Tag: dumbing down

Zohran Mamdani plans to phase out Gifted and Talented program in NYC elementary schools

Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani wants to phase out New York City’s Gifted and Talented program — the democratic socialist’s latest move to revert to ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s era.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, said Thursday he would eliminate the accelerated learning program at the kindergarten level, something that’s likely to anger parents, who have been passionately divided on the issue.

The gifted classes would remain active through the school year, but would no longer be available next fall, he said.

Critics have attacked the coveted learning model as racist due to the higher number of white and Asian students that gain entry through the exam.

But backers argue getting rid of the classes would eliminate opportunities for thousands of bright students from low-and-middle income families.

Mamdani’s proposal would be the first step in undoing the program across all elementary schools — a controversial change inside the Department of Education made by de Blasio on his way out the door in 2021, and reverted by Mayor Eric Adams when he took office.

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L.A. School District to Ban Fifth-Grade Plays About U.S. History: ‘Culturally Insensitive’

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is banning a celebrated series of fifth-grade musical plays about American history at a local charter school because, the district says, they are “culturally insensitive.”

For nearly three decades, the fifth-graders at Marquez Charter Elementary in Pacific Palisades have performed musicals about crucial periods in the formation of the United States.

These include Miracle in Philadelphia, about the Constitutional Convention; Hello, Louisiana!, about the voyage of Lewis and Clark; and Water and Power, about the Industrial Revolution. (A fourth-grade play, Gold Dust or Bust, focuses on the history of California.)

The musicals, co-written by Jeff Lantos (with music composed by the late jazz pianist Bill Augustine), are so successful in conveying historical details that Marquez students consistently score off the charts in history assessments.

A 2004 academic study of the Marquez plays observed: “Students who attended Marquez Elementary School scored more than twice as many items correctly [on history tests] as did students from other schools.”

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Reading and Math Test Scores for American 12th Graders Hit 20 Year Low, Despite Massive Spending on Education

The reading and test scores for American 12th graders have hit a 20 year low, new analysis has found.

This is despite the fact that the United States spends more on education than most countries. New York City is currently poised to spend up to $42,000 per student this school year.

The closure of schools during Covid can be blamed in part for this, but there has to be more to the story than that.

NBC News in Chicago reported:

Nationwide test scores show U.S. high school students falling behind in math and reading

A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation’s report card.

Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress.

The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading and math. They reflect a downward drift across grade levels and subject areas in previous releases from NAEP, which is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of U.S. schools.

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”

Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon spoke about this recently and explained that this is one of the reasons why the Trump administration wants to return education authority to the states, so that parents and local communities can get more involved in fixing the problem.

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Teachers Unions Fund Leftist Causes While Students Fail Math, Reading

As union-controlled public schools in big cities continue failing to educate kids, a new report shows that the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions have contributed almost $50 million to far-left interest groups since 2022.

When kids headed back to school nationwide last week, the Defending Education website reported that the National Education Association (NEA) and American Teachers Federation (AFT) is more interested in promoting crazy causes than educating kids.

Meanwhile, during the same time, multiple reports showed that urban students are not proficient in basic subjects such as math and reading.

As urban kids languish in schools with barely literate teachers, AFT and NEA poured money into a who’s who of leftist kookery.

In the past three years, the two anti-Christian, anti-American unions “have given out a combined $43,524,123 in funding to leftwing and far-left groups,” Defending Education reported.

Some organizations receiving funds include MoveOn.org, PEN America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Trevor Project, and a handful of state and federal leftwing Political Action Committees (PACs). For example, the two unions gave a combined $9,300,000 to For Our Future Action Fund, a leftwing political action committee. Additionally, the NEA gave the State Engagement Fund $9,500,000 over the same period.

AFT contributed $14,747,625 to organized leftism, while the NEA pumped in almost twice that much with $28,776,500.

AFT shoveled $100,000 each into the Color of Change PAC; National Action Network; the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation; and $200,000 into the Center for American Progress.

The Democratic Governors Association collected $600,000.

