Author Topic: education  (Read 16610 times)

ccp

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education
« on: March 30, 2010, 10:10:58 AM »
The new student loan thing makes sense on the face of it. Why not cut out the middleman if it costs more.  Of course the timing couldn't be more perfect for the One when we started witnessing students demonstrating in Kaliforna.

My question is this.  Why is the fed government using taxpayer money to *guarnatee* student loans?
It is bad enough if the student defaults that the taxpayer eats the cost.  I agree it was worse that the gov. would pay the bank for it's loss.  So 75% of the population who does not have a college degree is helping pay for college ed for others?

These loans cannot be good risks or else why couldn't the student get it from the private sector?  I would like to see a better analysis of this but I haven't found one on searching this AM.

***Obama promotes 'overlooked' changes to student loan program
Under the new rules, the government will lend money directly to college students, without the involvement of banks as the "unnecessary middlemen" in what Obama called a "sweetheart deal" that provided them with billions in interest payments.

"Those were billions of dollars that could have been spent helping more of our students attend and complete college," Obama said to an appreciative audience at a community college in Alexandria, Va., just across the river from Washington, D.C.

Critics said in some cases these are the same banks that Obama is pressuring to provide more loans to business people, yet now the government has wiped out part of their operations.

"Americans are looking for jobs and economic growth, not for the government to expand its tentacles even further into their lives and the economy," said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. His office also provided examples of private lenders who will have to cut jobs in light of the new student loan system.

Direct student lending by the government will save the program about $68 billion "in the coming years," Obama said, money that can be put back into higher education.

The new law also caps the repayment of loans at 10 percent of the borrower's discretionary income.

Here's an explanation of the new rules from USA TODAY personal finance columnist Sandra Block.

Obama also planned to sign an updated version of the law, after revisions approved by Senate Democrats last week under the legislative process known as reconciliation.

As he has since passage of the core health care bill on March 21, Obama said the measure will allow millions more Americans obtain insurance and lower costs.

The bill "won't fix every problem in our health care system in one fell swoop," Obama said, "but it does represent some of the toughest insurance reforms in history."

McConnell, who like all Senate Republicans voted against the health care package, said most Americans oppose "this partisan reconciliation bill which hikes taxes even higher in the middle of a recession, and cuts Medicare even deeper for our seniors."

(Posted by David Jackson)***


ccp

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Who works for who?
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2010, 09:32:05 AM »
Here in NJ is huge fight between Governor Christie and teachers unions.  I have many patients who are teachers, ex teachers, even a close family memeber who is one.
What Christie is asking of the teachers is clearly NOT unreasonable.  He requests they put of their *annual* 4 to 5 % pay raise (does anyone know of any private sector job that has that?), and contribute 1.5% towards their health care.  The grand total is around $1500 per year.  Teachers union wages are $730/year.
This in the state with the highest porperty taxes in the nation.

Yet the power of the teachers union and how they literally control politicians is on display to amaze all.  They run ads the Christie is ruining education, harming our children and the teachers even have brainwashed out students into going out and marching for them.

I even had a retired teacher tell me she can't stand Christie and how "he is going after teachers". 

I simply don't get this.  They are outraged?  With all their benefits, pensions, health care, reasonably good salaries for a job of 9 months a year and a milliion days off?
It is not like they are facing huge pay cuts.  They think they are entitled to 4-5 % pay raises in economies with 10% unempolyment?

Quite the opposite.  The outrage is not with them.  Can Christie break this?  I sure hope so.  Thank God we have a governor who stands up to this crap. Yet he is sinking in the polls I've heard.  Well they say 1/3 of Jersey residents are on some form of dole.  I guess it is no wonder why teachers forget who works for who.   It is time they be reminded. 

****By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann 05.6.2010 A perfect storm is brewing for the nation’s schools and the teachers’ unions that have them in a stranglehold. Voter anger at the socialist, big government solutions of the Obama Administration and its Democratic lookalikes in state capitals throughout the country is about to combine with massive education funding shortfalls brought on by the unions’ waste of taxpayer money.


These forces will combine in November, 2010 to force gigantic changes in school financing and governance, leading to the prospect of genuine school choice for the poor and middle class as the rich have always had.

Just as a Republican landslide in November will engulf and extinguish Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, so it will sweep away the party’s power at the state level. State houses in at least ten states are likely to change parties and dozens of legislative chambers will see Republican majorities, many for the first time in decades. The teachers union will be swept from power along with its Democratic allies.

Just as this earthquake is making its way through state capitals, governors will be casting about for ways to meet revenue shortfalls without tax hikes. Top on their list will be the elimination of layers of bureaucracy and of privileges enjoyed by the teacher unions. As a result more and more of the education budget will be spent in the classroom and vastly more will be channeled into education choice programs.

The number of charter schools will likely grow exponentially and programs for vouchers, scholarships, and tax credits for private and parochial schools will be passed in state after state. Given a chance to provide good education for $7,000 per student in alternative schools rather than pay $10,000 per student in dysfunctional public schools, government officials will move rapidly to expand school choice.

To learn more about this coming revolution in education, GO HERE NOW.

