Tag: dumbing down

‘Arbiter of Truth’ & ‘Disinformation Guru’ Tells Public ‘Don’t do Your Own Research’

During a recent discussion, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and Executive Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab Beth Schwanke spoke about beguiling the public into believing establishment sources.

The discussion specifically regarded what they deem as misinformation and disinformation on elections and how Americans should not have a mind of their own.

The Pitt Disinformation Lab executive lambasted self-led investigations, instead saying Pennsylvanians should just blindly eat up what the ‘trusted sources’ claim to be true. She also discussed January 6th and the 2020 election as a failure of control over the minds of citizens.

“One thing everyone can do to make sure they are seeing accurate information is to use trusted sources. So in elections that means using the Department of State, that means using your county elections office, it means using media organizations that follow, that adhere, to professional journalism standards like … your local NPR affiliate,” Schwanke said. “And it doesn’t mean you know, ‘doing your own research’ and just asking questions and sharing, you know, posts from – I don’t know, in my case, it’s Uncle Joe, right? It means being thoughtful about where your sources are coming from.”

Keep reading

Fury over Seattle’s axing of gifted and talented schools for having too many white students grows, as unearthed footage shows weeping black mom begging board to keep them, before bully member forces audience to listen to poem to mark his birthday

Anger over Seattle’s decision to close its schools for gifted and talented students has grown – as newly-unearthed footage showed shocking behavior from the board who made the decision. 

Last month’s announcement that the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC) schools would shutter because they have too many white and Asian students enraged parents who say bright but disadvantaged children of all races will now suffer.

Kiley Riffell, whose two daughters attend HCC school Cascadia Elementary, said: ‘SPS is scrapping all HC programming and replacing it with empty promises, zero plan, and zero funding. I’m sad to watch so many families leave the public school system, but I can’t blame them.’

Eric Feeny told Fox13: ‘Until you have a better system, don’t give out a fake system or half solution’ 

Teachers will now be forced to manage classes of 30 children of mixed abilities at the same time, without additional resources or funding. The HCC schools, which are targeted at the top two percent of students, are now being aggressively phased out and will be gone completely by 2024. 

And newly-unearthed footage of the board behind the decision displayed behavior that will further concern parents, with two of the most vocal ringleaders since disgraced by bullying accusations.

During the January 2020 meeting, a high-achieving black tech leader and mom called Sara Jones, who flourished after attending a HCC, wept as she begged the board to keep the schools. 

‘It breaks my heart that little boys and girls like me may not get the opportunity that I did,’ she told the board, in remarks first reported by the Seattle Stranger.

Other parents of all ethnicities made similar pleas – only to be sharply cut-off by former board member Zachary DeWolf after their allotted time ran out. 

Keep reading

Seattle Is Getting Rid of Gifted Schools in a Bid To Increase Equity

Seattle is getting rid of its specialized public schools in an effort to increase racial equity. Ironically, this decision may end up hurting the very students the policy change is intended to help.

In 2021, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) moved to phase out its “highly capable cohort schools.” The district had three elementary schools, five middle schools, and three high schools devoted to teaching students at an accelerated pace. The district plans to finish phasing out the specialized schools by the 2027–28 school year. The reasons behind the change are rooted in the disproportionate number of white and Asian students in the program.

“The Seattle community and our families began to demonstrate discomfort with the racial gap disparity in classrooms and in schools now affiliated with” the advanced schools, reads a 2020 SPS task force report, which recommended doing away with the accelerated program. “Our current data regarding students receiving services who are identified as highly capable is disproportionate to the student populations who attend our school classrooms each day….Current practices must be interrupted and an authentic examination of our commitments and priorities must occur.”

School officials say that gifted students will still get specialized instruction through the “highly capable neighborhood” model it plans to start next school year. However, a recent story from The Seattle Times sheds doubt on Seattle’s ability to make good on this promise.

“SPS is offering a whole-classroom model where all students are in the same classroom and the teacher individualizes learning plans for each student,” writes reporter Claire Bryan. “Teachers won’t necessarily have additional staff in the classroom; the district is working to provide teachers with curriculum and instruction on how to make it work.”

The idea that teachers have the extra time to craft individual instruction for each student in a classroom with a wide range of ability levels is obviously far-fetched.

