves is racist and wrong. Moreover, the results are both predictable and pernicious: “limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons.”

“They’re shortchanging a significant number of students,” one parent complains, “overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.” This is the case because many of the more affluent parents can afford to bypass the antagonistic public schools and get their kids the education they need to succeed. 

Public schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on teaching low-income and many black and brown kids, deciding that racial “equity” can most easily be achieved by taking away educational opportunities from white and Asian students.

Is this where the logic of public education leads — race as an excuse to play Procrustes, sawing off the tops of our heads to make us “equal”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Sin of Skin Color

education, race, racism

Zack De Piero, who taught English at Pennsylvania State University for several years, was pushed out of his job in 2022 for opposing race-based grading and opposing “diversity” training that tells white people that they are inherently racist. De Piero is white.

With the help of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he is suing the school for racial discrimination, specifically for being “singled out for ridicule and humiliation because of the color of his skin.”

According to the lawsuit, various of the defendants told De Piero that “outcomes alone — regardless of the legitimacy of methods of evaluation, mastery of subject matter, or intentions — demonstrate whether a faculty member’s actions are racist or not. . . . The logic of Defendants’ demands required that De Piero also penalize students academically on the basis of race.”

The filing details a litany of such conduct.

De Piero told Fox News: “I think there is almost a religious, cult-like environment where you had this original sin. In this case, I’m white. I need to repent for that sin. . . . I think they were waging a psychological war campaign and they’re trying to break people. And they almost broke me. But they didn’t.”

The U.S. Supreme Court took fifty years to rule against discriminatory, race-based university admissions. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another fifty years to rule against the travesties of racist grading, racist “diversity training,” and allied diversity-equity-inclusion racist policies doublespeakingly designed to mandate racism in the name of antiracism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling judiciary

Thomas & Thomas

race, racism, Supreme Court, college, education

In the Students for Fair Admissions decision, the Supreme Court rules that using race as a criterion of university admissions is unconstitutional.

Ambiguous aspects of the decision and the determination of some universities to keep using race as a criterion mean that qualified applicants may, alas, still be penalized for being the “wrong” color. Unambiguous, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s rebuke of the decision’s dissenters for, among other things, assuming that only racism can explain the different average outcomes of ethnic groups.

“[N]one of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race — rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor — and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds. . . .”

Has Thomas been perusing the work of Thomas Sowell?

One of Sowell’s career-integrating insights is that statistics summarizing differences in average group outcomes are mute about the causes. 

One must investigate causally relevant facts.

Consider, for example, differences in characteristics and outcomes between subgroups of a broader ethnic group. Sole possible cause: racism? Or the fact that Asians on average perform better than whites in certain academic or economic categories. Sole possible cause: racism?

Just two of many pertinent questions that Dr. Sowell has asked as he, in his numerous books, surveyed our world’s cultures, lands, and histories.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Affirmative Action Disaffirmed

affirmative action, quotas, college, race, racism

Congratulations to WHITE
SUPREMACY for winning
a huge victory today.

Thus tweeted Gene Wu, District 137’s representative to the Texas legislature. 

That was his reaction to yesterday’sSupreme Court decision striking down racial discrimination in picking students for colleges and universities.

He’s a Democrat and in a tricky situation. The case was brought to the High Court by Asian Americans, who have been most discriminated against in college placement. Rep. Wu, himself Asian American, talks up the compensatory racial preference cause. 

“Asian Americans have consistently been used as a foil to eliminate Affirmative Action programs which serve to repair centuries of intentional discrimination against Black and Latino AND Asian communities,” he argues. “Having Asian Americans as parties doesn’t make it any less racist.”

Actually, of course, discriminating in favor of “Black and Latino” applicants has hurt Asian Americans’ college placements the most, and provably so. Racial discrimination was the criterion. Not academic achievement, IQ, or ability to pay. Asian Americans were the big losers. 

More than whites.

But all Rep. Wu can think about is WHITE SUPREMACY. In all-caps, no less.

He worries not one whit about racial discrimination against Asians!

As absurd as what we used to call “reverse” discrimination is, we can be sure that, after this current ruling, DEI-obsessed administrators will still seek ways to continue their discrimination on the basis of race.

Also being raised? The issue of legacy admissions, rewarding with preferential treatment applicants whose parents and grandparents previously attended the institution. Senator and GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott called for public universities to nix those policies as well. Scott was joined by President Biden and AOC.

Sounds like justice and fairness based on merit is on a roll.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom media and media people

People Lover

China, children, population

Steven Mosher loves people.

Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”

In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.

Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.

Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.

Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”

He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.

This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.

The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”

My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Destroying (& Saving) Debate

debate judges, clowns, communism, communists

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” confesses someone now judging high school debates.

Her name is Lila Lavender, and she won the 2019 national high school debate championship. But now she has Authority.

“I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging.”

Start of a resignation letter? 

Not on your life. Ms. Red — excuse me, Ms. Lavender added, “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”

She exalts totalitarianism, instead, and the deaths of over one hundred million people and counting. And feels quite comfortable doing so . . . in this terrible, evil country . . . in which somehow she judges debate.

She’s not exactly an aberration. High school debate has regressed “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning,” champion debater and coach James Fishbeck writes in The Free Press,“to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.”

He points to a listing of judges run by the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), where many judges on their individual but public webpages acknowledge deciding winners and losers according to their own personal politics. 

“A black student I coached,” he recalls, “was told by the debate judge that he would have won his round, if he hadn’t condemned Black Lives Matter.”

One judge posted instructions that “if you are white, don’t run arguments with impacts that primarily affect POC [people of color]. These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.”

Another judge said “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegals’” would automatically lose one the debate.

While the NSDA insists that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs,” Fishbeck complains they do nothing about judges who publicize their punishment of students on a political basis.

But James Fishbeck did something. He formed a new debate league, Incubate Debate, which this year has already hosted 18 debate tournaments. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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