Friday, March 29, 2024



Tuition at these elite New England universities will hit eye-popping $90,000 a year this fall

"Soak the rich" prices

Several elite New England universities will cost students a jaw-dropping $90,000 a year beginning this fall — with more schools expected to follow suit, according to a report.

Boston University, Tufts, Wellesley, and Yale — among the top private colleges in the country — will begin charging the nearly six-figure sum a year for tuition, housing and other expenses, according to the schools’ admissions websites, The Boston Globe reported.

Just six years ago, families were in an uproar when the annual price at schools like BU, Tufts, Harvard and Amherst college all topped $70,000 — and costs have continued to skyrocket.

“There’s always a huge psychological impact to these thresholds,” Sandy Baum, senior fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, told The Globe. “I remember when it went above $50,000, and people were just in shock.”

A number of other Boston-area colleges have yet to update their already steep tuition and fees for the 2024-2025 academic year, but are also expected to raise their prices for the fall semester, according to the paper.

At Boston University, the price tag includes $66,670 in tuition, $19,020 for housing and food and the cost of books and other fees for a whopping total of $90,207 for the 2024-2025 academic year.

That represents a 42% jump from 10 years ago where the total cost was $63,644, The Globe reported.

Cost of attendance at Tufts in Medford will be $91,888, according to estimates on the school’s website. Yale University in New Haven, Conn. will cost $90,975 next year.

Other schools nearing the eye-popping $90,0000 threshold for the 2024-2025 school year include Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. which costs $89,824; Amherst College in Amherst, Mass. at $88,210; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology at $85,960.

For the 2023-2024 academic year, Harvard charged $79,540 — which reportedly jumped to roughly $87,450 when expenses such as books were factored in. At Boston College, the all-in cost was $89,955 and Northeastern University was $86,821.

Fortunately, most students won’t be paying the full listing price thanks to financial aid and scholarships.

BU, for instance, will dish out $425 million in financial aid for the next academic year, school spokesperson Colin Riley told The Globe.

That need-based aid is “guaranteed for four years with BU Scholarship Assurance,” he said.

About 56% of BU’s students receive financial aid in some form, with the average aid package amounting to around $67,000, Riley said.

“Because this is an average, some of the neediest students paid $0, and others paid more,” he told the paper.

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More States Make Progress on School Choice

Several states are making progress empowering their citizens with access to education freedom and opportunity.

Earlier this month, Alabama became the 15th state in the nation to enact a program providing education savings accounts and the 10th state to enact universal education choice.

Last week, South Carolina and Louisiana took steps to become the 11th and 12th states to make every K­-12 student eligible for education choice.

The South Carolina House of Representatives voted 69-32 on Wednesday to pass a bill to expand eligibility for the state’s education savings account policy to all K-12 students. Eligibility is currently limited only to students from low-income families.

South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver celebrated the bill’s passage in the House, calling it “a HUGE step forward” in a post on X and “a win for students and families.”

That same day, the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee voted 5-2 to advance a bill that would create a scholarship program called Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise, or LA GATOR.

The bill, SB 313, is sponsored by state Sen. Rick Edmonds and is the companion bill to HB 745 in the House, sponsored by state Rep. Julie Emerson. Both are Republicans.

Louisiana’s new Republican governor, Jeff Landry, campaigned on school choice and his education council proposed that state policymakers should, among other goals, “Ensure that parents are granted flexibility in their child’s education.”

Three other states also are making progress on school choice, although their proposals are not as robust as in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, or a dozen other states.

Wyoming

With Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature last week, Wyoming became the 16th state in the nation to adopt an education savings account policy. With an ESA, families may choose learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children.

In the Cowboy State, families will be eligible for $6,000 to use for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, school supplies, online learning, and more.

This is a small but significant step in the right direction. It could have been a much larger step, however.

The bill sent by the Legislature to the Republican governor made families eligible for an education savings account if they earned up to 500% of the federal poverty level, or $156,000 for a family of four. That’s the equivalent of the combined average salaries of a Wyoming firefighter married to a registered nurse.

However, Gordon used his line-item veto to modify the eligibility criteria so that families are eligible only if they earn no more than 150% of the federal poverty level, or just $46,800 for a family of four. That means that the typical nurse or firefighter alone wouldn’t qualify.

In his letter explaining his veto, Gordon said a provision of the Wyoming Constitution requires that such programs be limited to the poor. Article XVI, Section 6 states that neither the state nor any local government shall “[l]oan or give its credit or make donations to or in aid of any individual, association or corporation, except for necessary support of the poor.”

However, education savings accounts are neither loans nor donations, but rather a fulfillment of the state’s constitutional obligation to provide citizens with educational opportunities.

As Article I, Section 23 of the Wyoming Constitution declares: “The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition.” No other policy yet devised provides families with greater educational opportunities than education savings accounts.

Georgia

The Peach State is on the cusp of becoming the 17th state to offer education savings accounts.

Last year, 16 Republican state legislators voted against a bill to create education savings accounts. This year, eight of those recalcitrant Republicans switched their votes to support the education choice bill.

After the bill passed both chambers in slightly different forms, a conference committee resolved differences and sent the bill to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature. Kemp is expected to sign it soon.

Unfortunately, the conference committee failed to fix the proposal’s flawed “failing schools” eligibility criteria.

The Georgia Promise Scholarship Act would limit eligibility to K-12 students assigned to the lowest-performing 25% of district schools in the state. As I noted earlier this month, the “failing schools” model for an eligibility mechanism is unsound:

First, a child’s access to a quality education should not depend on the average performance of a nearby district school. A school that is high performing on average nevertheless may not be the right fit for a particular child who is assigned to it.

Why should a child’s access to a quality education be dependent on the average level of performance of his or her peers in that school?

Second, the ‘failing schools’ model is unnecessarily confusing for parents. Parents often don’t know if they live in an area where their students are eligible.

Moreover, as district schools frequently move in and out of the bottom 25%, the eligible zones also will shift frequently, making it even harder for parents to keep track of which areas are eligible. It will be incumbent upon local school choice groups to ensure that families know about their education options.

Three years ago, Kansas state lawmakers changed eligibility for their state’s education choice policy from a “failing schools” model to a means-tested one, precisely for these reasons.

After learning this lesson in the school of experience, Georgia lawmakers probably will do likewise in the coming years.

New Hampshire

Earlier this month, the New Hampshire House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to expand eligibility for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts.

Eligibility currently is limited to students from families earning up to 350% of the federal poverty level, or $109,200 for a family of four. Under HB 1665, sponsored by state Rep. Glenn Cordelli, a Republican, students from families earning up to 500% of the federal poverty level, or $156,000 for a family of four, would be eligible.

That’s about the equivalent of the income of a typical commercial pilot married to a typical school counselor in New Hampshire.

In his annual State of the State address, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, encouraged the state Legislature to send the bill to his desk in the state capital, Concord.

The state’s families, Sununu said, “are singing the praises of Concord for finally passing Education Freedom Accounts which are now ranked as the most effective and popular school choice program in America—and why passing HB 1665 to expand this program is a great opportunity for families.”

“Let’s get it done!” the governor urged.

Sununu is right to highlight the popularity of the education choice policy. According to the most recent monthly tracking poll by Morning Consult, education savings accounts have the support of two-thirds of Granite State citizens as well as three-fourths of parents of K-12 students.

New Hampshire parents are voting with their feet. Over the past academic year, the number of Education Freedom Accounts has grown a whopping 58%, from 3,025 accounts awarded in 2022-23 to 4,770 in 2023-24. That’s more growth per capita than any other state nationwide.

The state Senate will soon hear the bill, but local school choice advocates are concerned about rumors that some senators are looking to scale back the eligibility expansion. Such a move not only is unlikely to persuade any opponents of school choice to support Education Freedom Accounts, but it is also guaranteed to reduce public support.

In addition to souring supporters of the expansion bill who suddenly would discover that their children no longer were going to be eligible, studies repeatedly have shown that the public favors universal eligibility over targeted eligibility.