“You can only do so much differentiation,” Karen Stukovsky, a parent with three children in highly capable cohort schools, told the Times. She added that one principal told her, “You have some kids who can barely read and some kids who are reading ‘Harry Potter’ in first grade or kindergarten. How are you going to not only get those kids up to grade level and also challenge those kids who are already way above grade level?”

Keep reading

The bar exam will no longer be required to become a licensed attorney in Washington

The Washington Supreme Court approved multiple new avenues to become a licensed attorney in the state Friday, none of which require taking the bar exam. 

The court approved new ways for law students to become licensed attorneys in the Evergreen State. One method is an apprenticeship program for law school graduates who work under an attorney for six months, then submit a portfolio for review. The other option is to complete 12 credits of skills coursework, 500 hours of hands-on legal work prior to graduation, and submit a portfolio for the Washington State Bar to review.

“These recommendations come from a diverse body of lawyers in private and public practice, academics, and researchers who contributed immense insight, counterpoints and research to get us where we are today,” Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis said in a statement. “With these alternative pathways, we recognize that there are multiple ways to ensure a competent, licensed body of new attorneys who are so desperately needed around the state.”

Law clerks can also become lawyers without going to law school by completing standardized education courses under the guidance of an attorney and 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern. 

In 2020, the Washington Supreme Court created the Bar Licensure Task Force to examine alternative paths to becoming a licensed attorney in the state. The task force looked at the “efficacy of the Washington state bar exam” and assessed “disproportionate impacts on examinees of color and first generation examinees.”

While Washington’s alternative licensing program has a DEI element, states with similar programs have implemented their programs for other reasons.

California is considering DEI as a barometer for expanding its licensing program that would help students “avoid the heavy expense of preparing for the traditional bar exam — a burden that falls disproportionately on historically disadvantaged groups, including first-generation graduates, women, and candidates of color,” according to Reuters.

The new avenues to becoming licensed address the “serious legal deserts problem” in Washington and “help remedy the fairness and bias concerns with the traditional licensure,” according to Seattle University School of Law Dean Anthony Varona, co-chair of the task force. 

Keep reading

Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom Can Only Offer Artificial Educations

Educators are grappling with how to approach ever-evolving generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can create language, images, and audio. Programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot pose far different challenges from the AI of yesteryear that corrected spelling or grammar. Generative AI generates whatever content it’s asked to produce, whether it’s a lab report for a biology course, a cover letter for a particular job, or an op-ed for a newspaper.

This groundbreaking development leaves educators and parents asking: Should teachers teach with or against generative AI, and why? 

Technophiles may portray skeptics as Luddites — folks of the same ilk that resisted the emergence of the pen, the calculator, or the word processor — but this technology possesses the power to produce thought and language on someone’s behalf, so it’s drastically different. In the writing classroom, specifically, it’s especially problematic because the production of thought and language is the goal of the course, not to mention the top goals of any legitimate and comprehensive education. So count me among the educators who want to proceed with caution, and that’s coming from a writing professor who typically embraces educational technology. 

Keep reading

Academics embrace new ‘deficit framing’ concept to justify unprepared, underperforming, or immature students

ANALYSIS: In other words, there isn’t a problem with students entering college grossly unprepared. The problem is college is too challenging. Those that say otherwise are colonizing subjugators.

It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.

They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.

Yet, although some professors view these deficits as problems to be fixed, many in academia have embraced bits of pedagogical fluff intertwined with fashionable DEI that suggest there is something demotivating if not bigoted about acknowledging deficits as deficits and holding students to basic academic or professional standards, while implying bad grades and a lack of maturity on the part of students are simple quirks educators just need to better accept.

One such fluffy concept is that of “deficit framing,” sometimes referred to as “deficit thinking” or a “deficit model lens.” As defined by education researcher Chelsea Heinbach in a 2021 interview, deficit thinking is “the belief that there is a prescribed ‘correct’ way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit.”

Keep reading

“American Students Are Falling Behind”: Poor Math Scores Are Now A National Security Threat

The most recent results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) highlight a concerning trend for U.S. students in the field of math.

In comparison to their counterparts in other industrialized nations, American students are falling behind. The rather sobering results revealed a 13-point decline for U.S. students when compared to the 2018 exam.