NEA delivered $106,146 to the Alliance for Justice; $500,000 to the Center for American Progress; and $75,000 to the Tides Center, a “progressive incubator” tightly linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros.

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Ken Paxton Calls For Putting Prayer And Bible Back In Texas Schools

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton urged schools to prepare for classroom prayer and Bible reading following the passage of a new state law.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a statement.

He recommended that students start with the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13.

He warned that the far left is actively working to strip schools of America’s spiritual foundation.

“Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society,” he said. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

The announcement follows Senate Bill 11, approved during the 89th Legislature. The law requires school boards to vote within six months of Sept. 1, 2025, on whether to adopt policies permitting voluntary prayer and Bible reading.

The measure also directs the Attorney General’s Office to defend districts or charter schools that adopt such policies.

Supporters quickly praised the move.

“God bless you, General Paxton, for having the courage to begin the legal process of putting prayer and reading of Scripture in Texas classrooms,” Melissa Katz wrote on X.

“Amen! Thank you, sir!” added Alexander Duncan, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Critics online pushed back.

“His actions are unconstitutional. I attend mass every week. Public school should be for all, not just Christians. Note, I am a Christian/Catholic and still feel this way,” wrote Vincomputerman.

“So now students have to take time out from academics so that there can be a prayer hour? Since when can’t people pray on their own time?” asked X user Johnson@F1979J.

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She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

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Half Of American Schools Require ‘Equitable’ Grading And Most Teachers Are Opposed: Survey

Lackluster student performance has plagued the Schenectady, N.Y., city school district for years.

The school district, like many others, implemented a “grading for equity” policy in response to dismal test scores.

However, as Aaron Gifford reports below for The Epoch Times, a recent national survey indicates that most teachers feel grade equity actually hurts students long term, although more than half of the schools and districts across the nation engage in the practice.

Schenectady’s 2022-2023 academic report said 95 percent of its high school freshmen were behind in math by three or more grade levels.

A year later, the district reported that in the first quarter of the 2022-2023 school year, more than half of its middle school students (grades 6-8) were three or more grade levels behind in both reading and math, while the daily attendance rate for high schoolers had dipped below 79 percent.

In response to these disappointing results, district leaders implemented a “grading for equity” policy whereby students are not penalized for handing in assignments late, and are allowed to retake tests with continuous guidance from teachers until their scores reflect proficiency levels. Incomplete grades for the semester require authorization from school principals. The policy took effect last fall.

“It’s almost academic fraud,” Christopher Ognibene, Schenectady High School social studies teacher, told The Epoch Times. He recalled a student who was given B’s all year but failed the end-of-the-year New York State Regents assessment with a score of 43.

“Watered-down report cards and transcripts mean nothing if you are left unprepared academically for college. And there are due dates in the real world—it doesn’t matter where you go after high school,” he said.

Most teachers agree with Ognibene’s assessment of the widely used approach, according to the recent survey by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Rand Corporation education team members.

The Aug. 20 report, “Equitable Grading Through the Eyes of Teachers,” summarized responses from 967 teachers from K-12 districts across the country in late 2024.

“Turns out, teachers don’t like it when the powers that be take a sledgehammer to their few sources of leverage over student motivation and effort. Nor do they like giving students grades they don’t deserve,” the report says.

The report identifies five equitable grading practices—unlimited retakes, no late penalties, no zeroes, no homework, and no required participation.

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Scholars & Schemers: How The Left Ruined Higher Education

Despite denials from the left, US higher education has been captured by leftist faculty, students, and administrators. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, as for most of this century colleges and universities have changed dramatically.

Anyone who has been to college in the past half-century would attest to what then was called the “liberalism” of most of their professors, and, in the post-World War II era, the probability that one’s professor was a registered Democrat has been high. Yet, this is not what we mean by the “radicalizing” of American higher education, for even those professors that classified themselves as “liberals” and faithfully supported the Democratic Party would not have considered themselves to be radicals.