The organization EdChoice’s most recent Schooling in America survey found that 76% of the public supports education savings accounts that are available to all families, regardless of income, while only 54% support ESAs that are targeted based on financial need.

Some have argued for limiting program enrollment as a cost-saving measure, but—at best—that’s pennywise and pound foolish. The average value of an Education Freedom Account is currently $5,255, barely one-quarter of the average cost of over $20,000 per pupil enrolled in New Hampshire’s district schools.

Instead of curtailing the proposal, state lawmakers should go all in by making the education savings accounts available to all.

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Government hostility to religious schools

So it appears that, after several more years of consultation, reviews and inquiries, Australia’s communities of faith will once again be disregarded, cast aside and left to fend for themselves in the land “beyond the wall”.

For those unfamiliar with the imagery, it comes from George R. R. Martin’s popular (and confronting) Game of Thrones literary series. In it, a giant ice wall is built to protect the land of Westeros from the horrors of the wintry north – primarily from the legendary dead army that is rumoured to be on the move. The only problem is that there are still humans who live beyond the wall, simple people, unaffectionately known as “Wildlings”. They are a free folk, a proud folk, with deep history, but fundamentally seen as lesser and cut off from the riches and protections of the mainland.

Such it seems is the view of religious people in Australia at this current point in history. Not only are we largely seen as backward and archaic by the elite ruling class, holding onto outdated superstitious beliefs, but also face repeated legislative raiding parties into our communities by state governments and activist media elements (who I like to refer to as the “Night’s Watch”).

This mentality is perhaps most evident when it comes to faith-based higher education, of which I run but a humble chiefdom. We are a significant minority in the Westerosian university landscape, and the inequality is increasingly blatant. Our Wildling students are forced to pay as much as four times the HECS fees of the city dwellers (despite our institutions often outperforming theirs); we have no access to the Maesters’ citadel (research funding and block grants), and our land rights are rapidly being eroded.

Take the example of the Queensland anti-discrimination bill introduced into the state’s parliament this month which strips faith-based educational institutions of the ability to employ staff who share their religious ethos and values – arguably the most oppressive laws in the land. We thought that those in the northern realms might at least have some empathy, but perhaps their long summers have made them complacent towards their devout Wildling brothers and sisters.

We have always felt, however, that we would be able to endure, particularly when those in King’s landing reassured us that we were indeed an important part of Westeros. We would be respected and left in peace, and when it came down to it, they would ensure our protection and survival. Indeed, the kings and queens on the revolving blood-splattered chair of political swords would even sometimes praise us from afar as we educated their children, looked after their poor and took care of their aged.

However, it now seems that, despite all the promises from the Iron Throne, that the protections will not be forthcoming. The Hand of the King (Australian Law Reform Commission) has advised that exemptions for religious educational institutions in the Sex Discrimination Act should be removed. Additionally, the High King of the eight kingdoms has now also indicated the Religious Discrimination Bill is to be dropped. Roughly translated, this means the Wildlings and their backwards ways are condemned. The long, dark night is upon us.

It is no shame to say that we hold a healthy fear of the army of the dead, or in our case the waves of frozen-eyed lawyers primed to overwhelm our educational institutions with litigation. We have already seen internationally that most cases of religious freedom involve educational institutions – where communities of individual Wildlings who hold the sacred values of marriage, or maleness and femaleness, or that life is sacred, are cast out to wander the wilderness.

One idea that has been discussed in our villages is that perhaps we should all just attempt to clamber back over the wall into Westeros, tell our communities to walk out and enrol in the already underfed public schools south of the wall. I anticipate, however, that there would not be enough food to feed us all.

The real question, therefore, is: does the Iron Throne and its multitude of cunning advisers genuinely want diversity in Westeros? By that I mean diversity of perspectives, cultures and opinion. Or are they seeking a monoculture which ensures every inhabitant bends the knee to whoever controls the ideology of the day?

If it is the latter, then the free folk will always be a thorn in the side of any ruler. Whatever the Wildling tribe – whether it be Christian, Islamic, Judaic or just individuals who covet the free life – the reality is that they won’t ever bend the knee to anyone who is not the True King of Westeros and beyond. Our allegiance and salvation does not rest with men and women – thank God.

All we Wildlings really pray for is the opportunity to live in peace, to educate our young people, freely associate, and serve where our help is accepted. Unfortunately, in this current wintry climate beyond the wall, that is by no means assured.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024



College savings should start in kindergarten and kids should be involved: financial expert

With the cost of college on the rise plus an unstable debt load, the best thing parents can do is to set children up for financial success — and that can start as early as the kindergarten years.

Gregg Murset, CEO of BusyKid, a chore app that provides kids with debit cards and financial education, believes the best way to avoid "digging yourself into a hole of debt" is by starting the saving process much earlier.

And while this may sound like a task for the parents, it's also something the kids should get involved with, according to Murset, who is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"I think it's really important that not only the parents start thinking about this, but the kids start thinking about it, too, because who made the rules that it's all up to the parents to pay for college anyway? I don't like that rule," Murset told FOX Business.

The best way to avoid empty wallets or anxiety surrounding pricey college tuition is for parents to consider saving early because kids are not as expensive when they're younger, Murset said.

"Having lived through six children of my own and raising them, and most of them are gone now, they're much cheaper [in] the beginning," said the financial expert.

"So, it's actually smarter to start saving when they're little because they don't cost as much."

For Murset, it's not about how much the family is setting aside — but rather, the fact that consistent saving is taking place.

He suggested putting the amount into a growth mutual fund with a 20-year cut-off, and then start dollar cost averaging, so you can "set it and forget it."

While kids might be more excited about attending soccer camp or dance class and aren't thinking about college, it is still important for parents to start engaging in some sort of savings conversation when they are young. Murset suggested that the ages of 4 or 5 are not too soon to start.

"I'm a big believer that kids learn best about money by doing stuff," he said.

"They can read things, they can watch videos, but at the end of the day, they need that practical, visceral experience."

"You got to start that money conversation very young and let them practice. And they not only have to practice earning the money by actually working, but they have to learn what I call a ‘balanced financial approach.’"

Murset's "balanced financial approach" is about teaching kids to earn money, save, invest from savings — and then give some away.

"I know that seems counterintuitive, but you've got to teach them that the world is a bigger place than just them," he said.

A great place to start teaching your children about earning and savings is in your own home, by assigning them chores, said Murset. He calls this a "work-money connection."

"Not only are they going to learn how to work and get something done, but you're going to get your house clean," Murset said with a laugh.

Once they get the money that they earned, they must learn how to manage it, which is when the "balanced financial approach" comes into play.

For parents getting ready to send their children off to college, it is best to discuss how four years of college will be paid for while they're still in high school — so that they are not left shocked or anxious about their savings. Murset said this is the time to start exposing them to the reality of how much life costs.

"A lot of parents have this little bubble and they don't tell their kids anything, and everything's wonderful. And they're clueless, so you have to start teaching them by being more transparent," Murset said.

"This is easy, and it's actually fun," he added.

Murset advised asking kids to help figure out the cost of dinner at a restaurant, plus the tip, and they will start to realize that all things come with a price tag.

When a household's electric or auto insurance bills come in the mail, parents can show them how they're paying for these necessities — and they will quickly realize that life is not cheap, Murset said.

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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee expects a school choice 'revolution,' with parental rights a key 2024 election issue

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee says his state is joining what he views as a "revolution in America right now around school choice," as a $400 million bill to overhaul public school achievement testing and implement universal school choice advances in the state legislature.

Lee, who is also president of the Republican Governors Association this term, said the issue of school choice resonates nationally beyond just Tennessee during the 2024 presidential election year.

The governor explained in an interview with Fox News Digital that school choice, to him, is "really about freedom," noting how regarding matters of COVID-19 vaccines, books in public school libraries and classroom instruction, "parents on the left and right have very strong opinions about what that ought to look like."

