H.L. Mencken on education…
Tag: education
The Next Generation Is Being Groomed For Destruction – Here’s Why They Are Vulnerable
The past week the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the US, issued guidance on the use of leftist activist symbols in public school classrooms. As part of their advice to teachers, they recommended violating district and state rules and hanging items such as pride flags and BLM flags. This is generally cited as a means to “start a conversation,” a way for teachers to circumvent school rules. They might not be able to spend each day spinning lessons on woke concepts, but if a child asks a question about the flags in the room, then they can provide “context.”
The NEA has been one of the primary driving forces behind the intrusion of woke ideology into the public school setting. Around 97% of their political fundraising goes towards Democrat candidates. They seem to be obsessed with the grooming of children into the leftist fold with lessons focused on Critical Race Theory, gender-fluid propaganda and socialism. If you want to know where the sudden surge in social-justice cultism came from in terms of America’s kids, leftist teachers and the NEA are to blame.
Keep in mind that the teachers’ unions are encouraging their members to break the law and lose their jobs, just to double-down on political indoctrination. Contrary to popular belief, teachers do NOT have free speech rights while at work. Woke teachers might fantasize about being Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society fighting against the system, but the the truth is they ARE the system. There are numerous reasons why rules for teacher behavior are necessary.
Narcissistic teachers are parasites that view the classroom as a place where they are owed affirmation. They see the children in their class as a captive audience that they can feed off of to gain attention, admiration and justification. They look down on parents as inferiors and treat students as their own personal puppets for molding and controlling.
In their minds, the kids don’t belong to the parents, the kids belong to “society.” Progressive educators see themselves as the benevolent shepherds chosen by the collective to condition the minds of the next generation. Teaching academics is secondary – manufacturing new leftist recruits is more important to them. This is the hill they have chosen to die on and they will not back away from it. They have made it clear that the targeting of children is their paramount concern.
To be sure, the woke cult is losing steam lately. Even the kids are starting to fight back against it, with the largest spike in conservatism among high-school boys that the US has seen in a long time. They are getting fed up. But there is definitely good reasons why leftists are implementing psychological warfare against America’s youth. Lets examine what I feel are the top three…
Biden admin withholding key funding for schools with hunting, archery programs
The Biden administration is blocking key federal funding earmarked under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 for schools with hunting and archery programs.
According to federal guidance circulated among hunting education groups and shared with Fox News Digital, the Department of Education determined that, under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) passed last year, school hunting and archery classes are precluded from receiving federal funding. The interpretation could impact millions of American children enrolled in such programs.
“It’s a negative for children. As a former educator of 30-plus years, I was always trying to find a way to engage students,” Tommy Floyd, the president of the National Archery in the Schools Program, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “In many communities, it’s a shooting sport, and the skills from shooting sports, that help young people grow to be responsible adults. They also benefit from relationships with role models.”
“You’ve got every fish and wildlife agency out there working so hard to utilize every scrap of funding, not only for the safety and hunter education, but for the general understanding of why stewardship is so important when it comes to natural resources,” he continued. “Any guidance where it’s even considered a ‘maybe’ or a prohibition for shooting sports is a huge negative.”
California’s War on Math
“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.
Math made California prosper.
It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output.
All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.
But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself.
Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.
On July 12, that’s what happened when California’s Board of Education, composed of eleven teachers, bureaucrats, professors—and a student—decided to approve the California Mathematics Framework.
Technically, the CMF is just a series of recommendations. As a practical matter, it’s the new reality. School districts and textbook manufacturers are already adapting to the new standards.
RIP, Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto Educator Who Stood up to Woke Bullying—and Paid the Price
In late April, 2021, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer named Kike Ojo-Thompson presented a lecture to senior Toronto public-school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that (Ojo-Thompson believes) afflicts Canadian society. Canada, she said, is a bastion of “white supremacy and colonialism,” in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.
Anyone who lives in Canada knows this to be a preposterous claim. But in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which opportunistic DEI entrepreneurs in Canada treated as a gold rush, such lies have been treated as unfalsifiable. The same is true of the (equally preposterous) claim that Canada’s experience with anti-black racism directly mirrors that of the United States. And so it was expected that Ojo-Thompson’s audience would simply nod politely and keep their mouths shut until her jeremiad had concluded.