Now is the time for every parent and taxpayer to get involved and to push for seismic shifts in education funding and policy. Perfect storms like this don’t come along every year and not even in every lifetime.****






Crafty_Dog

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Forget what you know about good study habits
« Reply #2 on: September 08, 2010, 05:06:07 AM »
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: September 6, 2010

 
Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).


And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.

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(Page 2 of 2)



A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.


“When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle (position, for example) reduces the accuracy with which you can know another property (momentum, for example): “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,” is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in “The Mod Squad”? Francie’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

“In lab experiments, you’re able to control for all factors except the one you’re studying,” said Dr. Willingham. “Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.”

But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.

G M

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ccp

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Health costs are bad? What about education?
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2010, 07:53:19 AM »
From the Economist:

Declining by degree
Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
Sep 2nd 2010

FIFTY years ago, in the glorious age of three-martini lunches and all-smoking offices, America’s car companies were universally admired. Everybody wanted to know the secrets of their success. How did they churn out dazzling new models every year? How did they manage so many people so successfully (General Motors was then the biggest private-sector employer in the world)? And how did they keep their customers so happy?

Today the world is equally in awe of American universities. They dominate global rankings: on the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s list of the world’s best universities, 17 of the top 20 are American, and 35 of the top 50. They employ 70% of living Nobel prizewinners in science and economics and produce a disproportionate share of the world’s most-cited articles in academic journals. Everyone wants to know their secret recipe.

Which raises a mischievous question. Could America’s universities go the way of its car companies? On the face of it, this seems highly unlikely. Student enrolments are higher than ever this year, as Americans who cannot find jobs linger or return to education. Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows no outward sign of becoming Detroit. Yet there are serious questions about America’s ivory towers.

Two right-wing think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Goldwater Institute, have both produced damning reports about America’s university system. Two left-wing academics, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, have published an even more damning book: “Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It”. And US News & World Report, a centrist magazine, says in its annual survey of American colleges that: “If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

As costs soar, diligence is tumbling. In 1961 full-time students in four-year colleges spent 24 hours a week studying; that has fallen to 14, estimates the AEI. Drop-out and deferment rates are also hair-curling: only 40% of students graduate in four years.

The most plausible explanation is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research. Mr Hacker and Ms Dreifus point out that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year rather than every seventh. This year 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors will be on leave.

America’s commitment to research is one of the glories of its higher-education system. But for how long? The supply of papers that apply gender theory to literary criticism remains ample. But there is evidence of diminishing returns in an area perhaps more vital to the country’s economic dynamism: science and technology. The Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, argues that the productivity of federal funding for R&D, in terms of patents and licences, has been falling for some years. Funding is spread too thinly. It would yield better results if concentrated on centres of excellence, but fashionable chatter about the “knowledge economy” stirs every congressional backwoodsman to stick his fingers into the university pie.

The Goldwater Institute points to a third poison to add to rising prices and declining productivity: administrative bloat. Between 1993 and 2007 spending on university bureaucrats at America’s 198 leading universities rose much faster than spending on teaching faculty. Administration costs at elite private universities rose even faster than at public ones. For example, Harvard increased its administrative spending per student by 300%. In some universities, such as Arizona State University, almost half the full-time employees are administrators. Nearly all university presidents conduct themselves like corporate titans, with salaries, perks and entourages to match.


At least the Naval Academy is free

Given the size and competitiveness of America’s higher-education system, you might expect these problems to be self-correcting. Why don’t some universities compete by hiring teaching superstars? And why don’t others slash prices? The big problem is that high-status institutions such as universities tend to compete with each other on academic reputation (which is enhanced by star professors) and bling (luxurious dormitories and fancy sports stadiums) rather than value for money. This starts at the top: Yale would never dream of competing with Harvard on price. But it also extends to second-division universities: George Washington University has made itself fashionable by charging students more and spending lavishly on its facilities.

This luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals. The internet also poses a growing threat to what Bill Gates calls “place-based colleges”. Online, you can listen to the world’s best lecturers for next to nothing.

America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of GM.


Crafty_Dog

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Alexcander: The Directorate of Indoctrination
« Reply #5 on: May 19, 2011, 09:56:35 AM »
The Directorate of Indoctrination
Leftist Academic Apparatchiks
"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." --George Washington from his Farewell Address, 1796
It's the end of the school year, so Barack Hussein Obama is including commencement speech whistle stops on his 2012 campaign itinerary.

In Memphis, where Obama delivered one such speech to budding sycophants at Booker T. Washington high school, he asserted, "My administration has been working hard to make sure that we ... encourage the kind of change that's led not by Washington, DC, but by teachers and principals and parents..." (Notice the order in which he lists the agents of change: "teachers and principals and parents.")

Of course, "the kind of change" led by socialist unions in government schools across the nation is already in lock step with what "Washington, DC" dictates. They're both bent upon churning out legions of useful idiots necessary to ensure incremental implementation of Democratic Socialism. Of incremental implementation, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev once said, "We can't expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism."

I must note here that there are thousands of outstanding teachers who do not subscribe to Leftist efforts to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" via student indoctrination, partisan and sectarian curricula, and a liberal worldview. However, I must also note that, unfortunately, these brave souls are the rare exception to what was once the rule.

Prior to latter-20th century, outstanding teachers dominated public schools.

Historically, establishment of most private and public academic institutions for the young was, first and foremost, for the purpose of reading the Bible. Indeed, most Christian denominations established schools, colleges and universities to train clergy.

