RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/28/dozens-of-universities-face-lawsuits-for-failing-to-provide-on-campus-learning/

College is absurdly expensive. While some of the mark up comes from the schools’ reputations, much of the price tag is in exchange for the experience. Access to professors, relationships with classmates, and academic, athletic, artistic, religious, and social activities and groups are all a major part of both the “college experience” and the education itself. These aspects, and their associated benefits, are lost when classes are moved to Zoom, or worse, prerecorded lectures. Further, college campuses provide resources for students which are lacking at home, including quiet study locations and access to comprehensive libraries.

While many schools acknowledged the need to refund students for the portion of their on-campus dorms and meal plans unused, many believe that tuition should be likewise discounted, for the commensurate drop in quality and failure to deliver the promised experience.

And since schools themselves aren’t offering the financial credit, students at various universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Drexel, Georgetown, Liberty, UC Berkeley, Michigan State, Vanderbilt, and others, are banding together in class action lawsuits. The students are suing on three counts: breach of contract, conversion, and unjust enrichment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/distance_learnings_downfall_.html

Disasters, it is said, often have silver linings, and in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this might be a widening access to computerized learning. Now, it is alleged, as a result of school closings, thousands of youngsters, disproportionately poor and members of minority groups, will finally possess the advantages of their more affluent schoolmates. In California, for example, thanks to Google’s generosity, some 4000 students will enjoy free Chromebooks while 100,000 rural households will have no-cost  Internet access for three months. Moreover, the LA schoolboard had previously allocated an emergency $100 million to provide free laptops while partnering with Verizon for free Internet. According to Linda Darling-Hammond, the California State Board of Education president, Google’s (and similar corporate) generosity will double the number of students with Internet access to help close the digital gap all the while also instructing teachers and parents how to master distance learning.

All sounds terrific, of course and, perhaps the race-related (and income) achievement gap will finally close, or at least narrow. Alas, don’t bet on it. Formidable obstacles will impede these good intentions and, most notably, distance learning may well exacerbate achievement gaps, the very opposite of what is intended.

Recall another Los Angeles’ venture to overcome dreadful academic achievement levels via a computer-for-everyone initiative.  In 2013 the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) decided to give every student a tablet computer loaded with a digital curriculum. 21st century here we come! The plan was to buy some 650,000 Apple iPads (only 43,261 were actually acquired) along with the necessary networking equipment, labs and the software from Pearson, a major education publisher. Total cost, financed by school bonds, was nearly $1.3 billion. The district’s superintendent John Deasy predictably foresaw the initiative as helping to close the race-and ethnic-related achievement gap. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/academia_bows_to_islamic_terror.html

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but not everyone shares in the cost.

Even fewer comprehend that the threat to our democracy is more likely to come from the internal erosion of our civic institutions than from external forces.

The most corrupting influence on our democracy is rooted in political correctness in our education system. Whereas there once was an emphasis on civic education as a means to imbue the citizenry with the values of the Constitution, that emphasis has long been diminished.

From elementary school through college, basic requirements in American history and civics have been replaced by political trendiness.

Consequently, it is not surprising that our educational system has produced generation after generation of college administrators who suffer from an embarrassing ignorance of the fundamental political values of the republic.

These present-day Gletkins (the character who embodied the ideology of Stalinism in Arthur Koestler’s classic, Darkness at Noon) have been suckled on a steady diet of political correctness, and so it follows that they are quick to trample basic liberty when it gets in the way of political expediency.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/499385-trump-rips-columbia-as-disgraceful-institution-after-study-showed

President Trump ripped Columbia University as a “disgraceful institution” in a new interview released Sunday after it released a study last week concluding thousands of lives could have been spared in the U.S. if shutdowns weren’t delayed.

Sharyl Attkisson asked the president about the study, which determined almost 36,000 deaths from COVID-19 through early May could have been avoided if social distancing and lockdowns had started earlier. 

The president called the fact that the university would issue the study “a disgrace” on the show “Full Measure.”

“Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me,” Trump said.

“And I saw that report,” he added. “It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.”

Trump cited his January travel ban on foreign nationals from China as evidence of his administration’s early actions, adding that he took “tremendous heat” for the decision at the time. 

Columbia University did not immediately return a request for comment.

The study focused on transmission in metropolitan areas and concluded that social distancing efforts reduced the rates of COVID-19 contraction. The research was conducted with counterfactual experiments, which researchers acknowledged are based on hypothetical assumptions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-college-testing-mistake-11590189601?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.

The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.

California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-colleges-have-accepted-6-billion-in-undisclosed-donations-from-foreign-governments-doe-probe-finds/

The Department of Education has discovered at least $6 billion in unreported donations to American universities from adversarial foreign nations, Townhall reported on Friday.

The DoE revealed its updates in a May 19 letter to Congress and a subsequent briefing to several ranking House Republicans who are conducting an investigation into the foreign funding of U.S. educational institutions.

The investigation was spurred by increasing reports of Chinese funding at U.S. educational institutions, including the prevalence of Confucius institutes on U.S. campuses. Confucius institutes are Chinese-government funded centers which ostensibly promote Chinese language and culture, but which U.S. agencies have warned spread propaganda for China’s government.

“Some [Institutions of Higher Education] leaders are starting to acknowledge the threat of foreign academic espionage and have been working with federal law enforcement to address gaps in reporting and transparency,” the letter from the DoE’s Office of the General Counsel reads. “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision-making, mission, and values of too many institutions.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/21/multiple-universities-refuse-to-cooperate-with-federal-investigations-into-ties-to-china/

Several universities around the nation are currently under investigation by the Department of Education over their alleged financial ties to the Chinese government. A report published this week suggests that many universities are refusing to comply with a standard request to produce internal documents.

According to a report by the College Fix, several universities and colleges that are under investigation by the Department of Education are refusing to release internal documents that may contain evidence of undisclosed financial grants from the Chinese government.
The report claims that lawyers for several universities refused to comply with a request to produce documents, arguing that they were entitled to privacy under “Freedom of Information Act exemptions and legal privileges.” A letter from the Department of Education did not name the universities and colleges that have refused to comply with the request for documents.

Department of Education General Counsel Reed Rubinstein believes that many American universities and colleges have been compromised by foreign governments, China being one of the primary governments in question.  “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision making, mission, and values of too many institutions,” Rubinstein said.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-coming-upheaval-in-education/

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The economic impact of COVID-19 will take its toll on education funding. The National Education Association is in full freak-out mode, “calling for an additional $175 billion to stabilize education funding—the $30.7 billion authorized thus far is not nearly enough.” The California Teachers Association echoes the $175 billion figure and adds that it should be part of a $1 trillion pay-out in the next CARES Act.

Referring to the 2008 recession when class sizes increased and teachers were laid off, United Teachers of Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl insists, “We cannot go back to that.”

We are currently the second-highest spending nation in the world, pouring more than $700 billion a year into education. Where do the unions think the additional billions of dollars are supposed to come from? Capital gains, withholding, corporate, and sales tax revenues are going to take a huge hit, and you can only print so much money before it becomes worthless. 

As such, education is going to have to make do with less. The question then becomes, how best to manage the cuts?