But one audience member refused to submit: Richard Bilkszto, a long-time principal at the Toronto District School Board who’d also once taught at an inner-city school in upstate New York. Having worked on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he told Ojo-Thompson that her generalizations about the two countries seemed misguided; and that denouncing Canada in such a vicious manner would do “an incredible disservice to our learners.”
Joe Biden’s Incoherent Student Loan Logic
In the hours after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down his attempt to forgive large amounts of federal student debt, President Joe Biden promised two new actions to ease borrowers’ burdens. The president’s next steps and his rhetoric suggest that little has changed in his flawed logic regarding student loan forgiveness—which has always seemed to have been more about electoral politics than serious policymaking, despite the huge price tag.
Going forward, Biden’s student loan plan will include the two steps announced Friday and one lingering element from his earlier proposal that wasn’t part of the Supreme Court’s review.
First, Biden has invoked a different federal statute in another attempt to unilaterally forgive some student debt. Under powers contained in the Higher Education Act of 1965, Biden intends to direct Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.” That will be a federal ruling process, and those tend to take a while—the White House says the first step is a virtual public hearing on July 18—and it is unclear how much debt could be forgiven this way, who would benefit, or what the cost to taxpayers will be.
In the meantime, federal student loan payments will come due again in October after being paused since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in March 2020. But borrowers will be able to ease back into paying what they owe: Biden also announced Friday a 12-month “on-ramp” process during which missed payments will not accrue penalties and won’t result in delinquent borrowers having their credit scores dinged.
When they do restart, those monthly payments will be lower than before the pandemic for many borrowers. That’s due to the third part of Biden’s plan, which caps monthly payments at 5 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income—which the Department of Education defines as income that exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. In practice, that means a single borrower with no children starts making payments on income that exceeds $20,400. Additionally, outstanding loan balances will be forgiven after 10 years for those who borrowed $12,000 or less, with a maximum payment period of 20 years no matter how much was borrowed.
That part of the plan isn’t new, but the Department of Education finalized those rules on Friday just after the Supreme Court’s ruling. “It will cut monthly payments to zero dollars for millions of low-income borrowers, save all other borrowers at least $1,000 per year,” Cardona promised.
The consequences of capping monthly payments and also capping the length of time a loan can be in repayment should be fairly obvious: A lot of loans will never get paid back in full. “On average, borrowers (current and future) might only expect to repay approximately $0.50 for each dollar they borrow,” the Brookings Institution concluded in an analysis last year.
That’s going to create some major perverse incentives in the already screwed-up student loan marketplace. Brookings warns that Biden’s income-based repayment plan will result in “tuition inflation” and “increased borrowing,” particularly by students in pursuit of “low value, low earning” degrees.
Joe Biden Says He Wants To Crack Down on ‘Privilege’ in Education. He Once Called UPenn’s President To Get His Granddaughter In.
Shortly after the Supreme Court declared affirmative action college admission policies unconstitutional, President Joe Biden said his administration would direct the Department of Education to scrutinize how “practices like legacy admissions … expand privilege instead of opportunity.”
The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.
In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.
Maisy Biden’s college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of “legacy admissions” Biden has slammed. The story also highlights the Biden family’s occasionally shady dealings with the University of Pennsylvania just as congressional Republicans are probing alleged ethical misconduct by both Joe and Hunter Biden.
Maisy Biden was never much of a student. But she had her sights set on the University of Pennsylvania, whose 5.9 percent acceptance rate made it one of the most exclusive schools in the country.
“I applied early decision to Penn today!!” Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.
Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy’s application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.
On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was “going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow.” Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he “had a great talk with Guttman [sic].”
“Maisy still in the game for regular acceptance. But must do well in class this period. It’s real,” Joe Biden wrote on December 15. “We should talk about tutors etc starting tomorrow.”
Dumbing Down The SAT Perfectly Sums Up The State Of American Education
In a recent announcement, College Board expressed plans to make significant changes to the SAT that will go into effect in 2024. The test will be fully digital and shortened from roughly three hours to two. The reading passages will be made shorter and the math section will allow the use of a calculator throughout. In short, the test will be easier for both the testers and the person being tested.
According to College Board, the changes are meant to address concerns with access because of Covid and the lack of equity in the SAT, which some allege favors certain racial and socioeconomic groups. The complaint about equity has led a large number of colleges to stop using SAT scores as part of their admissions. Evidently, College Board is hoping that making the test easier and shorter will narrow these performance gaps and restore the usefulness of the SAT as an assessment for college readiness.
