Tag: dumbing down

Outrageous: Rice University Offers Course on Taylor Swift Analyzing “Whiteness” and “Nationalism”

In the latest in waste of money on courses at American schools according to Campus Reform, “Rice University, a private research university in Houston, Texas, is offering multiple courses centered on pop star Taylor Swift, including one class examining far-left themes such as “American nationalism and whiteness” through Swift’s lyrics and public image.”

“Rice will offer “COLL 118 Mastermind: The Taylor Swift Eras” this fall, in which students will analyze Swift’s albums as “primary texts” and examine “how a single artist can shape global culture and shift industry standards.”

If you find this absurd you are not alone. Yet again the universities are offering woke courses lacking academic rigor.

The class is focused on Swifts musical trends genres as well as her ownership dispute over her master recordings.

If this wasn’t irrelevant enough “Rice is also listing a second Swift-focused course in its 2026-27 catalog titled “COLL 167 Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift.” This seminar course will focus on Swift’s songwriting alongside discussions about “femininity and gender,” “politics and social impact,” and “American nationalism and whiteness.”

University courses wouldn’t be complete without an attack on traditional gender roles and “Whiteness.”

“Students in the class will examine all 10 of Swift’s albums and complete written responses, participate in classroom discussions, and write a final essay analyzing one of her songs.”

In other words no academic rigor and waste of time.

“While it is listed in the 2026-27 course catalog, Rice has not specified whether the “Miss Americana” course will be offered during the fall or spring semester. The university previously offered the same course in fall 2023.”

The fact that this is being offered in Texas shows wokeness has infultrated schools in almost every region and state.

“The university’s undergraduate tuition cost for the 2026-27 academic year exceeds $70,000. The university estimates the total cost of attendance to be $97,000 after fees, housing, meals, books, and personal expenses are included.”

This is insulting to those paying tuition at these schools.

The cost of tuition is getting higher while the courses become more anti American and less academic.

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Public Schools Are In A Downward Spiral

After decades of steady growth, attendance in U.S. K-12 public schools has shifted drastically. Over the past five years, registration has fallen by 2.3 percent, or 1.18 million students, and schools show no signs of rebounding. Lower birth rates are the primary driver of the downturn. The number of births has decreased steadily in recent years, with 690,000 fewer children born in 2024 than in 2007.

California lost nearly 75,000 K-12 students as of the 2025-26 school year, a slide more than twice as steep as the previous year.

Since 2017-2018, the Golden State has seen a 10 percent decline.

New York City has also been hard hit.

As of the 2025–26 school year, 793,300 students are enrolled in K-12 schools, down nearly 10 percent from 2020.

The loss of enrolled students has prompted some desperate measures. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is offering “free” childcare for 2-year-olds regardless of their parents’ income. In 2024, parents of toddlers spent an average of more than $23,000 on center-based childcare, according to the NYC Comptroller.

For those still attending public schools, chronic absence—the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of a school year—is a growing problem. As of January 20, the latest data show that chronic absenteeism, which surged from 15 percent pre-COVID to 28 percent in 2022, remains elevated at 24 percent.

Nat Malkus, American Enterprise Institute’s director of education policy, notes that the surge in absenteeism affects districts of all sizes, racial backgrounds, and income levels. However, the data reveal significant racial and ethnic disparities, with 39 percent of black students, 36 percent of Hispanic students, 24 percent of white students, and 15 percent of Asian students chronically absent.

A major factor behind rising absenteeism is that many students lack motivation to attend school. In 2024, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students ages 12 to 18 and found that only 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school feel motivated to attend. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. Similarly, a 2024 EdChoice poll found that 64 percent of teens said school is boring, and 30 percent view it as a waste of time.

Additionally, a 2024 survey revealed that nearly 64 percent of school parents say K-12 education is headed in the wrong direction, up 8 points from 2023.

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Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She’s calling it a “call to action.”

She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place.

For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel,” and threatened the possibility of safety strikes.

Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures.

Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions.

So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood.

The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s.

Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo.

In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she “…led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible.” That’s a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did.

Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were “… things we really didn’t get right,” including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn’t accountability. It was a pivot.

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South Carolina Passes “GRADE FLOOR” Ban For K-12 Public Schools

In a move to protect educational excellence, consistency and standards, the State of Carolina has become the first state in the U.S. to ban “grade floor” policies in K-12 public schools.