However, there also were demands for academic integrity 50 years ago, and certainly most of my professors at the University of Tennessee (1971-75) would have given at least a good effort to place their academic role above politics. In fact, I cannot recall being subjected to any politicized curricula—and I was a journalism major during the Watergate crisis, which practically invited politics into the classroom.

This does not mean that professors didn’t have political opinions or that the university itself was free of politics. I’m sure that most of my professors were Democrats but I don’t remember any of them attempting to influence my own political views (which, at best, were a mishmash of a lot of nonsense). There were, however, the effects of the cultural revolution that had begun before I went to college were already taking hold on the language, such as calling freshmen “freshpersons” and chairman a “chairperson.” For most of us, these things were eye-rolling but not really harmful. Furthermore, if some of us insisted on using the term “freshman,” there was no attempt to impose a campus-wide shaming campaign.

Today, the situation is very different. Higher education has been thoroughly politicized to a point where even if things were to turn around today, it would take an entire generation before things could be where they were even 30 years ago. There are no academic areas left in higher education that have not been corrupted by leftist thought.

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Needed: Stupid Anonymous

For many years, large segments of the American public were perfectly willing to go on Jerry Springer and admit to the world that they abused their spouses, molested their children, tortured their pets, and consumed every illicit drug they could get their hands on. Beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, a plethora of Anonymous organizations has come on the scene to deal with these issues, along with an ever-increasing number of other social and psychological maladies. However, there is not one Anonymous chapter where a person can get in front of a supportive group and state: “Good evening. My name is Steve, and I’m stupid!” Don’t believe me? Google it! 

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll use the term “stupid” based on actions, not intellect…or as Forrest Gump was known to say: “Stupid is as stupid does!” Getting people to admit that they’ve behaved stupidly is a very heavy lift. Just as Social Security has been called the “third rail” of American politics, admitting stupidity is the third rail of the American psyche. In addition, I have found that stupid actions tend to be based on rigid ideology or fear, both of which are hard to overcome. 

Let’s start with stupidity due to rigid ideology. Given that the receipts documenting the Obama administration’s efforts to carry out a “soft coup” are now in the public domain, at least half the population is going to need Stupid Anonymous services badly. I must point out that the use of the word “soft” when talking about a coup is absurd. It’s like telling a person that you just kicked in the crotch that it was an accident, expecting the person’s pain to immediately subside. It’s not happening! An attempted coup is a very serious crime, no matter the means used to carry it out or its level of success, and there must be full accountability. 

I find it interesting that RussiaGate, which has now been definitively demonstrated to have been nothing but a hoax, was thought by many of its believers to be worse than Watergate. Frankly, I believe that those who, to this day, continue to believe that RussiaGate was a real scandal are just acting stupidly! While I have no issue using Watergate as the gold standard by which government corruption is adjudicated, it needs to be assessed in proper context. 

At the time of the Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974, I had just finished college. PBS carried gavel-to-gavel coverage, and I listened to dozens upon dozens of hours of testimony. A year earlier, I had cast my first vote for George McGovern. My relatives, all of them Jewish, kept pointing out that almost all of Nixon’s partners in crime had German last names. 

As such, I was surrounded by people who were very fearful about Nixon’s plans for the country. I had similar concerns. In short, I was no Richard Nixon fan, and I believed that he got what he deserved. In reality, however, our Constitutional republic was never in jeopardy, and the country continued to function as it would have had the scandal not occurred. Despite this, a sitting President was forced to resign, approximately 60 people were indicted, of which almost 50 were convicted or pleaded guilty, and about two dozen were sent to prison. 

I have no issue with this level of accountability. Therefore, if we’re going to use Watergate as the gold standard, the perpetrators of the coup should receive punishment that is at least an order of magnitude more severe, given the fact that our Constitutional republic WAS placed in jeopardy. It was only due to Trump’s tenacity and fortitude, and the Hand of the LORD (most obviously in the deflection of the assassin’s bullet) that we are now in a position to turn the ship of state around.

There are those who will tell themselves that because the coup didn’t succeed, and Trump was legitimately ousted from office via the vote in 2020 (which raises a whole series of other questions that I won’t cover here), we’re okay, and our Constitutional republic prevailed. Not by a long shot! The fact is, the four years of the Biden administration were reminiscent of the last four years of Brezhnev’s leadership of the former Soviet Union from 1978-82. 

