Tag: education

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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Basic Civics Test in Oklahoma Triggers Democrat Outrage

Democrats are furious with Oklahoma lawmakers for requiring out-of-state teachers, many of them from deep-blue states, to pass a basic civics test before teaching in Oklahoma classrooms.

The law is straightforward: anyone responsible for educating American students must demonstrate knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and basic principles of government. 

Yet the left is treating this as if it were some radical assault on public education.

The test itself is not complicated. It mirrors the civics portion of the U.S. naturalization exam—the same test immigrants must pass to become citizens. 

Sample questions include: Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? or What is the supreme law of the land?

If immigrants seeking citizenship can learn these answers, surely teachers entrusted with the education of young Americans should be held to the same standard.

The statistics speak for themselves. 

According to a 2022 survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only 47% of Americans could name all three branches of government. Even more troubling, 23% could not name a single branch. 

The growing crisis of civic illiteracy reflects decades of neglect in schools where basic U.S. history and constitutional principles have been sidelined in favor of political activism. 

Teachers who do not know or respect America’s founding documents cannot be expected to instill civic responsibility in their students.

Oklahoma’s approach is both reasonable and popular. Polling consistently shows that Americans want more civics in schools. 

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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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Baltimore Schools Collapse Into “Failure Factory” Under Democratic Mismanagement

President Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting earlier on Tuesday, “I think one of the most important things we’re doing at this table is bringing education back to the states, where parents and local school boards run it.”

This leads us to President Trump’s executive order earlier this year to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. At the time, the president pointed to an uncomfortable truth for Democrats running Baltimore City Schools and City Hall: 40% of public high schools have zero students proficient in math. That damning statistic came from Fox 45 investigative reporter Chris Papst’s coverage of Baltimore’s education crisis. 

For nearly eight years, ZeroHedge has followed Papst’s investigative work through the trenches of school to school across crime-ridden Baltimore City. Papst has conducted all the investigative work through Project Baltimore, in collaboration with Fox45 News. He has spent years reporting on optically displeasing headlines that merely expose how progressive elites in City Hall and in the local school system seemingly rob generations of children of a future for short-term gain to line their pockets and funnel taxpayer funds into the Democratic Party machine, which is nothing more than corrupt unions. 

Many of Papst’s reports have gone viral, including the 2023 report cited by President Trump, which revealed that 40% of Baltimore City high schools had zero students proficient in math. 

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Ontario teachers union hands out awards for activism, not math or science

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (EFTO) has handed out more than a dozen awards but not one recognized classroom excellence in teaching math, literacy, science or pedagogy without emphasizing a progressive activist lens.

This month, the union announced its 2024–25 award recipients, honouring “outstanding contributions.” Every academic category from curriculum development to children’s literature was tied to activism, equity, or social justice.

A closer look shows that the “academic” or “creative” awards were overwhelmingly for work that embedded activism into academics. Literature awards went to projects advancing social justice themes, curriculum awards highlighted equity-focused resources, and even environmental education was framed through climate justice, elevating union-aligned activism as the highest professional achievement.

Roughly two-thirds of all awards celebrated work in anti-racism, anti-oppression, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), or other progressive initiatives, while the rest were awarded for service to the union. No recognition was given for improving literacy, numeracy, or classroom learning outcomes.

Teachers’ unions exist to protect the labour rights of members. As such, their core responsibilities to collective bargaining, safeguarding against unfair discipline, and lobbying for manageable class sizes and working conditions. In Ontario, the ETFO has broadened that role into one that functions as a political and cultural actor inside the education system. Its public campaigns, professional development programs, and awards now consistently emphasize anti-racism, anti-oppression, 2SLGBTQ+ issues, climate change, and decolonization.

Recognizing traditional teaching skills was not on the agenda. True North asked the ETFO why none of this year’s awards recognized classroom excellence in math, literacy, science, or pedagogy unless explicitly tied to progressive political causes. The union did not respond.

The union has received negative public feedback in recent months over its focus on activism. At its Annual General Meeting in August, the ETFO delegates passed a motion to develop teaching resources addressing anti-Palestinian racism. Seventy-one per cent supported the measure, which was intended to affirm Palestinian identity in schools and equip educators to confront bias.

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Billionaires Backing Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up Amid DEI Rollback

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

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California invested millions in STEM for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

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Mamdani’s Plan for Schools Draws Angry Backlash from New York Parents

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani continues to make waves with his radical agenda. This time he’s targeting charter schools, producing some strong reactions from parents and residents.

In an exclusive report by The New York Post, the newspaper wrote that Mamdani “plans to declare war on charter schools if he’s elected mayor,” according to a survey he answered June before the Democratic primary.

The state assemblyman said he would “fight efforts to open more charters, which largely educate minority, working-class students, and even opposed the schools sharing space in city-owned buildings,” the article read.

“I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” he said in a Staten Island Advance questionnaire.

Mother Arlene Rosado, who has a son in 10th grade at the “Nuasin Next Generation” K-12 charter school in the Bronx, said Mamdani doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“I don’t understand why Mamdani would be hostile to charter schools,” she said. “I think he’s very misinformed.”

Rosado reportedly moved her son there because he was being bullied in public school. His situation has since improved after he was given the option to leave.