For those who are not familiar with the “grade floor” policy, it is a practice that prevents teachers from giving a student a grade below the actual percentage the student earned.

The most common “floor” school systems adopt is the 50% minimum. Basically, a student need not do any work to earn at least a 50%. It’s part of what is called “equity grading” which should be correctly called “enabling grading” because it enables students to appoint themselves as “victims” in order to skate by without achieving educational proficiency in school. It teaches students that they can’t and don’t have to achieve, especially when they face difficult content or situations. We have published several articles on this crippling policy:

Currently, we can confirm only six districts in Maryland that have used or do use the 50% floor in grading, Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Talbot. Talbot recently removed it from their policies.

Currently, it is estimated that 18 out of South Carolina’s 22 School Districts use the 50% floor in student grading even though research concludes that the practice does not improve student achievement.

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Doing The Math: UC Faculty Urges Return To Standardized Testing After Shocking Decline In Skills

Years ago, I wrote a column denouncing the decision of the University of California system to drop standardized testing in the cause of greater racial diversity. Now, hundreds of UC mathematics faculty have called for a return to such testing after reports showing a thirtyfold increase in students with math skills below high school level.

It was heralded as a way to preserve diversity after voters in California repeatedly rejected race-based admissions and the Supreme Court appeared ready to bar such practices (commonly proven with reference to standardized test differentials among applicants).

Now, many professors in the California system have come to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move years ago. They have witnessed the drop in academic skills and abilities among incoming students.

These tests not only have the most significant predictive value for performance but also play an important role in the advancement of minority students. Former University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.

Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students.

The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”

Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.”

In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted.

So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions.

The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.

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The Public School Mess

For most of my life, I’ve wanted to do two things: teach and write. I’ve now done both, but I’ve been more successful at one than the other. I went to college to be a teacher. It took me five and a half years to get my degree and teacher certification. It took me a year and a half of substitute teaching to get a teaching position. I taught 9th-grade English and, later, World Geography at a majority minority high school southwest of Houston. I was teaching there on 9/11. I quit two years later. I lasted all of five years. It took me longer to get my degree and teacher certification than the time I was actually on the job. 

Why didn’t I stay longer? There is a very long list of reasons, far too many to list here. Had the public school system been the one I had graduated from 10 years before, I might have stayed in the classroom. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The public school system is a mess and has been for decades. People wonder why public school teachers today have purple hair and like to talk about their sexuality with their students. They wonder where the normal teachers are. The normal teachers quit like I did. It’s simple, really. When you chase away the people who want to be there, like me, you’re stuck with what’s left, including the purple hair people. 

Don’t believe me? The turnover rate for the state I live in, Texas, is 12%. Twelve percent of all teachers hired do not return for a second year. In the state’s largest district, the Houston Independent School District, the turnover rate is 15% higher! Nearly 30% of all teachers hired by Houston I.S.D. do not return for a second year. This absurdly high turnover rate is one of the many reasons that Houston I.S.D. is being run by the state right now and not the school district.

What is the problem? Why do so many teachers quit? What can be done to improve the public school system, if at all? The main problem, as I see it, is that teachers are no longer valued. They’re appreciated a couple of times a year, but they’re not valued. Teachers are interchangeable. Today, teachers are seen as the hired help. If one quits, you just find another. No big deal. My school district, the district I graduated from, did not see me as a teacher. I was a babysitter at a “problem school.” The district would never say that in public, but that was the very clear implication. 

Students are believed over teachers. Teachers are expected to solve all the problems thrown at them without help or backup and without stopping the lesson. If the problems aren’t solved, it’s the teacher’s fault. In fact, it’s ALWAYS the teacher’s fault, ALWAYS. Misbehaving student? Teacher’s fault, poor classroom management. Lack of supplies? Teacher’s fault, they didn’t bring enough. Not enough copies for the classroom? Teacher’s fault, they used up their allotment before the end of the month. Higher than average failure rate? Teacher’s fault, the lessons aren’t interesting enough. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do. It turns out that constantly being told you’re terrible at your job and that you’re wrong about everything is not conducive to teachers wanting to return for another year. 