The nation's oldest academic institution, Harvard University, was established in 1636 and named for Puritan minister John Harvard. A 1643 college brochure identified Harvard's purpose: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches." Harvard alumnus John Adams (class of 1755) wrote in 1776, "It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe." In his Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, Adams wrote, "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."

Yale, the nation's third oldest academic institution, was established in 1701 by royal charter "wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State." Yale alumnus Noah Webster (class of 1778), wrote in the forward of his 1828 Webster's American Dictionary, "In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed. ... No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."

Princeton was founded by "New Light" Presbyterians of the Great Awakening for the purpose of training their ministers. Jonathan Dickinson, a Presbyterian minister and leader of the Great Awakening of the 1730s, was the school's co-founder and first president. Princeton alumnus James Madison (class of 1771) observed, "The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it."

Virginia's College of William and Mary, founded in 1693, was Anglican. Baptists founded Rhode Island College, now Brown University, in 1764. Congregationalists established Dartmouth College in 1769 to extend Christianity to native populations.

Founder Benjamin Rush wrote, "[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments."

But teaching reliance upon Essential Liberty as "endowed by our Creator," in support of Rule of Law as affirmed by "the Law of Nature and nature's God" and as outlined in our Declaration of Independence, is in direct opposition to those who would advocate for tyrannical rule of men.

Benjamin Franklin asserted, "A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."

The importance of government education as a tool for denying Rule of Law has been advocated by generations of tyrants. In order to achieve totalitarianism, they must undertake to expel God from the academy.

Karl Marx wrote, "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." His student Vladimir Ilyich Lenin concurred, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." As Josef Stalin understood, "Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."

Leftists also understand that the earlier socialist indoctrination is applied, the greater its force, and the greater the likelihood it will stick.

Obama promised in his inaugural speech that he would "transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age." It was a promise that he'd previously fleshed out in "The Audacity of Hope," the second of his self-congratulatory autobiographies: "It's time to redesign our schools -- not just for the sake of working parents, but also to help prepare our children for a more competitive world. Countless studies confirm the educational benefits of strong preschool programs, which is why even families which have a parent at home often seek them out."

Likewise, its sunrise-to-sunset year-round application could provide further assurance of successful indoctrination. "The same goes for longer school days, summer school, and after school programs," writes Obama.

To that end, according to the Communist Party Education Workers Congress, "We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists. ... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."

Of course, the Left's indoctrination agenda has been subject to exposure since its inception.

Benjamin Disraeli, the conservative 19th-century British prime minister, noted, "Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." His contemporary, John Stuart Mill, warned, "A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."

The great 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke observed, "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." Indeed, that delusion is dependent on erasing the knowledge of the past, as 20th-century philosopher George Santayana concluded, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "If a nation expects to be ignorant -- and free -- in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Caveat emptor, my fellow Patriots! The ultimate objective of Leftist Apparatchiks in the Democrats' dumbed-down Directorate of Indoctrination is to disenfranchise Liberty.

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Or we could abolish the DOE , , ,
« Reply #6 on: June 12, 2011, 04:22:35 AM »
By STEPHANIE BANCHERO and LAURA MECKLER

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is threatening to use the power of his position to alter key elements of No Child Left Behind if Congress doesn't renew and upgrade the education law before the next school year begins.

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Associated Press
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, right, takes questions from first graders as Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., listens during a visit to Dayton's Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary School in May.

Mr. Duncan is promising to waive specific requirements of the law in exchange for states agreeing to adopt other efforts he has championed, such as linking teacher evaluations to student achievement, expanding charter schools and overhauling the lowest-performing schools. Effectively, he's warning Congress that if it doesn't overhaul the nine-year-old law, he'll bypass lawmakers to get his way.

"Principals, superintendents and children cannot wait forever for the legislative process to work itself out," Mr. Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. "As it exists now, No Child Left Behind is creating a slow-motion train wreck for children, parents and teachers."

No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's signature domestic achievement, has been up for renewal since 2007. Congress has so far extended it on a year-by-year basis.

The law requires states to test students in math and reading and punishes schools that fall short of score objectives set by the states. The law has been widely criticized for labeling too many schools as failures, narrowing the school curriculum and prodding states to water down standardized tests.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan have aggressively pushed Congress to overhaul the law and, until recently, it was expected to be one of the few bipartisan achievements this year. But Republicans have begun to push back, especially tea-party Republicans who want to reduce the federal government's role in K-12 schools.

Mr. Duncan's pledge to use the waiver process didn't sit well with two Congressmen working to renew the law.

"Given the bipartisan commitment in Congress to fixing No Child Left Behind, it seems premature at this point to take steps outside the legislative process that would address NCLB's problems in a temporary and piecemeal way," Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate education committee, said in a statement.

Rep. John Kline, Republican chairman of the House education committee, has said he feels no urgency to move a bill, despite Mr. Duncan's pressure. "He'd like to get this done before they go back to school in September. We're not going to do that," he said in a May interview with the Wall Street Journal. He said he hopes to have the matter settled in 2011, partly because it's more difficult to pass ambitious legislation during a presidential election year.