However, by working off false premises, College Board is coming to the wrong conclusion. All these proposed changes will simply lower the standard for everyone, hardly address problems with equity, and make the SAT all the more useless.
Any teacher or “data coach” who analyzes test results can attest to seeing this kind of logic play out in most state standardized tests. In the beginning, these tests were more challenging and designed to assess higher-level thinking skills. Over time, however, wave after wave of low scores and obvious performance gaps cause the test creators to lower standards dramatically. Finally, the test becomes a pointless hurdle for teachers and students to jump through, inviting calls for a new standardized test that actually says something.
Dumbing down a test is often subtle, but there are a few ways to spot it: make passages shorter with lower reading levels, simplify the math problems, allow a calculator, dictionary, and even provide some basic strategies for working through the test. Along with these changes, the scoring is often needlessly complicated with a series of formulas and algorithms replete with multipliers and random variables to supposedly indicate whether a student “meets” or “masters” expectations. Hence, standardized tests usually fill a whole sheet with a multitude of categories, bar graphs, tables, and color-coded labels to communicate a tester’s final score.
This was the evolution of Texas’s standardized test, the STAAR, which started in 2013. In its earlier days, it was highly regarded in terms of quality, and many students did poorly on it. These were the days of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), so mass failure on a campus often meant the threat of a school or district receiving a failing grade and being reconstituted. Naturally, this led to wailing and gnashing of teeth among administrators and educators, who were now having to shape up their instruction and pay attention to data.
To make matters worse, the data from STAAR indicated serious gaps between students of different races. Thus, even the more affluent campuses that had relatively high pass rates were still given low marks because the few students who failed were largely students of color. Thus, for the sake of equity, there was an effort among all campuses to teach to the bottom and get these few students to pass while stronger students were largely neglected.
A Rural, Waldorf Microschool Gets Shut Down By State Regulators
Ariel Maguire gathered together with other moms in her rural area of the Big Island of Hawaii to create a child-centered educational solution for local families. It was late 2021 and the parents realized that nearly two years of pandemic policies had left their kids behind both academically and socially.
There weren’t a lot of child care or early-education options nearby. “The closest place to send our kids would be a little over an hour drive each way and it has a huge waitlist,” Maguire told me in a recent podcast interview. “We were all struggling because we’d been stuck at home with our kids without community for a couple of years and needed to get back to work.”
So Maguire and the other moms decided to build what they couldn’t find. They established their program, Kulike Learning Garden, as a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, as well as a private membership association, or PMA, that works legally like a social club to facilitate voluntary association within a cooperative community of shared roles and expectations. They hired an experienced Waldorf teacher, and opened their Waldorf-inspired, child-focused, nature-based microschool on a family farm in January 2022 with about 15 children, ages three to six. Parent volunteers shared in the teaching responsibilities.
Over the following months, the microschool, which cost families $600 a month, flourished. “The kids were all thriving,” said Maguire, an accountant and mom of four young girls. “The feedback we were getting was that the kids were doing so much better at home because of this new routine. A lot of their behaviors that we were experiencing during the pandemic had calmed down. The kids were having a blast.”
Then, in November 2022, officials from the Hawaii Department of Human Services showed up on the farm property. “They were very Men in Black style,” recalled Maguire. “They had glasses on, masks on, multiple cars. A representative from the Attorney General’s office was there, and they were interrogating us, really making us out to seem like we were doing something really wrong, but we truly felt that we weren’t.”
One week later, Maguire and the other parents got served with a $55,500 fine and a court date for operating as an “unlicensed preschool.” They tried to challenge the state regulators, but it seemed like an uphill battle. “Circuit court takes at least a year to get through, and so looking at the attorney costs of doing that and the time it would require of me, and meanwhile, I have these four children who I’m trying to educate and prepare for life. I just didn’t have the time or the money to do that,” said Maguire. So she and the other moms agreed to shut down their microschool and pay a $5,000 fine.
“It was devastating for all of these children and families to suddenly close at the end of December,” said Maguire. “Everybody is homeschooling right now because there’s really no other option. We have play dates and meet up at the beach or the market, and that’s really it.”
H.L. Mencken on education…
Hellbound and Down 
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