I would hope that this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this. Teachers do not teach for the money. I promise you, they don’t. I didn’t. I taught because I was good at it and I enjoyed it until I didn’t. Why complain? Teachers get the summers off. Surely that’s enough time to recover. It might be if teachers were paid during the summer. They’re not. Not unless they’re teaching summer school. Teachers are paid for nine months. They stretch nine months of pay to cover all twelve months. I know, I’ve done it. Who gets paid all twelve months? Administration. All the paper pushers sitting in their nice offices, making twice or three times what the average teacher makes, miles from any school, making sure they justify the continuation of their job, those are the ones who take an ever larger chunk of the money the school district receives. Those are the ones who need to go. Every last school district in the U.S. needs to be DOGED. Every last one. 

There has been a fundamental shift in public education in the last twenty to thirty years, moving from student accountability to permissiveness, under the guise of equity and inclusion. Everyone, from the students to the faculty to the staff, is allowed to live their truth. Now, it’s okay for students to run wild, talk back to the adults, and assault the teachers. Anything goes nowadays. It’s not even babysitting, it’s chaos with an educational imprimatur. What happened? 

Progressives happened. They rule with emotion, not logic. If they hear something they don’t like, they ignore it. Boys in the girls’ locker room? What’s the big deal? The boys identify as girls; it’s sexist to kick them out. The girls should be more understanding. It’s never a progressive’s fault, either. They mean well. They just want everyone to be happy and equal. Yes, equally miserable. 

With progressives in control, there is no one to enforce standards and accountability, so there are no standards or accountability. The agency supposedly created to enforce educational standards, the U.S. Department of Education, has been an absolute disaster. After its creation, the U.S. was no longer #1 in the world in terms of education. Today, according to the World Population Review, the U.S. is 38th in Math and 24th in Science. 

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Harvard Weighs Major Crackdown On “Grade Inflation”

Harvard faculty begin voting Tuesday on what may be the most aggressive effort in decades to curb grade inflation, a long-running issue that has also drawn attention from the White House as it pushes broader higher-ed reforms, according to Bloomberg.

The proposal would cap A grades in undergraduate classes at 20% of students, plus four additional students. The move comes after A grades surged at Harvard: about 60% of grades were A’s in the 2024–25 academic year, more than double the rate in 2006. After administrators pushed for stricter grading last fall, that number dropped to 53%. Faculty have one week to vote, with results expected May 20.

Supporters say grade inflation has made academic distinctions less meaningful. Last year, Harvard seniors needed a 3.989 GPA to earn summa cum laude, and an award traditionally given to one student ended in a 54-way tie. As professor Jason Furman said, “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half.”

Bloomberg writes that students have strongly opposed the plan, arguing it would increase stress, discourage academic risk-taking, and push students toward easier courses. Nearly 85% of undergraduates surveyed by The Harvard Crimson opposed the proposal. Student leader Caleb Thompson said “people really are against this,” while senior Summer Tan said students are already seeking easier classes instead of more challenging ones.

Some faculty members agree. Scott Duke Kominers warned the policy could discourage ambitious students and make Harvard less attractive to top applicants.

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Ed-Tech Vendors Fleece Schools Out Of Millions Of Dollars For Software That Makes Kids Dumber

After the teachers in Los Angeles nearly went on yet another strike, they may want to study a recent scandal that reveals where some of the district’s money is going. According to a report in the Westside Current, a former Los Angeles Unified School District employee and technology vendor, Gautham Sampath, just pled “not guilty” to money-laundering charges after allegedly rerouting $3 million to LAUSD technical project manager Hong Peng to land a $22 million contract for his information software.

Assuming Peng is guilty in this instance — and the hilariously illiterate texts between her and Sampath would suggest she is — it is reasonable to conclude she has probably done the same with other tech vendors, paying gargantuan sums of taxpayer money for often shoddy, useless software and pocketing large sums for it. And she is far from the only person doing it. Sampath’s company, Innive, evidently has “government contracts in California and elsewhere in the country.” This means that all over the country, local and state governments are awarding multimillion-dollar bids to conmen with few legal repercussions.

To be clear, this is money that could have gone to teachers, counselors, and administrators. This is money that could have been kept by the homeowners paying extortion-level property taxes. This is money that families could have applied to alternative schooling options. 

But instead, this kind of corruption continues to siphon away taxpayer money without anyone realizing it. Years ago, I wrote about the expenses that consume most of a school district’s budget, namely extracurriculars, special education, and disciplinary programs. What I should have added to this list was technology. 