Mr. Kline is particularly hostile to Race to the Top, Mr. Obama's pet program that provides competitive funding for states that embrace the education changes he favors. The president has repeatedly cited this as a key to his administration's success in education and a blueprint in reauthorizing No Child Left Behind.

Jennifer Allen, Mr. Kline's spokeswoman, said the Congressman didn't know details of Mr. Duncan's recent waiver promise, but said, "Chairman Kline remains concerned about any initiative–including waivers–that would allow the secretary to pick winners and losers in the nation's education system."

Mr. Kline said his committee would pass legislation in small pieces so that members, particularly newly elected ones, can understand it.

The law as it stands gives the education secretary broad authority to waive certain provisions. Mr. Duncan wouldn't offer specifics on which provisions are under consideration, but said he's opposed to one that currently punishes schools for not reaching high, specified goals, even as they make dramatic improvement. He also said he might offer states flexibility on how they can spend federal education money.

Mr. Duncan said individual states could apply for waivers and he might approve them in exchange for agreements to embrace other education changes. States that already have adopted reforms favored by the administration also would be considered.

"There is zero intent here to abandon accountability," Mr. Duncan said. "In fact, ideally, this flexibility would be in exchange for courage and reform."

Crafty_Dog

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Weatherman Willian Ayers is VP for AERA!
« Reply #7 on: August 09, 2011, 04:13:01 PM »
Read below how William Ayers, unrepentant Weather Underground domestic terrorist, is actually Vice President for Curriculum Studies at the American Educational Research Association (AARA), the nation's largest organization of Education school professors and researchers.  And you think it's an accident that our public school teachers are being taught to teach our school children anti-capitalist, anti-American, pro-Socialist ideas, including that America is a racist, sexist, oppressive nation?:


www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7655&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fpmdtn+%28FrontPage+Magazine+%C2%BB+Discover+the+Networks%29

G M

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Re: education
« Reply #8 on: August 09, 2011, 04:27:40 PM »
Imagine where Timmy McVeigh would be in academia, were he only a leftist......

ccp

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Re: education
« Reply #9 on: January 24, 2015, 05:24:47 PM »
How can holding down repayments, interests rates, and forgiveness timetables be good for anyone but those particular students who don't make the payments.

Why not hold our education system to the new standards they want to hold the medical system.  Pay for quality performance.  I propose that universities get no tuition paid for those graduates who can't get a decent job.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-quiet-revolution-in-helping-lift-the-burden-of-student-debt/ar-AA8xUps

DougMacG

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Re: education
« Reply #10 on: August 13, 2015, 07:45:25 AM »
How can holding down repayments, interests rates, and forgiveness timetables be good for anyone but those particular students who don't make the payments.

Why not hold our education system to the new standards they want to hold the medical system.  Pay for quality performance.  I propose that universities get no tuition paid for those graduates who can't get a decent job.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-quiet-revolution-in-helping-lift-the-burden-of-student-debt/ar-AA8xUps

Like healthcare, education costs are high because of the third party (government) money being pumped into it.

"A July report from the New York Federal Reserve found that every additional dollar in aid and subsidized loans led colleges to raise tuition as much as 65 cents."
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr733.pdf

So what have we learned?  Hillary (and all Dems) want to double down on failure.  And most Republicans have no rebuttal, offer no alternative.

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Re: The Pedagogy of an Amok Nanny State
« Reply #12 on: August 14, 2015, 10:35:15 PM »
Political correctness cubed:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

If the price were not so high, it would be kind of interesting watching a nation imploding firsthand.

Crafty_Dog

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Prager: What kids now learn in college
« Reply #13 on: August 15, 2015, 05:35:56 AM »
What Kids Now Learn in College
Wednesday, Feb 29, 2012
t

As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20-$50,000 they will pay each year.

The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.

There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”

God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.

Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.

Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.

Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.

The South votes Republican because it is still racist and the Republican party caters to racists.

Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.

Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist).

The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.

Patriotism is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.

War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.

Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.

We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.

Women are victims of men.

Blacks are victims of whites.

Latinos are victims of Anglos.

Muslims are victims of non-Muslims.

Gays are victims of straights.

Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.

There is no objective meaning to a text. Every text only means what the reader perceives it to mean.

The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their wealthy status.

The Constitution says what progressives think it should say.

The American dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was an act of racism and a war crime. The wealthy have stacked the capitalist system to maintain their power and economic benefits.

The wealthy Western nations became wealthy by exploiting Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.

Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is as immoral as defining marriage as the union of a white and a white.

Some conclusions:

If this list is accurate – and that may be confirmed by visiting a college bookstore and seeing what books are assigned by any given instructor – most American parents and/or their child are going into debt in order to support an institution that for four years, during the most impressionable years of a person’s life, instills values that are the opposite of those of their parents.

And that is intentional.

As Woodrow Wilson, progressive president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

In 1996, in his commencement address to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College, the then president of the college, James O. Freedman, cited the Wilson quote favorably. And in 2002, in another commencement address, Freedman said that “the purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.”

For Wilson, Freedman, and countless other university presidents, the purpose of a college education is to question (actually, reject) one’s father’s values, not to seek truth. Fathers represented traditional American values. The university is there to undermine them.