"The only way to resolve those differences are [is] to give parents the choice so that they're not resolved to live with whatever, you know, some teacher or some classroom or some library or some educational school district believes that they ought to be," Lee said. "Most all of us Americans, not just elected officials, recognize that education is one of the top priorities when it comes to issues and what Americans care about."

"This is not a choice between school choice and public schools. We have a strong commitment in this state toward the improvement of our public school system. The vast majority of our kids are going to be educated in our public schools, even years after a choice initiative like our proposed legislation goes through," the governor added, responding to criticism that the proposal would divert resources from Tennessee's underfunded public schools. "We need to have the best public school systems. They need to be funded well. They need to be innovative and creative and part of the part of the legislation."

Lee said he’s observed an increased understanding among conservatives – but also from Americans more generally – that parents should be given the ability to impact what happens in their children’s education. He credited the pandemic, when remote learning gave parents insight into what gender and racial ideologies were included in public school curricula, as well as the resulting learning loss from keeping kids out of classrooms, as parents seek options to play catch-up several years later.

"I do believe there is a push in this country, especially among conservatives, for understanding how important freedom is – freedom in education, freedom in health decisions, freedom in what we do for our employment," he said. "We talk a lot about Tennessee being a place where people have access to opportunity and security and freedom. And as it relates to education, that is an Education Freedom Scholarship Act. And that's what we are really hopeful passes in this state in the next few weeks."

Despite some objections from state Democrats, the framework of Lee's proposal, included in House Bill 1183, advanced through the state House Government Operations Committee and was recommended to move forward to the state House Finance Subcommittee last week. As Lee enjoys a Republican super majority in both the Tennessee House and Senate, he said he expects a version of the legislation to pass after the final provisions are ironed out between chambers.

The current version of the bill in the House would increase payment for teacher health insurance from 45% to 60% – a measure intended to help rural districts retain quality teachers, as well as provide a $75-per-student infrastructure payment toward school facilities and maintenance and increase state funding for students in small and sparsely populated school districts, The Tennessean reported. It also allows for teacher and principal evaluations and state-mandated student testing to happen less often.

A corresponding version of the legislation in the state Senate, SB 0503, is estimated to cost about $250 million less than the House bill. But the upper chamber’s version would primarily focus on creating the governor's Education Freedom Scholarship program and opening inter-county school enrollment. It excludes the House bill’s provisions on teacher health insurance, evaluations and changes to testing requirements.

As the governor noted, school choice initiatives passed in states like Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma and Arkansas last year and more recently in Wyoming and Alabama. It’s also gaining momentum in Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia, Lee said, and Florida and Indiana have multiple stages of school choice. Though it varies by state, Lee said they have the same premise that "the parent knows best."

In states like Texas, Lee said, it has cost candidates elections to oppose school choice.

Tennessee has one of the fastest-growing populations and one of the top-performing economies among all 50 states in recent years, Lee acknowledged, stating how the influx of families weighs in on school choice.

"We need to give parents more choices. And when we do, children are going to have much more options to be successful. And at the end of the day, that's what this is all about," Lee said. "It's not really political, even though it's a very conservative issue. But hey, look at the states that have Democrat governors are passing that choice now as well, because Americans are beginning to believe that this is about children and the future of our country. And we ought to do everything we can to challenge the status quo and get it and get a better outcome."

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Torrens University pushes private sector path to higher education targets

Australia’s only for-profit university is besting its sandstone rivals in taking on more Aboriginal, female and poorer students, as its chancellor warns the nation will fail to meet the goals of a landmark review into higher education if doesn’t embrace a new model of private universities.

Torrens University chancellor Jim Varghese said the targets set out in the recent Universities Accord report – that 80 per cent of the population aged 25 to 34 should have at least a tertiary qualification and 55 per cent should have a university degree by 2050 – would not be possible with public institutions alone.

He has called for a shake-up of the tertiary sector, which has been dominated by government-funded institutions, arguing that without competitive private alternatives there will not be enough places. The Accord report estimates an additional 940,000 Commonwealth supported places will be required to reach the university attainment goal by 2050.

“It is not possible unless you get the private sector actively involved,” Mr Varghese said.

“Unless you have a private higher education sector working hand in glove in competition, it will become very bureaucratic, very difficult and we won’t reach that very ambitious and laudable target.”

As Australia’s only for-profit higher education institution with university status reaches its 10-year anniversary, a new Deloitte report has found Torrens University was already leading the way on the access and equity goals set out in the Accord’s final report ­released last month.

The report found 25 per cent of its students were from disadvantaged backgrounds, compared to 12 per cent of Group of Eight universities; 19 per cent were from regional areas, compared to 9 per cent at the Go8; and 3 per cent were Indigenous, compared to 1 per cent at sandstone universities.

It also found that Torrens ­University – which is owned by US company Strategic Education – had added $468.9m in value to the Australian economy and supported more than 3000 jobs, all without any investment from the government.

Torrens University president Linda Brown said it was the nation’s fastest-growing university, expanding from 165 to 24,000 students in a decade, and had built its brand by scrapping the requirement for an entry score, attracting non-traditional students and ­offering flexible study options.

She said the university also focused on offering degrees in high demand areas including health, nursing, hospitality, education and business, and was becoming a leader in artificial intelligence. “I believe that we should be allowing investors to invest in universities, all universities – people should be able to raise private money for public good,” she said.

“I also believe that individuals should put their hand in their pocket because they’re getting the return on investment and the ­benefit for that, so there should be more individual investment,” Ms Brown added. “And there should be government investment … one plus one plus one is much better than relying on funding from one source for 90 per cent of the market.”

Ms Brown said Torrens had attracted international students from 150 nationalities, warning Labor’s crackdown on student visa holders using the pathway to work rather than study could harm the nation’s reputation.

“We will manage whatever is coming, but this uncertainty or drip feeding of changes is not great for our reputation as a country for being open for business for international students,” she said.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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The Growing Discontent With American Education

There is a growing discontent with American education. You can sense it swelling like a big wave, evidenced in a mix of troubling stats and trends from waning public perceptions of education to significant declines in enrollment and attendance. Students aren’t just talking about their discontent with education but walking it, too.

Enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities peaked in 2010 and has been on a steady decline since and more than a quarter of students in K-12 schools are now chronically absent. Certainly, many factors are at play here ranging from mental health issues and a pandemic hangover to technological disruption and a series of education policy debacles. But the ultimate culprit of our discontent may be the hardest of all to acknowledge and address. The brutal reality is that education isn’t exciting, engaging or relevant for far too many students.

It sounds harsh to say and even more difficult to write, but ‘exciting,’ ‘engaging’ and ‘relevant’ are not words often used to describe education. When asking students, parents or employers, we are more likely to hear descriptors such as ‘boring,’ ‘outdated,’ and ‘disconnected from the real world.’ Indeed, only 26% of U.S. adults who have experienced higher education strongly agree their coursework is relevant to their work and day-to-day life. And a mere 13% of K-12 students give their school an “A” grade on “making them excited about learning.”

One of the many outcomes of students who find little excitement or relevance in what they are learning is not just declining attendance but also employers of all shapes and sizes who say they can’t find the talent they are looking for. With nearly 10 million open jobs in the U.S. and a mere 11% of business leaders strongly agreeing graduates are well-prepared for work, we cannot afford to have an education discontent crisis.

While we have spent the better part of the last three decades focused on improving students’ standardized test scores, we’ve made effectively zero progress against this goal. The most heralded solution in recent memory for improving schools was ‘Common Core’ - which took a decade to roll-out and then faced repeal and backlash leading to no measurable result. And as we put more emphasis on ‘academic standards,’ we let students’ real world work experience atrophy as the least-working generation in U.S. history. At the higher ed level, less than a third of our graduates complete a work-integrated learning experience (such as an internship or a semester-long project) as part of their degree.

How does school remain relevant when it provides such little exposure to the real world of work? How does school compete with the engaging and addictive content found in modern-day media, video games and bite-size-length mediums such as X, TikTok, and YouTube shorts? How does school remain up to date amidst the fastest-moving technological and social changes in history? Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes to the great discontent with education. But we can start by establishing a new, fundamental goal for education.