For the past couple of decades, school districts have raided their rainy day funds, issued bonds, and gone broke paying for iPads and Chromebooks, educational software, and specially trained personnel tasked with helping faculty use these products. And aside from a few district bureaucrats safely hidden in a nondescript office building that the district somehow owns, no one really knows how much any of this costs. Naturally, this lack of transparency makes it all too easy for embezzlement, laundering, and bribery.

Moreover, in my own experience of teaching high school English, most of these programs are usually worthless. I have no clue how much local districts are paying for so many research databases, note-taking apps, informational organizers, or AI tools, but I do know I never use them, nor do any of the teachers I’ve known.

Ironically, what’s worse than this useless software is the software we actually do have to use. Whether it involves recording grades, taking attendance, referring misbehavior, or compiling standardized assessment data for each student, these programs are, as a rule, terrible. They are poorly designed, convoluted, and frequently glitch and crash. Added to this are our online textbooks, which force users to click two dozen times through two dozen dropdown menus to open a particular text — and usually require a few periodic reboots afterward. 

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King’s College accused of ‘dumbing down’ after overlooking poor grammar to be more ‘inclusive’

A top university wants to scale back traditional exams and overlook grammar mistakes in a bid to be more ‘inclusive’.

King’s College London, part of the elite Russell Group, is overhauling assessment to ‘validate diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences’.

In addition, it has introduced new shorter word limits on essays, to prevent students being ‘overburdened’.

Lecturers have branded the overhaul ‘dumbing down’, while students have criticised the word caps in an open letter.

In a recent presentation of the changes, staff were told to give students a ‘choice in assessment formats’, such as coursework.

The new framework discourages ‘over-reliance’ on exams, with ‘more options’ added to how students can be assessed.

One of the slides shown to staff with the heading ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ stated they should ‘focus on ideas, not grammar’.

It also said assessment should be ‘culturally responsive’ and ‘reward the use of culture, language and identity’.

Marking should be ‘inclusive’ and ’embrace linguistic diversity’, the slide said.

In a separate announcement, students were also told some of their essays will be capped at 1,300 words – down from 2,000 currently, to reduce academic stress.

However, this backfired when students slammed it in an open letter, saying it would stop them properly exploring their subjects.

One King’s College academic, who asked to be anonymous, said: ‘This whole framework, dreamt up by middle management to justify their existence, is about sending a message about which side of the culture war the university is on.

‘They seem to be claiming students are snowflakes and can’t cope, but students have set up a petition against it.

‘These young people are looking at the tough labour market and they haven’t got time for all this.

‘This is management trying to be ‘down-with-the-kids’ and classically getting it wrong’.

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Brutal Numbers: Schools Spent $30 Billion on Laptops… and They Seem to Have Made Kids Dumber

Technological innovation doesn’t always yield good results.

Even as electronic devices are championed as the best means of learning for youth — with a massive price tag — we aren’t seeing dramatic improvements in students’ performance.

On Feb. 23, Techspot published an article citing the beginning of the tech takeover in the classroom under former Maine Democratic Gov. Angus King.

In 2002, King created a program to put Apple laptops in middle schoolers’ repertoire. By 2024, the federal government had used a staggering $30 billion to follow his state’s plan, getting tablets and laptops to students across the country.

This seemed like an obvious shift in the right direction on paper: The world is becoming more technological. Students will use these devices in the workplace, so why not familiarize them now?

But neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath laid out the adverse impacts of this decision to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

According to Horvath, Gen Z is the first cohort to see declining test scores compared to their predecessors. He found an inverse relationship between academic performance and time using digital devices.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” he told lawmakers. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

Techspot cited studies showing 3,000 university students spent two-thirds of time on their school laptops engaging in material unrelated to classwork.

Fortune found that in 2017, test scores weren’t improving after King’s program.

A study published in OxJournal made a worrying conclusion regarding technology and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The research “established an evident correlation between digital media use and the prevalence of ADHD in contemporary society. This applies for all age demographics, depending on the setting, such as being in school or in a workplace.”

“The earlier we immerse our children’s underdeveloped minds in digital media, offering them instant fulfillment, the higher the likelihood that an attention-deficit disorder will emerge as they mature,” the study continued.

“This inhibits individuals from focusing their selective attention on a particular task, as well as reduces their divided and sustained attention.”

A traditionally minded educator — or most conservatives — could have seen this coming.

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