“Charter schools are helping kids in the community,” Rosado added. “You should always have a choice. Taking that choice away is not cool.”

The socialist candidate claimed charter schools divert public resources and mainly serve the wealthy, while harming lower-income families, The Hill reported last month.

Mamdani also promised to conduct audits of charter schools that are within the city’s Department of Education buildings, claiming they get too much public money.

“I also oppose the co-locating of charter schools inside DOE school buildings, but for those already co-located my administration would undertake a comprehensive review of charter school funding to address the unevenness of our system,” his survey answer read.

He added, “Matching funds, overcharged rent, and Foundation Aid funding would be part of this audit as my administration determined how to manage the reality of co-located schools and legal entitlements.”

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‘Whitelash’: Professors say white students get angry, frustrated by ‘anti-racist education’

Two social work scholars argue that their “anti-racist education” efforts in the classroom faced “whitelash” from white students, who became emotionally distraught, pushed back by using “color-blind rhetoric,” or later wrote negative course reviews.

Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University recently published an article in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research detailing their experience creating a “pedagogy of discomfort” to challenge white supremacy in the classroom.

The method was criticized by two scholars in interviews with The College Fix, who called the experiment somewhat abusive.

“[T]he more I reflect on that paper, the more I find it cruel to shame students based on immutable identities they hold, regardless of identity,” one observer said via email. “For the professors, it appeared that White and male students were their target.”

The College Fix reached out via email to both Hafen and Villescas regarding some of the concerns raised about their teaching methods. Hafen and Villescas did not reply.

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10 Examples That Show That Our Society Is Going Completely Insane

It has been said that there is no cure for crazy.  If that is actually true, we are in all sorts of trouble.  When I was growing up, the crazy people were on the fringes of our society.  Today, it is the normal people that have been pushed to the fringes of our society.  If you think that I am exaggerating, just look around you.  Much of the population is literally behaving like maniacs.  We all laughed when “Idiocracy” was released in theaters in 2006 because it was so absurd, but in retrospect that film was essentially a warning about what would soon be coming.  Over the past 20 years, our society has been turned totally upside down.  The lunatics are running the asylum, and many of them are lashing out in wild and unpredictable ways.

If you think that I am being too harsh, please read the rest of this article.  I truly wish that I was exaggerating, but I am not.  The following are 10 examples that show that our society is going completely insane…

#1 Would you join a “scream club”?.  In Chicago, a very large group of liberals meets even Sunday evening at 7 PM to scream their heads off…

Scream Club Chicago has found an unorthodox way to let off some steam and make life a little easier.

The group meets on the North Avenue Beach pier every Sunday at 7 p.m., where they breathe deeply and collectively scream into the open air over Lake Michigan.

The group was started by Manny Hernande, a breathwork coach who was looking for an outlet to deal with stress. He invited others to join him in the screaming ritual on social media. Now the weekly therapy session are growing in popularity.

#2 In America today, the violent lunatic walking next to you could snap at any moment.  At a Walmart in Michigan, a man that was shopping in the grocery section suddenly pulled out a knife and started stabbing people…

“It was a guy with a knife — people were screaming and running in all directions,” said Tasha Nash, a Walmart employee. “I saw someone stabbed in the eye.”

Amber Paull, another shopper, described the assailant as a foreign man who “just lost it” and began randomly attacking people in the produce and grocery section. “An African American man pulled a hero move — he drew his pistol and tried to stop the attacker,” Paull said. “But then people started screaming, and the suspect managed to slip back into the crowd.”

#3 There are more than half a million victims of child abuse in the United States.  A recent case in Florida was particularly horrifying…

Four adults were arrested after being accused of abusing nine children in their Florida home by caging them with plywood under a bunk bed and spraying them in the face with vinegar as a form of punishment, authorities said Friday.

Husband and wife Brian and Jill Griffeth, along with 21-year-old Dallin and 19-year-old Liberty Griffeth, were arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse, the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Friday.

The four adults are suspected of abusing five biological and four adopted children — ages 7 to 16 — at their home in Fort White, Florida, roughly 35 miles northwest of Gainesville, the sheriff’s office said.

#4 Some school districts are now paying kids to come to school because chronic absenteeism has become so pervasive…

Educators are trying to incentivize students to come to school, with some districts even paying students for their attendance.

Others have encouraged teachers to have attendance count towards grades or limit the number of assignments that can be completed online, The Boston Globe reports.

Twenty states reported that more than 30 percent of their students missed at least three weeks of school in 2022-23, according to latest figures from the DoE.

#5 Mad scientists feel like they have the right to “play God” without our permission.  For example, not too long ago a group of mad scientists on the west coast attempted to conduct an unauthorized geoengineering experiment in San Francisco Bay which was intended to dim the sun…

The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay.

They also offer a rare glimpse into the vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth’s warming, work that has often occurred outside public view. Such research is drawing increased interest at a time when efforts to address the root cause of climate change — burning fossil fuels — are facing setbacks in the U.S. and Europe. But the notion of human tinkering with the weather and climate has drawn a political backlash and generated conspiracy theories, adding to the challenges of mounting even small-scale tests.

Last year’s experiment, led by the University of Washington and intended to run for months, lasted about 20 minutes before being shut down by Alameda city officials who objected that nobody had told them about it beforehand.

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