Our aim should be to make education more engaging and relevant. This sounds so simplistic. Yet this has never been a stated goal of any education policy reform in the past half century. If we were to make this our driving goal, we would need to put much more emphasis on the art and science of teaching and learning and on the integration of learning and work. And we would need new ‘north stars’ or metrics for which to aim.

We have national institutes for all sorts of important national priorities. But we don’t have one for teaching and learning. We have a U.S. Department of Education and a Department of Labor as wholly separate entities - yet nothing that aims to integrate learning and work. The average U.S. student takes 112 mandatory standardized tests across their K-12 education, yet we have no national measures of student engagement, exposure to experiential education or work-integrated learning.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And the will is developing in the rising swell of discontent with American education.

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NYC music school seeks to change blacks-only $3M scholarship over fears it will be deemed unlawful

The Manhattan School of Music wants to change the parameters on a nearly $3 million scholarship fund earmarked only for black students — because they fear the race restriction will be deemed unlawful.

The money was bequeathed to the Morningside Heights school by trustee Cate Ryan, a longtime nurse and playwright who died in 2019 at age 78.

Ryan, who was white, left the dough to the school in recognition of her longtime friend and childhood caretaker, Masolinar “Mackie” Marks, who was black. Ryan, who also worked for The New Yorker, wrote her 2012 play, The Picture Box, in honor of Marks.

In her will, Ryan specified the money go to “financially deserving African-American students” in the school’s precollege programs — but in recently filed Manhattan Supreme Court papers, the institution worries the race-based restriction will be found unlawful after the US Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

The school has yet to dole out the money and wants a judge to green light changing the scholarship’s parameters, making it available to “financially deserving students who have experienced social, educational, cultural and economic challenges similar to those experienced by” Marks.

The school did not respond to a message seeking comment.

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Government Targeting ‘Ghost Colleges’ in International Student Visa Crackdown

Despite an uptick in net migration, the Australian government forecasts a significant drop due to measures introduced to clamp down on illegal visas in the international education sector.

According to data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on March 21, net overseas migration totalled 548,800 until September 2023, resulting in the total population growing by 2.5 percent.

The new population figure is 26.8 million, an annual increase of 659,800 people.

This latest data does not account for measures implemented by the Labor Party to curb migration, which is expected to halve by next year, primarily due to major restrictions in student visa approvals.

“Net overseas migration grew by 60 percent compared with the previous year, driven by an increase in overseas migration arrivals (up 34 percent), predominantly on a temporary visa for work or study,” said Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil.

Last year, as part of a greater move to drive down migration, the Albanese government implemented a migration review.

This was aimed at ending pandemic-era concessions afforded to education providers to prevent rogue operators from running so-called “ghost colleges” that often recruit international students who are not genuinely coming to Australia to study.

“Instead of pretending that some students are here to study when they are actually here to work, we need to look to create proper, capped, safe, tripartite pathways for workers in key sectors, such as care,” said Ms. O’Neil on March 21 at a press club event.

“More than half of the people who receive permanent skills visas under our current system arrived in Australia on a student visa.”

Over the next week, high-risk providers, referred to as “visa factories” by the government, will be sent warning notices that give a six-month compliance period to eliminate dodgy practices. If standards are not met, the provider runs the risk of being suspended from bringing in overseas students.

“Increased powers for the regulator and tougher penalties will deter dodgy providers who currently see fines as a risk worth taking or merely a ‘cost of doing business,’” Skills and Training Minister Brendan O'Connor said.

A new “genuine student” test will ask students to answer questions about their intentions for study, provide evidence of their current and potential financial situation, and sign a declaration that they understand what constitutes a genuine student.

Additionally, English language requirements for student and graduate visas will increase, with the minimum requirement from IELTS rising from 5.5 to 6.0 and for graduate visas from IELTS 6.0 to 6.5.

Results of the increased enforcement are already starting to show says Clare O'Neil.

“Since September, the government’s actions have led to substantial declines in migration levels, with recent international student visa grants down by 35 percent on the previous year,” she said.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, March 24, 2024



To improve America’s school kids, we need to get them moving

Math and reading scores have been declining in American classrooms for years. And this is not just an academic challenge, it’s a matter of national security. According to a Department of Defense brief from late last year, China and Russia are graduating far more math, science and engineering students than the US, compromising America’s defense preparedness.

Hiring more teachers might seem like the most obvious way to help America’s students catch up; so too is reducing classroom sizes. But neither appear to boost graduation rates. What about injecting more movement into class time, instead? The need could not be greater.

Indeed, according to a recent “report card” from the Physical Activity Alliance, barely one-fifth of American children are meeting the minimum physical activity levels of 60 minutes each day. What’s more, average American teenagers are sitting up for upwards of eight hours each day. These behaviors have serious consequences — including obesity, depression, and sleep disturbances; prolonged levels of inactivity are bad for both the body and the mind.

Children need to move — and the US education system is failing to get them on their feet. Instead, students are told to actually stay still, stop fidgeting and remain quietly for hours at a time. This might make things easier for teachers, but for students there are far better options, most notably kinesthetic learning.

For the uninitiated, kinesthetic learning — also known as tactile learning — involves the active engagement through physical sensations or movements. Rather than merely sitting in classes, students learn through practical experiences, exploration, and the process of discovery. The current education system treats children like passive recipients of information; kinesthetic learning, on the other hand, actively engages kids. It works particularly well for boys, who are far more prone to in-class distractions in than girls.

Research demonstrates that while physical activity may improve overall academic achievement, it’s particularly effective in boosting math skills. That’s because exercise activates regions of the brain associated with mathematical cognition. The incorporation of movement can also aid in the development of phonemic awareness and letter-sound recognition, along with the understanding of fundamental concepts.

For instance, when 8-year-olds were instructed to use their hands and bodies to act out the meaning of words in a foreign language — such as spreading their arms and pretending to fly to learn the German word for airplane — they were significantly more likely to remember the words, even after two months, with a 73% higher recall rate.

This effect is not just limited to language. In a 2021 study involving 757 elementary school students in Copenhagen, researchers divided the participants into two groups. One played in basketball while doing math, while the other followed the usual classroom routine and shot hoops as a regular gym activity. Those who paired basketball with math exhibited a six percent improvement in subject proficiency, a 16% increase in intrinsic motivation, and a 14% enhancement in perceived autonomy compared to their peers who learned math solely in the classroom

The brain influences the body, but the body also influences the brain, a process known as “embodied cognition.” For many students, engaging in low-intensity movement helps them regulate alertness levels; with Stanford experiments demonstrating that students generate more creative ideas while walking than when seated.

Incorporating more movement, even micro-movements, into the average school day is not rocket science. For instance, in mathematics classes with younger children, hand and arm gestures can be employed to impart a wider array of complex concepts like tangents and cosines.

Additionally, teachers (and parents) can get children to draw what they have learned. As indicated by a 2018 study out of the University of Waterloo, Canada, children asked to illustrate their lessons were twice as likely to retain the information than children who merely wrote or read about what they had just learned. The combination of cognitive and physiological activities leads to a more profound encoding of learning, making drawing a dependable and easily replicable method for enhancing performance.

Learning is necessary, but it needn’t be a nightmare. The more fun and interactive, the better it is for students — and teachers. Not only does movement influence cognitive abilities, it improves classroom behavior. Children are balls of energy; they are not “designed” to sit for countless hours. Educators must reimagine classrooms accordingly — the future of America’s security depends on it.

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NYC: No one’s telling the truth about the class-size law: It hurts kids and ONLY helps the UFT

All the recent sound and fury over the state class-size law signifies nothing because all the players refuse to say the most important part out loud: This mandate only serves the interests of the United Federation Teachers — and is actively bad for the city’s schoolchildren.

Declining enrollment had the UFT’s ranks steadily shrinking as of 2022; the class-size mandate is purely a gimmick to turn that around.