Still want to get into years of debt?

ccp

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What are they kidding me?
« Reply #14 on: November 13, 2015, 12:47:53 PM »
Thanks to the liberals instilling in their young minds that it is a right and it should be free and now we have this.   Grown ups all know nothing is free.  But everyone else should work to provide this for them.  Wow.  Obamster loves it:

http://news.yahoo.com/why-students-across-country-plan-walk-classrooms-today-182122340.html

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« Last Edit: December 14, 2015, 05:58:39 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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Re: education
« Reply #17 on: December 22, 2015, 06:05:22 PM »
What's the catch?   If a Republican said anything like this there would be a huge eruption all over the MSM:

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/22/hillary-clinton-if-elected-president-ill-shut-down-50000-public-schools/

Not a peep from the teachers' unions?  What gives?  There must some sort of shell game.  She wants to close all these schools so she can give more money somehow.  What is the punch line?

DougMacG

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Re: political education
« Reply #18 on: December 22, 2015, 06:52:34 PM »
Huge billboard on Broadway today in leftist north Minneapolis says "77% of black kids read below grade level in Minneapolis"
  - Paid for by 'Better Ed' supporting school choice.  http://www.better-ed.org/

BTW, Minnesota usually leads the nation in test scores, so it can't be the weather.
Our school district 14 miles away has a 99% graduation rate and a 92% on-to-college rate.

Your public teachers union dollars at work.  They all support Hillary and the status quo.
7 years into the Obama-Hillary reform agenda, those are your results.
I bet the kids know their transgender studies and climate change forward, backward and sideways.
I wonder what percent know who Christmas is named after.
Zero percent could tell you who was the first supply side economist.

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Walter Williams: Corrupt Academics and the Media...
« Reply #20 on: September 07, 2016, 11:06:41 AM »
Corrupt Academics and the Media

Walter E. Williams - Townhall.com - September 7, 2016

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don't bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let's look at it.

"A Clash of Police Policies," a column written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics: "Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years."

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today's crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit's deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts. In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it's close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the "legacy of slavery" argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing. Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the "proficient" level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support "a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools."

It's easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public-school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent, Chicago, 39 percent and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, "One thing for thee and another for me."
"You have enemies?  Good.  That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: education
« Reply #21 on: September 07, 2016, 04:07:38 PM »
Very good!  Please post in the Race thread on the SCH forum too.

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A 4 credit course costs $184 and that is apparently too much to ask
« Reply #22 on: February 07, 2017, 09:27:37 AM »
If a fee of $ 46 a credit is asking too much for  college students  to pay  there really is NO hope:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-reaches-deal-for-free-tuition-at-City-College-10912051.php

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Sowell on DeVos
« Reply #23 on: February 08, 2017, 08:04:57 AM »

DougMacG

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Re: Sowell on DeVos
« Reply #24 on: February 08, 2017, 08:40:58 AM »
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/47274

The appointment and confirmation of Betsy DeVos is a BIG DEAL.  Education unions are the biggest contributors of the left and she is a potential monopoly buster.  For the way that education, K-12 and college is so close to a 100% leftist stronghold, it is quite amazing to see a conservative reach the highest office, even if she was a Kasich supporter and had some ties to Common Core.

An all-voucher or all-school choice system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shake out might be just what the system needs.   - Elizabeth Warren, 2004

I would like to see DeVos be so effective that it liberals try to end the federal interference in our schools.  She will oversee a $70 Billion budget and 5000 education employees, all of which doesn't go toward teaching reading, writing, math or science (accurately) to children.

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/2017/02/07/5-things-to-expect-under-education-secretary-betsy-devos/
« Last Edit: February 08, 2017, 09:21:17 AM by DougMacG »

G M

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Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide
« Reply #25 on: April 17, 2017, 12:53:12 PM »
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/04/13/academia-is-our-enemy-so-we-should-help-it-commit-suicide-n2312479

Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide
Kurt  Schlichter  |Posted: Apr 13, 2017 12:01 AM 

If Animal House were to be rebooted today, Bluto – who would probably be updated into a differently–abled trans being of heft – might ask, “See if you can guess what am I now?” before expelling a whole mass of pus-like root vegetable on the WASPrivileged villains and announcing, “I’m a university – get it?”

At least popping a zit gets rid of the infection and promotes healing. But today, the higher education racket festers on the rear end of our culture, a painful, useless carbuncle of intellectual fraud, moral bankruptcy, and pernicious liberal fascism that impoverishes the young while it subsidizes a bunch of old pinkos who can’t hack it at Real World U.

At least literal boils don’t diss you while demanding you give them free money. We’re expected to shut up and write checks while the universitools ruin our culture. Luckily, due to the happy coincidence of a conservative federal government, technological advances, and the college industrial complex’s inexplicable death wish, we normals now have a chance to lance the boil that is 21st Century academia.

The purpose of universities long ago stopped being education, yet Big Edu and its liberal supporters keep pushing the lie that the only way to prepare young Americans for the future is to tie an anchor around their necks. America’s student loan debt now totals a staggering $1.4 trillion carried by 44 million Americans, and 2016 grads are weighed down with an average $37,712 each. And what do they get for it? Nothing but four years older and considerably dumber. Record numbers are using their degrees in Papuan Feminist Literature and Genderfluid Break Dance Therapy as gateway credentials into the exciting field of brewing caffeinated beverages for grown-ups who didn’t still live on the futon in their mom’s spare bedroom at age 33.