We had an obviously senile leader who was led by the nose by an unelected Politburo (a term I had used from the beginning of Biden’s presidency that is being uttered with some frequency in recent days). We had a Stalinist Dept of Justice (i.e., you show me the man and I’ll show you the crime), our Intelligence agencies were run by a bunch of Putin/KGB wannabes, and our news outlets were reminiscent of Pravda. As a result, the entire fabric of American life was in tatters going into the election of 2024.

I’d hate to think of what would have happened to this country had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election.

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Is AI Turning Us Into Dummies?

That AI is turning those who use it into dummies is not only self-evident, it’s irrefutable. ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study

“Of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.’ Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

“The task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient,” Kosmyna says. “But as we show in the paper, you basically didn’t integrate any of it into your memory networks.”

AI breaks the connection between learning and completing an academic task. With AI, students can check the box–task completed, paper written and submitted–without learning anything.

And by learning we don’t mean remember a factoid, we mean learning how to learn and learning how to think. As Substack writer maalvika explains in her viral essay compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting, digital technologies have compressed our attention spans via what I would term “rewarding distraction” so we can no longer read anything longer than a few sentences without wanting a summary, highlights video or sound-bite.

In other words, very few people will actually read the MIT paper: TL/DR. Here’s the precis: Your Brain on ChatGPT (mit.edu).

Here’s the full paper.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.

To understand the context–and indeed, the ultimate point of the research–we must start by understanding the structure of learning and thinking which is a complex set of processes. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is a framework that parses out some of these processes.

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), developed by John Sweller, provides a framework for understanding the mental effort required during learning and problem-solving. It identifies three categories of cognitive load: intrinsic cognitive load (ICL), which is tied to the complexity of the material being learned and the learner’s prior knowledge; extraneous cognitive load (ECL), which refers to the mental effort imposed by presentation of information; and germane cognitive load (GCL), which is the mental effort dedicated to constructing and automating schemas that support learning.

Checking the box “task completed” teaches us nothing. Actual learning and thinking require doing all the cognitive work that AI claims to do for us: reading the source materials, following the links between these sources, finding wormholes between various universes of knowledge, and thinking through claims and assumptions as an independent critical thinker.

When AI slaps together a bunch of claims and assumptions as authoritative, we don’t gain a superficial knowledge–we learn nothing. AI summarizes but without any ability to weed out questionable claims and assumptions because it has no tacit knowledge of contexts.

So AI spews out material without any actual cognitive value and the student slaps this into a paper without learning any actual cognitive skills. This cognitive debt can never be “paid back,” for the cognitive deficit lasts a lifetime.

Even AI’s vaunted ability to summarize robs us of the need to develop core cognitive abilities. As this researcher explains, “drudgery” is how we learn and learn to think deeply as opposed to a superficial grasp of material to pass an exam.

In Defense of Drudgery: AI is making good on its promise to liberate people from drudgery. But sometimes, exorcising drudgery can stifle innovation.

“Unfortunately, this innovation stifles innovation. When humans do the drudgery of literature search, citation validation, and due research diligence — the things OpenAI claims for Deep Research — they serendipitously see things they weren’t looking for. They build on the ideas of others that they hadn’t considered before and are inspired to form altogether new ideas. They also learn cognitive skills including the ability to filter information efficiently and recognize discrepancies in meaning.

I have seen in my field of systems analysis where decades of researchers have cited information that was incorrect — and expanded it into its own self-perpetuating world view. Critical thinking leads the researcher to not accept the work that others took as foundational and to spot the error. Tools such as Deep Research are incapable of spotting the core truth and so will perpetuate misdirection in research. That’s the opposite of good innovation.”

In summary: given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we’re de-learning how to innovate. What we’re “learning” is to substitute a superficially clever simulation of innovation for authentic innovation, and in doing so, we’re losing the core cognitive skills needed to innovate.

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