State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) and the other Democrats who pushed the law through plainly don’t even believe the mandate is pro-education, or they wouldn’t have imposed it only on New York City.

Note, too, that the city’s lower-performing schools already mostly meet the law’s class-size targets: It’s the schools that largely work that have more kids in every classroom.

So the law’s actual impact is to force those schools to break up classes — and, indeed, if they don’t have enough available classrooms, to admit fewer students.

That is, fewer children being taught by the best, veteran teachers, and fewer kids in the better schools.

This may well mean fewer students getting the chance to learn at the city’s elite high schools: The buildings that house Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science have fixed numbers of classrooms, after all.

Worse, complying with the law requires the city Department of Education to triple its rate of hiring new teachers — which pretty much forces it to hire every warm body that comes along with the right paper qualifications.

Another wrinkle: Under the UFT contract, senior teachers have considerable rights to choose which school to teach at; human nature ensures that many (maybe most) will transfer to any new slots that open up at “nice” schools, and away from schools where harder-to-educate kids predominate.

Yes, some dedicated veteran teachers will always stick it out at the “tough” schools; a few gifted new teachers will be great from their first days on the job.

But the fact is that this mandate mainly harms the education of the city’s needier kids — and everyone who understands how the system works knows it.

That includes Liu, UFT boss Mike Mulgrew, and the City Council members griping about the city’s slow implementation of the mandate: That they posture to the contrary just makes every one of them even more despicable.

Schools Chancellor David Banks knows it, too, though it’s beyond impolitic for him to call out the vile powerbrokers for playing this game.

But, since he cares about the kids, Banks has a moral duty to drag his feet as much as possible.

As for Liu: How does he sleep at night? The only possible answer: Wherever, whenever, and however the UFT tells him.

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Woke mathematics teaching in Australia: Rather sickening

Cresta Richardson, the head of the Queensland Teachers’ Union, declared that the 1.3 million children in Australia preparing to sit this year’s Naplan test should be spared the ordeal because it is too stressful for them. It is not surprising Richardson is calling for a boycott of testing, because Naplan testing exposes the complete failure of our education sector to teach people how to read, write and add up.

To his credit, federal Education Minister Jason Clare disagrees, stating he believes Naplan should stay. Since being sworn in as minister in June 2022, Clare has often repeated the mantra that we need to get ‘back to basics’. This is an admirable sentiment, but as long as this country’s education sector is controlled by a cohort of progressives who believe education is a vehicle for politicisation, it will remain nothing more than wishful thinking.

The progressive view of education is of course completely at odds with the expectations of most mainstream parents who still cling to the antiquated notion that, at the very minimum, schooling should be about acquiring basic skills such as numeracy and literacy. Nowhere is this difference more vividly illustrated than in the mathematics learning area of Australia’s national curriculum.

Deeply embedded in the K-10 mathematics syllabus is the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures’ cross curriculum priority, which ensures ‘students can engage with and value the histories and cultures of Australian First Nations Peoples in relation to mathematics’. The consensus seems to be that children should be taught things like statistics and algebra, not because these will furnish them with necessary life skills such as planning budgets or finding the best prices for products bought and sold, but because it will give them a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal dance, corroborees and dreamtime. Not so long ago, this was called anthropology.

Indeed, Aboriginal dance features heavily in the primary syllabus, especially when it comes to addition and subtraction. In Year 1, teachers attempt to explain to the kiddies why 2 + 2 = 4 through First Nations Australians’ dances. In Year 2, the point is hammered home again, using ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances to understand the balance and connection between addition and subtraction’.

For those students who still have not caught on, their teachers will explain through ‘First Nations Australians’ cultural stories and dances about how they care for Country/Place such as turtle-egg gathering using number sentences’. In Year 4, teachers explore ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances that show the connection between addition and subtraction, representing this as a number sentence and discussing how this conveys important information about balance in processes on Country/Place’. Just in case you thought this might be the last time children are subjected to the silent snake or cassowary dance, think again. The Year 5s are investigating ‘how mathematical models involving combinations of operations can be used to represent songs, stories and/or dances of First Nations Australians’.

As it turns out, these all-singing, all-dancing classes are a bit of a distraction. Not from learning the times tables or how to do a long division, but from something much more pressing, which is Reconciliation. This highly charged political concept is introduced in a Year 3 ‘Number’ class by ‘comparing, reading and writing numbers involved in the more than 60,000 years of First Peoples of Australia’s presence on the Australian continent through time scales relating to pre-colonisation and post-colonisation’. Two years later, they are busy ‘investigating data relating to Australia’s reconciliation process with First Nations Australians, posing questions, discussing and reporting on findings’.

It is in secondary school, however, that the architects of the mathematics syllabus really get down to business. From Year 7 onwards, students studying statistics are introduced to the notion of reconciliation between ‘First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians’. They are told to look at ‘secondary data from the Reconciliation Barometer to conduct and report on statistical investigations relating to First Nations Australians’. The Reconciliation Barometer was invented back in 2008 by Reconciliation Australia to measure, every two years, just how racist non-Aboriginal Australians really are. This racism is confirmed for students in Year 9 as they go about ‘exploring potential cultural bias relating to First Nations Australians by critically analysing sampling techniques in statistical reports’ as well as observing ‘comparative data presented in reports by National Indigenous Australians Agency in regard to Closing the Gap’.

Every Australian parent should know that their children are being subjected to overt politicisation in maths classes courtesy of the national curriculum. They should also know that the technique being used was developed by Brazilian Marxist, Paolo Freire, who proposed that the only true education is political education and that all teaching is a political act. When Freire talked about literacy, he meant political literacy, rather than actually being able to read and write.

His view was that the teacher’s role is not to educate in the traditional liberal education sense of the word, but to bring about what he termed the ‘conscientisation of the student’ by awakening their consciousness to the real political condition of their lives. Freire claimed that conscientisation could be achieved in the classroom by ensuring children are taught to see structural oppression in all aspects of life.

Thus, a potentially dull statistics lesson on standard deviations, random variation and central tendency is transformed into an entirely different, and much more exciting class in which children develop a critical consciousness of Australian society.

They might discuss the devastating consequences of the invasion of this land and colonisation, past and current systemic racism in Australia, the need for truth-telling, the reconciliation processes, or the need for reconciliation action plans. By the end of the session on statistics, all they will see is structural oppression. And by the end of twelve years of schooling, they will be ready and willing to overthrow the oppressive capitalist power structures and replace them with a utopian socialist society of diversity, equity and inclusion.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, March 21, 2024



West Point Military Academy Drops “Duty, Honour, Country” From Mission Statement

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point decided to drop the “Duty, Honour, Country” motto from its mission statement last week in favour of a bland reference to “the Army Values”. The New York Post‘s Paul du Quenoy is not impressed.

“Duty, honour, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”

So said Gen. Douglas MacArthur in his famous May 1962 address to West Point cadets.

But those words are no longer hallowed. West Point last week removed them from its mission statement, substituting a bland reference to “the Army Values”.

West Point’s Superintendent, Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland, defended the change, suggesting in a damage-control letter addressed to “supporters” that it resulted from a year and a half of discussions held “across” the West Point community and in consultation with unidentified “external stakeholders”.

He said the decision was supported by Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, whose last job was director of a centre at the RAND Corp., a research and policy institute that professes to “strive to cultivate a community that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion as central to our culture”.

Gilland also claimed the approval of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who previously served as Senior Military Assistant to Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, whose department requested $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023 for “dedicated diversity and inclusion activities”.

That would pay for a lot of implicit-bias workshops for men and women who should be trained to lead and kill, but the difference in language is neither subtle nor insignificant.

The words “duty, honour, country”, enshrined at West Point since 1898, have precise meanings that have historically bound our officer corps to timeless imperatives vital to the nation’s defence.

They presuppose our country is worth defending, honourably and as a matter of duty.

Proponents of woke ideology reject this notion.