A house, a family, and a future that involves either dignity or success – these are things walking out into society with a meaningless piece of paper and nearly forty grand in debt prevent. But hey – the important thing is that we continue to subsidize one of the Democrats’ key constituencies and its prime breeding ground for the social dysfunction and soft-handed tyranny that are the hallmarks of progressivism. Too bad if it ruins the lives of the young suckers whose parents pushed them onto the conveyor belt that annually pumps out another crop of credentialed indentured servants.

But even sucking the lifeblood out of Millennials is not enough to feed the greedy academic beast. The bright new idea – one embraced by that commie from New England, that other commie from New England who tricked her college into thinking she was an Indian, and that firewater aficionado who lost the election – is “free college.” Let’s set aside the fact that community college exists to give everyone the opportunity to get some higher education; today, it’s job is to occupy high school students for a few extra years by intermittently teaching them the things the incompetence of unionized teachers ensured they didn’t learn in public high schools. The “free college” idea offers those of us who have already paid for our own education the opportunity to pony up for someone else’s. As the grade-inflated bastions of higher learning say to pretty much anyone who hands them a check and keeps his mouth shut about liking America, “Pass.”


If traditional colleges performed some meaningful function that only they could perform, then there might be a rationale for them in the 21st Century. But there’s not. What do four-year colleges do today?

Well, they cater to weenies who feel “unsafe” that Mike Pence is speaking to their graduates. Seventy-some years ago, young people that age were feeling unsafe because the Wehrmacht was trying to kill them on Omaha Beach.

At our nation’s most prestigious university, students are emotionally incapacitated by the fact that other Americans elected someone they dislike. Their reaction is to form a “resistance” that they refer to as “Dumbledore’s Army.” What a bunch of wand-stroking. But there is one good thing about this mortifying childishness – perhaps now, when you meet a grad, he, she, or xe will hesitate for a couple minutes before telling you it went to Harvard.

And in their quest to ensure their students’ perpetual unemployment, colleges are now teaching that punctuality is a social construct. Somewhere, a Starbucks manager is going to hear from Kaden the Barista that, “I like, totally couldn’t get here for my shift on time because, like intersectionality of my experience as a person of Scandinavianism and stuff. I feel unsafe because of your racist vikingaphobia and tardiness-shaming.”


Academia is pricing itself out of reach even as the antics of its inhabitants annoy and provoke those of us whose taxes already pick up a big chunk of the bill even without the “free college” okie-doke. This is where the fortuitous coincidence of two phenomena collide to give us an opportunity to fix our problem. We’re woke to the scam, and we now have a federal government dominated by conservatives that can use the law and the power of the purse to tame the beast. As the same time, technology that will allow no-frills learning is improving every day. What we must do is pass popular laws that make colleges accountable to taxpayers and students, including by shifting some of the student loan risk onto them. We must also protect that whole wacky freedom thing – colleges can always give up all federal funds if they, say, want to force college Christian clubs to accept atheist members. And yeah – that’s a thing.


At the same time, we can use the law to help facilitate the transition away from the current centralized campus with a bloated administration and faculty/four-year booze cruise model. Laws can mandate and regularize credentialing for technology-based learning to help make non-traditional programs a viable and accepted alternative to a traditional degree. Right now, college is less about learning than about creating a cultural signifier – someone who went to college is “one of us.” But that snobby luxury can’t endure when tuition becomes unaffordable for everyone but ultra-rich folks willing to pony up for their spawn’s sojourn on campus. And it’s unnecessary. To the extent college teaches hard skills – I learned how to beer bong like a boss – students can go on-line at a fraction of the cost to get the specific education they need, without spending time and money on nonsense they don’t. Oppression Studies requirements, I’m looking at you.

The quarter million dollar academic vacation model is economically unsustainable and poisonous to our culture. The world of Animal House was a lot more fun when it didn’t mean preemptive bankruptcy for its graduates and the fostering of a tyrannical training ground for future libfascists. It’s time to get all Bluto on the obsolete boil that is academia; time to give it a squeeze.

ccp

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Emory to pay 100% of illegals' education financial aid
« Reply #26 on: May 05, 2017, 04:31:10 PM »
For all the millions of US parents who worked like dogs to send their children to college  this is so outrageous:

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/05/05/emory-university-to-pay-for-100-percent-of-undocumented-students-financial-aid/
« Last Edit: May 14, 2017, 06:40:03 AM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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not nice to fool with teachers unions
« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2017, 05:29:42 AM »
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/07/25/what-has-betsy-devos-actually-done-after.html

Who ever thought the political process would be controlled by teachers?  for goodness sakes ?   Letting government employees unionize is big mistake.  What a joke.
They will get their guy or girl in NJ soon.  Need to find more deductions....................

ccp

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NJ teachers
« Reply #28 on: July 26, 2017, 05:38:09 AM »
work 185 days a year. I am not against teachers but I am against their union's bully tactics and controlling our governments:

http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/statements/2011/dec/12/chris-christie/chris-christie-says-new-jersey-teachers-only-work-/

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Kindergartners Traumatized by 'Transition Party' for Transgirl
« Reply #29 on: August 26, 2017, 01:11:15 PM »
https://pjmedia.com/parenting/2017/08/23/kindergartners-traumatized-transition-party-transgirl-parents-outraged/

Kindergartners Traumatized by 'Transition Party' for Transgirl
 BY MEGAN FOX AUGUST 23, 2017 CHAT 8 COMMENTS

(Image via YouTube)
A public charter school in California (of course) is under fire from outraged parents of 5-8-year-olds who were forced to attend a "transition party" for a little boy who thinks he is a girl. The party included a series of transgender propaganda books read to students before the boy went into the bathroom and then came out dressed like a girl. At this point in the event, the teacher explained that the students were to now to address him as a her and gave "her" a new name. Parents received no notification of this event ahead of time. The Rocklin Academy has been inundated with complaints after kids came home traumatized.