In stark contrast, 28 countries and economies managed to either maintain or improve their 2018 math scores, with countries such as Switzerland and Japan leading the way—and leaving the United States in the dust. These considerably more successful nations share a number of common characteristics, including, most notably of all, shorter school closures during the pandemic, as noted in the report.

Obviously concerned by the findings, the Defense Department has called for a new initiative to provide support for education in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As The Hechinger Report reported, China, the United States’ biggest rival, has eight times the number of college graduates in these disciplines compared to the United States, while Russia, another major foe, has four times the number of engineers. This alarming disparity, noted the Hechinger Report piece, has prompted concerns beyond the realm of education. The United States’ mathematical failings pose a direct threat to its technological supremacy.

Other commentators have gone a step further. Falling math scores, they suggest, should be viewed as a national security threat. They’re right.

Mathematics plays a critical role in various fields such as the physical sciences, technology, business, financial services, and infrastructure. For instance, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry are fundamental parts of architectural design. Moreover, math plays a significant role in medicine, AI, and quantum computing. Math serves as the foundation for virtually all scientific and industrial research and development. Essentially, mathematics can be seen as the underlying operating system that makes the world go round.

Which begs the trillion-dollar question: What can be done?

Keep reading

Seattle English Students Told It’s “White Supremacy” To Love Reading, Writing

Students in a Seattle English class were told that their love of reading and writing is a characteristic of “white supremacy,” in the latest Seattle Public Schools high school controversy. The lesson plan has one local father speaking out, calling it “educational malpractice.”

As part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week, World Literature and Composition students at Lincoln High School were given a handout with definitions of the “9 characteristics of white supremacy,” according to the father of a student. Given the subject matter of the class, the father found it odd this particular lesson was brought up.

The Seattle high schoolers were told that “Worship of the Written Word” is white supremacy because it is “an erasure of the wide range of ways we communicate with each other.” By this definition, the very subject of World Literature and Composition is racist. It also chides the idea that we hyper-value written communication because it’s a form of “honoring only what is written and even then only what is written to a narrow standard, full of misinformation and lies.” The worksheet does not provide any context for what it actually means.

“I feel bad for any students who actually internalize stuff like this as it is setting them up for failure,” the father explained to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.

The father asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution against his child by Seattle Public Schools. He said the other pieces of the worksheet were equally disturbing.

The worksheet labels “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “perfectionism” as white supremacy. If students deny their own racism — or that any of the nine characteristics are legitimately racist — is also white supremacy. Denialism or being overly defensive is a racist example of an “entitlement to name what is an [sic] isn’t racism and that those with power have a right to be shielded from the stresses of antiracist work.”

The father argues the concepts are “incoherent and cannot stand any sort of reasoned analysis.” And he notes that it’s set up to ensure students accept every concept without ever questioning the claims.

“How is a 15-year-old kid supposed to object in class when ‘denial and defensiveness’ is itself a characteristic of white supremacy? This is truly educational malpractice.”

Keep reading

California School Drops $250,000 On ‘Woke Kindergarten’ Program to “Disrupt Whiteness”, Students’ Grades Dip Even Further

According to The Daily Caller, a California school district spent $250,000 on a ‘Woke Kindergarten’ curriculum while the majority of its students failed grade-level math, reading, and writing.

Woke Kindergarten has been giving teachers at Glassbrook Elementary School in Hayward training sessions for two years and is funded through a federal program for assisting low-performing schools, according to the Chronicle. Test scores for students at the school have fallen under the program, which pushes anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages.

Zeus Leonardo, a professor of education at the University of California Berkeley, says Woke Kindergarten promotes abolitionist education.

Their chief aim is to make “politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo told the Chronicle.

Some teachers questioned using the program because it is linked to insane left-wing politics and activism, the Chronicle reported.

One teacher, Tiger Craven-Neeley, said he supports talking about racism in the classroom but was confused about one of the objectives set by the training to “disrupt whiteness” in the school, according to the Chronicle. He also questioned a trainer who used the phrase “so-called United States.”

Questioning the idea of “disrupting whiteness” got Craven-Neeley temporarily banned from training sessions, he told the Chronicle.

“What does that mean?” Craven-Neeley told the Chronicle. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

A teacher who wished to remain anonymous in the program said there could be no divergence from what the program advocates. “It slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice that it’s not what they wanted to hear.”

Keep reading