For them, those very concepts — along with such basic values as merit, hard work, rational thought, respect for authority and even punctuality — are undesirable symptoms of a culture supposedly infused with ‘structural racism’ and ‘white supremacy’.

A country built on them is patently not one they would care to defend.

A March 2022 Quinnipiac poll found 52% of Democrats would leave the country rather than stand and fight against a military invasion of the United States.

“Army Values”, in contrast, can mean anything politicians and their diversity, equity and inclusion commissars want them to mean.

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Shutting Down the DEI Racket

The revelation this month that the University of Virginia has been spending $20 million a year on 235 employees who focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion was astonishing.

Thanks to a new report by the government watchdog group Open the Books, we now know that some DEI executives at the university are raking in more than $500,000 a year, including benefits.

For example, the senior associate dean of the business school is also the global chief diversity officer. He is paid $587,340 including benefits. The vice president of DEI and community partnerships takes home an estimated $520,000 in salary and benefits. There is a whole slate of DEI executives—vice presidents, associate deans, directors, assistant directors, managers, etc.—who earn up to $400,000 in salary and benefits.

Open the Books Founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski told me this week on Newt’s World that it takes tuition from 1,000 UVA students just to cover the base salaries of UVA’s army of DEI-focused employees.

Keep in mind, the median household income in Virginia is roughly $87,000 a year, according to the latest U.S. Census data. In Loudoun County, the state’s wealthiest area, the median household income is $147,111. So, DEI executives at a state-run school are making nearly six times more than the median income households in the state—and nearly three-and-a-half times more than median income households in the wealthiest county.

And UVA is not alone. In January, the New York Post reported the University of Michigan is paying more than $30 million to 241 DEI-focused employees. State legislatures across the country are now scrambling to curb DEI spending in their states, particularly in higher education. But the truth is, the DEI racket has gone global. Worldwide, the DEI industry is soaking up roughly $9.3 billion, according to Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

The terrible irony for Virginia is this DEI scheme is fleecing a university founded by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and famously penned the principle that “all men are created equal.” Since our founding—and through generations of intense civil discourse and serious effort—America has worked toward creating a society in which every American has equal opportunity and can succeed through hard work and determination.

To be clear: Diversity is good. America has been successful largely because it is a melting pot of people and cultures. I am also for making sure people are included and participate in our civil society.

However, I—and many other Americans—have serious concerns about the concept of placing equity over equality. Equity means guaranteeing people equal outcomes. DEI’s disciples will tell you equity is merely an effort to correct past discrimination and persecution. However, in practice, equity means treating people differently—or granting special accommodations—based on their ethnicity, sex, or other intrinsic traits. This flies in the face of everything we learned from the Civil Rights Movement and is the antithesis of the basic concept of equality.

Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin has begun to investigate DEI programs at some of the largest colleges in the state. His administration is seeking to review curriculum at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University. As the administration told the publication Higher Ed:

“The administration has heard concerns from members of the Board of Visitors, parents, and students across the Commonwealth regarding core curriculum mandates that are a thinly veiled attempt to incorporate the progressive left’s groupthink on Virginia’s students .... Virginia’s public institutions should be teaching our students how to think, not what to think and not advancing ideological conformity.”

In a separate statement, Youngkin’s press secretary, Macaulay Porter, told reporters the governor, “will continue to advance equal opportunities — not equal outcomes — for all Virginians.”

At America’s New Majority Project, we have learned that 88 percent of Americans believe universities should focus on teaching students how to think and succeed in the workforce—not to become social activists.
Gov. Youngkin and other state leaders are right. The DEI industry is a racket that must be shutdown.

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Sydney King's School headmaster Tony George erupts over 'woke' attacks on top boys' schools - and says his students are being unfairly targeted and ridiculed over high fees

The headmaster of an elite private boys school has hit out at what he calls the 'militant victimhood' of 'wokeness' that targets the 'straw man' of 'white privileged males'.

Tony George, headmaster of The King's School located in north-west Sydney, has lamented that 'sections of government and the press seem intent on deriding independent boys’ schools with any story they can concoct'.

HIs remarks follow the recent expose by ABC program Four Corners of another Sydney private boys school, Cranbrook, which resulted in the resignation of its principal.

Writing in The King's School magazine Leader, Mr George stated 'children attending non-government schools [are] being increasingly targeted and ridiculed' in what he called 'identity abuse' and this was especially true of elite boys' institutions.

'Government single-sex schools have seemed to avoid criticism, as have single-sex girls’ schools,' he wrote.

'However, the underlying agenda against the straw man of white privileged males has fuelled the creation of the term toxic masculinity and the religious fervour it subsequently generates.'

Mr George argued 'the practice of linking toxic behaviour to masculinity is to malign all males, just as linking oppression to the West maligns all western countries as oppressive'.

He argued this 'lambasted' men and boys with the same 'tarred brush of paranoia'.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024



UK: Gender-critical teacher, 60, tells tribunal he was sacked after refusing to use trans student's preferred pronouns

A gender-critical teacher has told a tribunal he was sacked after refusing to use a trans student's preferred pronouns.

Kevin Lister, 60, was dismissed for gross misconduct in September 2022 by New College Swindon following complaints by two students.

The maths teacher had refused to refer to a biologically female student, 17, by their preferred male name and he/him pronouns in A-level lessons.

Mr Lister has taken the college to an employment tribunal, claiming unfair dismissal, discrimination or victimisation on grounds of religion or belief, and that he suffered a detriment and/or dismissal due to exercising rights under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

The hearing was told that the teenager - known only as Student A - had informed the college in September 2021 they wished to be addressed by a boy's name and with the male pronouns.

Giving evidence, Mr Lister, from Wiltshire, suggested the decision of Student A to use male pronouns had the effect of 'compelled speech' - meaning he and fellow students had to follow their wish, irrespective of their own beliefs.

'I took issue with the demand on me to socially transition children who are unable to make an informed decision,' he told the hearing at the Bristol Civil Justice Centre.

'That is the intention of the policy - to encourage children to socially transition and to push them towards transgender lobby groups.

'Why are we not allowed to question why a student is presenting in the opposite sex?

'It is not the role of a maths teacher to confirm the gender transition and social transition of a student.'

Mr Lister said that, as a teacher, he had an 'obligation to teach facts' and said college policies went beyond the Equality Act and claimed they were 'illegal' as a result.

'I do say this is breaching the Equality Act because you are encouraging the idea that a non-binary person can come into class and say she is a boy and by the afternoon she can say somewhere between the two,' he said.

Referring to the college policy, Mr Lister said: 'It doesn't require gender-critical people to change their beliefs.

'What the policy does require is to be accepting in a way that is contrary to our beliefs.'

Jude Shepherd, the barrister representing the college, suggested the policy did not prevent staff members holding gender-critical beliefs from being 'inclusive and treating people with respect'.

Mr Lister told the hearing that, when Student A informed him by email of their wish to be referred to by male pronouns, he immediately raised a safeguarding concern with the college as he was concerned about their academic performance and whether the two were linked.

'She does not have the right to compel teachers and other students who do not share her views,' he said.

'It is the interpretation of the word "respect" which is at issue here.'

The hearing was told that during lessons Mr Lister, instead of using Student A's preferred pronouns, would point at them.

'I gestured. Some people would say I was pointing. I didn't want to use her dead name but I didn't want to assist with her social transitioning,' Mr Lister said.

During one lesson, Student A asked whether they could enter a nationwide maths competition for girls, and Mr Lister replied: 'Of course you can enter because you are a girl.'

Ms Shepherd asked: 'Do you accept that was an insensitive response?'

Mr Lister replied: 'No, that was a factual response. Student A is trying to subject me to compelled speech and the rest of the class to compelled speech.

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The Potted Plants of Higher Education

By RICHARD K. VEDDER

Throughout most of the nearly seven decades in which I have had an intimate association with American higher education, I have pondered the question: “Who really ‘owns’ the universities?”