“There were several of the little girls that went to their parents and were crying and saying, ‘mommy or daddy, am I going to turn into a boy?’”And a boy who hadn’t given “gender” a single thought before is now asking his mother if he can dress as a girl for school, added Keller.
The school claims that it did not have to notify parents about this because it's not sex education or something.

District Superintendent Robin Stout told Fox40News that parents were not notified because kids can’t opt out of gender identity and expression lessons.
The school board also held a special session on the matter on July 31, which included a presentation on California law by Young, Minney & Corr law firm that echoed Stout’s assertions.

According to that presentation, since January 2016, state law allows parents to only opt their children out of sex education.

“Diversity and tolerance curricula are not ‘sex education,’” it emphasized.

That's interesting. So now teaching kindergartners about "diverse" sexual proclivities is not sex ed? There is a high probability that the reason they did not notify parents is because they knew there would be loud objections to the systematic abuse of children by their teachers. The book that was used is called I Am Jazz, written by a seriously disturbed transgender teen who has a reality show on TLC by the same name. In this clip from the show, the boy is grilling his father about his mother's vagina and what it looks like. I'm not joking. This is the kind of trash that teachers and principals of schools think is okay for your kindergartner. Sources say the book I Am Jazz is graphic and gross. It was bad enough that several students left school that day in tears.


TLC Show 'I Am Jazz' Celebrates Child Abuse, Not Responsible Parenting
There were also idiot parents who were very proud of themselves for being so tolerant and accepting and had a marvelous time waxing virtuous to the press about how wonderful the event was for their children.

It was so precious to see that he had absolutely no prejudice in his body. My child just went in there and listened to the story, and didn't relate it to anything malicious, or didn't question his own body.
Soooo inclusive. Sooooo forward thinking. Sooooo tiresome. I don't care what kind of tripe you want to teach your kid in the privacy of your own home. Parents have the right to be morons and teach their son that he can be a girl if he wants to be. But there must be some kind of standard in schools where school officials stay OUT of this kind of unscientific garbage. What about the parents who are not going to teach their children that the sex organs they were born with are swappable? What about those of us who are going to teach them about actual biology and chromosomes that can't change on a whim? Why is there never any tolerance or acceptance of us?

As is the answer to most dilemmas these days, homeschool is really the only option to avoid psychotic teachers and administrators who think it's their job to convert your kid into self-abuse. Pull your kids out of the public system now before they come home asking for a sex change.

Crafty_Dog

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« Last Edit: August 26, 2017, 02:14:34 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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opinion piece
« Reply #31 on: October 22, 2017, 07:54:08 AM »
I am not an expert in education, of course, but if you ask me education starts in the HOME not in kindergarten.  More money for tech , and more data (endless data just endless  - here we go again with data)  collection in the schools and at best more marginal results is not going to change anything.

Maybe Gates should start doing his data collection in homes to find out the cultural reasons some groups do not perform well

why do asians do well despite the so called white privilege / supremacy?  Obviously it starts in their homes.  What are the cultural differences that are far more likely to contribute to good or bad academic performance?

(I know this is not a politically correct approach -lets keep blaming it all on white/anglo supremacy or privilege)

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/21/common-core-backer-bill-gates-announces-plan-invest-1-7-billion-public-education/

G M

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Leftist indoctrination
« Reply #32 on: July 08, 2018, 09:01:59 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: education
« Reply #33 on: July 08, 2018, 10:27:18 PM »
Funny you should bring this up because I've been thinking about a somewhat different facet of this the last few days.

It is not accident an that Baraq's Weathermen buddies were/are college profs as were Cloward and Pivens-- in the early 70s the Left made a conscious decision to subvert America by going into teaching-- and look at the success that they have had!!!  We need to do the same, but on behalf of the civics of the American Creed.

ccp

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Rebecca Friedrichs
« Reply #34 on: January 15, 2019, 06:19:54 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Jason Riley: Biden's boost to school yard bullies
« Reply #35 on: January 22, 2023, 04:52:37 PM »
Biden Gives a Boost to Schoolyard Bullies
As student misbehavior rises, he urges a return to Obama-era policies that encourage lax discipline.
Jason L. Riley hedcutBy Jason L. RileyFollow
Jan. 17, 2023 5:54 pm ET

A professor at an academic conference I attended earlier this month noted that “antiracism” and the policies that flow from it are a much bigger problem today than racism itself. Some might dismiss that observation as hyperbole, but examples keep piling up.