Several groups claim at least partial control on many campuses, hence the oft-cited term “shared governance.” But to avoid chaos, some specific individual or group has to have ultimate authority to make decisions regarding the use of university resources. Almost always, that is a governing board: “board of trustees,” “board of regents,” “board of visitors,” etc. I have worked with several such boards and spoken at statewide meetings to them, so I guess some think I am an expert on the subject.

I recently corresponded with a former student of mine now a trustee at a state university, about his board’s reaction to certain major developments at the school, and he replied, “We need to discuss many things but we won’t, and will continue to be potted plants.” He added that board members literally receive scripts for each meeting, even told when to make a motion or offer a scripted comment. In short, the boards are sort of a ceremonial device to maintain the façade that the university has a group in charge of serving the broader public interest, not just rubber stamp decisions made by university power brokers. Votes are almost always unanimous. In reality, the public is being conned into believing that the universities are getting effective external oversight.

Actually, university governing boards come in all shapes and sizes. Most public boards range from perhaps seven to as many as 20 members, but private school boards often number several dozen. Occasionally, boards have activists who believe that not only should they have a major role not only in determining the general direction of the university but also in making more routine decisions, down to who should be appointed the football coach. Sometimes, boards—Michigan State is a good recent example—have nasty internal warfare over control of the board itself.

That said, the “potted plant” model my friend described is probably the most common one. Boards have one truly important job: appointing the president, but then usually take a mostly ceremonial back seat role similar to that of the King of England—nominally powerful but in reality mostly a figurehead. To be sure, appointed trustees sometimes provide useful services to the school, most importantly by their financial gifts, especially critical at private schools, but also at state schools by using political connections to help win favors in the state capital from the governor, key legislators, or regulatory groups—like a state department of education or higher education, etc.

The growing perceived problems of higher education have ignited greater conversations about the role of governing boards. In the case of state universities, is their role to maximize the interests of the university community or to represent the broader public, ensuring that the taxpayers are getting a good return on their investment? A bill—Senate Bill 506—narrowly passed the Virginia legislature but, at this writing, unsigned by the Governor, seems to explicitly state that the trustees report to the University administration, not explicitly serving the broader public interest—in my judgment, a grievous mistake. Similarly, in private schools, like those in the Ivy League, shouldn’t trustees monitor and occasionally even alter actions of the University community that hurt both the school’s reputation and the broader public good?

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis summarily removed the entire board of New College and replaced it with new members who indicated they planned to change the nature and direction of the institution, I at first considered the action excessively radical and disruptive, but upon reflection, I feel it served a useful purpose by calling attention to the importance of imposing some external constraints on what campus communities can do.

It is increasingly obvious that colleges and universities need some adult supervision—public confidence is waning, enrollments have fallen, traditional campus support of free expression and robust viewpoint diversity have deteriorated, and increasingly unethical or even illegal behavior has occurred. Governing boards have a legitimate, more than ceremonial role to play, starting with recruiting able administrators who handle most issues, but also by monitoring campus happenings in a mostly non-intrusive way and constraining inappropriate behavior. The precise optimal role should vary somewhat—religiously affiliated schools, elite private universities, non-elite state schools, including community colleges probably require differing forms of external monitoring—but Boards should be more than rubber stamps or potted plants.

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‘Exorbitant’ fees paid to academic publishers better spent on research and education, report finds

This is certainly a problem. The top journals can basically charge what they like. Any inability to access them would greatly hinder research

Australia’s public research institutions are paying $1bn a year to giant academic publishers, new research shows, amid growing calls for taxpayer money to be redirected away from private enterprises.

The Australia Institute report, released on Wednesday, questioned if more public money should be used for research and education instead of being directed to international academic publishers.

Academic publishes are among the most profitable businesses in the world – raking in massive profit margins approaching 40% – in line with Google and Apple.

The market is dominated by five major houses – Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE Publications – and rakes in billions of dollars a year.

The report found Australia’s research institutions and universities spent $300m on journal subscriptions annually, totalling $1bn when additional fees and publication charges were added.

The “exorbitant” fees are charged to institutions and research groups in order to access research that the public largely funds, the report said. One-off access for a single article costs about $50.

Dr Kristen Scicluna, a postdoctoral research fellow and author of the report, said research was being “hamstrung” without appropriate funding and money could be better directed elsewhere.

“This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars every year – much of it public money – spent on publication and subscription, not research and discovery,” she said.

Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, has proposed a world-first open access model, recently finalised for the federal government, that would provide a centralised digital library for all Australians to access research papers free of charge, as long as they had a MyGov account or were in education.

Scicluna said Foley’s plan was a “great start” but did not go far enough, instead pressing for reform as to how research grants were awarded.

“It doesn’t do much to disrupt entrenchment publishers have on academic workflow,” she said.

Scicluna’s proposal includes revising grant criteria to reward publication in open access journals that have lower publishing fees and trialling a lottery-based grant system to reduce the power of major journals.

Australia’s two major public grant bodies – the Australian Research Council (Arc) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) – require publications to be open access, with stipulations in place. But receiving a grant depends on an academic’s track record, typically based on whether they have published in prestigious journals.

Scicluna said until grant conditions offered academics alternative avenues for promotion, private publishers would continue to benefit.

The lottery system has been trialled in New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Australia and Switzerland to some success. Grant applications are first screened for eligibility, then awarded randomly to applicants considered equal, to reduce the emphasis on a researcher’s publication record.

“Publishers can just keep increasing prices, so [the] funding universities get through the government to cover the costs of research, salaries and equipment end[s] up going to library subscription fees.”

In Australia, the Council of Australian University Librarians has taken the lead on negotiating open-access agreements on behalf of institutions. The council’s executive director, Jane Angel, said the need for reform came down to equity.

Angel said not advancing open access particularly hindered innovation among people without access to paywalled information – primarily, those outside educational institutions.

“That either predicates that innovation comes or is perpetuated among those who are tertiary educated, or suggests that this is where we expect to find innovation,” she said.

“That is not democratic or progressive, or indicative of the Australia [the education minister] Jason Clare wants where ‘no one is held back, and no one is left behind’.”

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024



Berkeley Is a Safe Space for Hate

Thuggish intimidation of Jewish students and teachers is the new normal as leftist brownshirts topple once-heralded free speech bastion

BY DANIEL SOLOMON

If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.

The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus “Free Palestine” movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which “equity” and “anti-colonialism” act as shields for rank antisemitism.

Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a “learning space” that exemplifies “what’s possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community.”

The message could not have been clearer: Intimidation and the specter of mob violence carry the day at this institution.

On the day of the Hamas pogrom, Makdisi posted a thinly veiled justification of the slaughter: “Just waking up to the news. Go read CLR James, Black Jacobins, on the violence of the oppressed. And then try to ignore the utterly racist double standard of Western politicians and media when it comes to questions of resistance and occupation and international law.” His online verbiage has since become more florid: He has accused Israel of “hunting” Palestinian children “in the name of Anne Frank,” and mocked diaspora Jews as “narcissists” for fretting over their security. He has addressed the crowds that have gathered on campus for “Free Palestine” marches and participated in a slew of events with Bears for Palestine.

Since the UC Berkeley Feb. 26 riot, Makdisi has defended the campus malefactors in a flurry of posts on X. Lavishing praise on an op-ed in The Daily Californian that attempted to “contextualize” the incident, he charged the whole brouhaha was no more than an attempt to distract from “the genocide” in Gaza. In a missive dispatched on the same day, he hit out at “the campaign of bullying, intimidation, and narcissistic gaslighting occurring across our campuses … all designed to make sure we don’t talk about Israel’s appalling genocide of Palestinians.”

Makdisi had put the light to the touchpaper in our department in the days after the Hamas pogrom. Canceling a mandatory course for first-year Ph.D. students that he taught, he urged the class to attend his “teach-in” (organized with BFP), in which he would “historicize” and “contextualize” the events of Oct. 7. The event was then promoted on our graduate student listserv, on the same email chain as a union organizing session. When I balked at this, pointing out the campus Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter’s vehement defense of the Hamas pogrom, a group organized a letter to the department chair directed at me. “We reject the assertions made, within our very community, that learning the history of Palestine is tantamount to terrorism or terror apologism,” the signatories, numbering about half of the graduate students, wrote. The signatories, who were mounting a defense of their mentor, spiced the letter with the customary accusation of lack of departmental engagement on “white supremacy ... within our community” (that is, those who had deplored the Hamas pogrom), and intoned about our “obligation to listen to the scholars whose research and lived experiences center these issues [Palestine and the Palestinians], and an equal responsibility to ensure that their voices are heard.” Hostage posters in our academic building were soon ripped down by fellow graduate students. Around this time, some members of the department started Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that posted the “Flood Sather Gate” sign.

Protesters bang on windows (shortly before the glass was smashed) to disrupt the Ran Bar-Yoshafat event last month
Protesters bang on windows (shortly before the glass was smashed) to disrupt the Ran Bar-Yoshafat event last month
NBC VIA YOUTUBE

Jewish students’ repeated attempts, over email and in-person, to explain to department administrators and colleagues how these actions were offensive and off-base soon met with escalating ostracism from others and a progressive withdrawal of Jewish students from departmental spaces and events. Antisemitism has battered a Jewish friend out of this department, after the majority of his first-year cohort claimed that “all resistance is justified to anyone with morals.” Another friend told me she would no longer come to our graduate library because “people there want my family dead.” Despite the department’s concern about the situation, administrators have maintained that academic freedom and institutional procedures prevent them from adopting a clear stance against the antisemitism in our midst and the primary instigator thereof. The same administrators have also consistently misrepresented the matter as a question of upholding civility in the course of intense political discord. Jewish students have sometimes felt like we are talking to a brick wall in explaining that this is not the case.

SJP’s antisemitic onslaught began on the same day as the Hamas pogrom. On that day, Bears for Palestine released a statement praising its “comrades in blood and arms” for their operations “in the so-called ‘Gaza envelope.’” The same organization then mounted demonstrations at which participants, wearing masks and Palestinian headscarves, clamored to “globalize the intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The demonstrations sometimes spilled over into minor altercations, such as when an SJP member attempted to rip an Israeli flag from a counterprotester’s hands. The protests took place on the university’s main plaza, right next to the academic building where in the fall I was teaching a freshman seminar on Holocaust memory. I was so concerned for my students’ safety that I moved our meetings to the campus Hillel.

The university’s response to these events was tepid and laden with false equivalencies. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ acknowledged in early November that “fear is being generated by the rhetoric used at some of the recent protests on campus”—a turn of phrase that was telling in its use of the passive voice and refusal to name names. She mentioned worries about antisemitism, which she nullified in the same breath with a condemnation of the “harassment, threats and doxxing that have targeted our Palestinian students and their supporters.” She even noted that one ought not to equate pro-Palestinian campus protests with support for terrorism (which seems at odds with the declarations of these self-same protesters). Christ closed her statement with a lofty call to honor the institution’s “long-lived and unwavering” dedication to free speech. [For Leftists only]

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University ‘Forces’ Journalism Students to Fork Over Tuition Money for Course on ‘Microaggressions,’ Pronouns

Arizona State University (ASU) forces students to hand over tuition money to take a course that pushes left-wing ideas, according to documents obtained by the Goldwater Institute.

The course, titled “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite,” pushes gender ideology onto students, and one requires students to make a public relations plan for a theoretical popstar who uses “they/them” pronouns, according to the Goldwater Institute, a free-market public policy research and litigation organization. The course is required for graduation from several degree programs at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“The journalism school at Arizona State forces students to take a course advising them that benign statements—such as ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job’—are offensive ‘microaggressions’ that make people feel unwelcome. This course also requires students to develop a public relations plan for a nonbinary pop star who uses ‘they/them’ pronouns. This course shows how universities use graduation requirements to force students to sit through lectures in progressive dogmas that add little or nothing to their education,” Timothy K. Minella, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The course “emphasizes the importance of diversity, inclusion, equity and civility to ensure all Cronkite students feel represented, valued and supported” and “offers training and awareness on cultural sensitivities, civil discourse, bias awareness and diversity initiatives,” according to the online description of the class. The class also “empowers students” to approach reporting “with a multicultural perspective.”

Over 400 students were required to take the course in the fall 2023 semester, according to the Goldwater Institute. The course is required for the completion of bachelors degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication, Sports Journalism and Digital Audiences at ASU, according to several university webpages.

One course document says that the statement “America is a melting pot” is an example of a “microaggression,” which is a minor insult believed to be unconsciously driven, according to the Goldwater Institute. Statements such as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” or “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” imply “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder,” according to the document.

Another reading required as a course assignment defines “cisgender privilege” as being able to “access gender-exclusive spaces (e.g., a space or activity for women) and not be excluded due to your trans status,” according to Goldwater’s report. The reading does not appear to be associated with the university and is housed on a website titled, “its pronounced metrosexual.”

Colleges around the U.S. have implemented similar classes pushing the tenets of gender ideology and critical race theory.

Princeton University made headlines in 2022 after adding “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization” to the school’s catalog. Wesleyan University offered one course in the 2023-2024 school year, titled “Queer Russia,” which offers students an overview of how queer people have influenced Russian culture.

The University of Chicago offered one class titled “Queering God,” which questions if God is queer and how queerness is related to the idea of God. “What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam?” the course description reads.

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Every school in NSW to offer gifted education programs

I am all in favour of this. It will be a great help to many students in crummy State schools. It is probably not important to really high IQ students, however. They will do well in any system. I did not go to school at all for my Senior exam. I just taught myself all in one year. Others in my IQ bracket should probably do the same

High potential and gifted education will be rolled out in every public school in the state under a new plan to challenge the students who are not reaching their full potential.

Such programs were available in only half of the state’s public schools, Education Minister Prue Car told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Schools Summit on Thursday, but fixing that would depend on tackling the state’s teacher shortage.

She said teachers had been “gaslit” by the previous government into thinking there was not a crisis in the sector.

“Parents deserve to see high potential and gifted education inside the doors of every local school,” Car said.

“Parents want confidence that regardless of their choice of school, that the learning environment will bring out the best in their child.

“Our vision is that in NSW, high potential and gifted education will be delivered in every public school, in a high-quality offering, in a way that is valued by students, parents and teachers alike.”

Under the plan, public schools will identify high potential students across four domains: intellectual, creative, social-emotional and physical.

A 2021 policy was supposed to make gifted education training available at all schools to ensure gifted students were extended even if they did not attend a selective school or opportunity class. However, only half of the state’s schools have the programs in place.

University of NSW researcher Professor Jae Jung said the extent to which the current gifted program was being taken up was highly variable.

The Sydney schools that have surged past 3000 students
“There needs to be a follow-up process and assessment to understand to what extent it is being implemented,” he said.

“One way to ensure gifted education practices are implemented is to guarantee all teachers have gifted education training at the pre-service teacher training level. There also needs to be a mandatory requirement that gifted education programs are available in all schools.”

Gifted education can take different forms including grade skipping, gifted classes and curriculum differentiation within the regular classroom, Jung said.

Car told the summit the challenges the public school system had faced, such as a lack of staff or resources, had left some communities wanting their schools to deliver more gifted education programs.

She said teachers felt “gaslit” by those supposed to support them, and that their challenging experiences in the classroom were being dismissed.

“They were told there was no shortage. That it was a beat-up,” Car said.

A research review by the NSW Department of Education previously found gifted children comprised the top 10 per cent of students, but up to 40 per cent of them were under-achieving.

If at least 10 per cent of students are gifted, 80,000 students in NSW public schools have high potential.

It found that without help to turn their promise into achievement, the students might never achieve their potential.

Car also announced at the summit that she had asked the NSW Education Standards Authority to conduct a review into professional development requirements for teachers and whether they were preventing them for undertaking learning that met their individual needs.

“I asked that NESA consider the administrative burden for teachers … as well as the professionalism of teachers in being able to identify their own professional learning priorities,” she said.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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