Living-wage mandates price poor minorities who are desperate for employment out of jobs. Bail-reform measures make bad neighborhoods even more dangerous by going easy on repeat offenders. Affirmative-action admissions policies in higher education boost dropout rates by mismatching black students with schools in the name of diversity. Open-space zoning laws, supported by environmental zealots, have limited the construction of affordable homes and thereby decimated the black population of major cities, such as San Francisco. It’s a long and depressing list.

Learning losses experienced by students during the pandemic, and especially by low-income minorities, have been attributed to an excess of remote schooling that was driven by union demands more than sound science. A study released last week by the U.S. Education Department offers reason to believe that policies being advanced by the equity crowd may be contributing to the challenge of getting our youngsters back up to speed academically.

According to an annual survey of school leaders conducted by the federal Institute for Education Sciences, schools saw a 56% increase in “classroom disruptions from student misconduct” compared with a typical school year before the pandemic. There’s also been a 49% rise in “rowdiness outside of the classroom,” in places such as cafeterias or hallways. Actual “physical attacks or fights between students” are up by one-third, and threats of the same have increased 36%.

Whatever the impact of pandemic education protocols on this behavior, student suspension policies pushed by the political left are no doubt making matters worse. Under President Obama, the Education Department released a study showing that black students are suspended from school at higher rates than white students and concluded that the only possible reason for the disparity was racism. Similar studies have shown that whites are suspended at higher rates than Asians, but progressives stop reading after they find the statistic that fits their preferred narrative. Thus, the administration subsequently issued letters of guidance to school districts that said federal officials would consider higher school-discipline rates among blacks to be evidence of racial discrimination.

MARC:  THIS IS PRECISELY WHY THE VERY PROBLEMATIC KID WHO DID THE MASS SHOOTING AT THE SCHOOL IN BROWARD COUNTY A FEW YEARS BACK WAS STILL GOING TO THAT SCHOOL DESPITE SOMETHING LIKE 20 POLICE APPEARANCES AT HIS HOME.  HE WAS CONSIDERED LATINO AND THE SCHOOL DID NOT WANT TO BE CONSIDERED RACIST FOR KICKING HIS ASS OUT.

The response, predictably, was a reduction in suspensions, which led to more disruption and bullying and to students feeling less safe—especially black students. A federal survey from 2017 found that 37% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic group. A policy intended to fight racism wound up harming black kids the most. Equity strikes again!

The Trump administration revoked the Obama-era guidance, but the pandemic made the matter moot until students began returning to the classroom again. President Biden, meanwhile, has pushed to reimplement the Obama policy. In 2021, the Education Department and Justice Department jointly announced that they would assess “the impact of exclusionary school discipline policies and practices, such as suspensions and school-based arrests, on our nation’s students, particularly students of color.” In July of last year, the Biden administration issued its own “guidance” urging schools to discipline students in a “nondiscriminatory manner,” by which it means basing suspension decisions on racial balance instead of behavior and the welfare of students who are in school to learn.

We don’t find anything approaching racial evenness in behavior patterns after young people leave school, so why would we expect to find it before they graduate? And why would we assume that bias is the only plausible explanation for racial disparities, especially given that so many of the teachers and administrators responsible for school discipline are themselves racial minorities?

The likely problem isn’t that school discipline policies are too harsh but that they’re too lax. Better to teach children to behave before they leave school and face far harsher consequences for making bad decisions as adults. Charter schools, which enroll a disproportionate number of low-income black and Hispanic children, have been criticized for employing stricter discipline policies for troublemakers. Yet academic studies have shown that charter students were less likely than their peers in traditional public schools to be incarcerated later in life.

Like so much of the utopian equity agenda, good intentions matter more than results, even if those results leave the intended beneficiaries worse off. Overly lenient treatment for the small minority of misbehaving students can make school a nightmare and learning impossible for the overwhelming majority of disadvantaged kids who are counting on a decent education to make a better life for themselves.


ccp

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Re: education
« Reply #37 on: February 01, 2023, 03:04:23 PM »
thumbs up for Desantis

all the victim & free shit Dems are all over  the internet

yelling and screaming

"hostile take over "
blah blah blah

like we are  all supposed to cave and give in to their endless demands for *MORE* !

Body-by-Guinness

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The Evolution of Course Catalogs & Associated Implications
« Reply #38 on: February 03, 2024, 07:16:31 PM »
I perused the first link, reading the conclusion, and did more mulling where the second is concerned. Indeed, the second piece did a better job of addressing what first jumped into my head: what sort of oxygen gets sucked out of the catalog evolutionary process by DEI orthodoxies, deconstructionism and other in vogue forms of revisionism, and so on? With all that said, I think the speed of revision of course catalogs is something of a two edged sword: were it possible to get a classical liberal education that would be all well and good and speed of catalog revision would not be much of an issue, and in area where specialized knowledge in an ever changing field like info tech rapid revision in offerings is likely critical. Where things stand now, however, we’ve something of the worst of both worlds, with various “Progressive” standard bearers absorbing the bandwidth of what change is available:

Student Demand and the Supply of College Courses
by  Tyler Cowen February 3, 2024 at 3:48 am in Data Source Education
From a recent Jacob Light paper:

In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities.

Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.

Think I think he is challenging you very much

John Cochrane offers comment as well, the first half of the post is interesting on demographics also.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/student-demand-and-the-supply-of-college-courses.html#comments