RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dumber-and-brainwashed/

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – known as The Nation’s Report Card – “gives us a window into the state of our K-12 education system.” The results provide educators, policymakers, elected officials, and parents across the country with information regarding how much students are learning in the U.S.

The scores on the latest test taken in early 2022 – after the nation’s Covid panic subsided – were released last week, and looking in that “window” revealed some scary things. In a nutshell, the scores showed that just 33% of the nation’s fourth graders are proficient in reading and 36% are proficient in math. The eighth graders did even worse: 31% are proficient in reading, while a painful 26% showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth- and eighth-graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”

The brightest spot in a sea of ugly took place in Catholic schools, most of which shut down very briefly, if at all, in 2020 and 2021. Scores in these schools were 17 points higher than the national public school average. In eighth-grade reading, the average score for Catholic school students was 20 points higher than the national public-school average, or about two grade levels ahead.

While it is clear that the test score plunge was affected by the pandemic-related shutdowns, there are some blurry areas. For example, not every school in a given state closed when Covid hysteria gripped the nation, so state-by-state comparisons don’t necessarily yield conclusive data on the effect of online learning.

There is a cohort that is trying to dismiss the shutdowns as a cause for the terrible scores out of hand, however. Typical is Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson who writes “all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.”

https://quillette.com/2022/11/02/bloated-college-administration-is-making-education-unaffordable/

With the first semester of the new academic year upon us, many students and parents are asking: How did college tuition skyrocket to the point where many middle-class families must mortgage (or re-mortgage) their homes, or prematurely raid their retirement funds, to send even a single child to a typical four-year college, whether public or private?

Most college professors are fairly well paid, to be sure. And buildings and grounds can be costly to maintain. But none of this fully explains why tuition and fees have been increasing well beyond the rate of inflation. At Harvard University, the 2022–2023 cost of attendance for non-commuting students (which includes tuition, room, board, and fees) is estimated at $76,763. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the corresponding figure is $79,850. At Boston University: $82,760. Even at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a public institution, it’s $34,834 for in-state students and $55,296 for out-of-state students.  

Image produced by chartr.

As someone who’s been involved in legal matters pertaining to higher education since the beginning of my career 55 years ago, I’ve had a chance to observe this phenomenon, and have naturally wondered at the cause. The short answer that I’ve come up with can be summarized in two words: administrative bloat. At Yale University, for instance, there are now as many administrative staff as undergraduates. Even among university academics, there seems to be far more resources dedicated to busywork. Every dean, it seems, has a deputy dean; with deputy deans sometimes having several assistant deputy deans. Many of these positions come with secretaries and other forms of administrative support.  

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/11/the-taxpayer-funded-child-abuse-system.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_

The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats.

Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the educational system, including shutting down schools for an extended period during the pandemic, eliminating standards in favor of promotion and turning a blind eye to sex abuse. While the shutdown of schools traumatized a generation, leading to increased suicide rates, loss of learning skills, social decline and even higher crime rates, school sex abuse is an ongoing crisis that targets a narrower population of abused students.

That doesn’t mean that the damage is any less.

A recent report reveals that nearly one school employee has been arrested a day on child-sex related charges.

In just the last week, a Utah elementary school teacher was arrested for inappropriate behavior with two female students, a middle school teacher in Pennsylvania was caught sexually abusing a 13-year-old, an Oregon high school basketball coach was arrested for sexually absuing a 17-year-old, a California elementary school employee was arrested on 19 counts of abusing minors going back a decade, and a Washington middle school employee was charged with 137 counts of taking videos in female bathrooms: an incredible school crime log for one week.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-discrimination-forever-supreme-court-students-for-fair-admissions-v-harvard-university-of-north-carolina-college-admissions-11667254607?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Supreme Court Justices exhibited supreme patience Monday in hearing nearly four hours of argument in a pair of major cases involving race and college admissions. But the argument was worth the time, because it exposed some unhappy truths about those who believe in the necessity of discriminating by rac

The Justices are considering challenges to the admission practices of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, in particular that they discriminate illegally against Asian-Americans in favor of other races. (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and SFFA v. UNC.)

This means revisiting Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which said schools could use race as one factor in admissions in the name of achieving diversity. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also famously wrote in Grutter that the use of race to achieve diversity probably wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.

That was 19 years ago, and on Monday several Justices pressed the question about when racial preferences would end. Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/28/the-fate-of-the-nation-rests-on-fixing-public-k-12/

The latest Nation’s Report Card is out and, once again, it shows the appalling state of government-run education in America.

There will be much hand wringing over the devastating impact of foolish COVID-19 policies on student learning. Don’t believe the B.S. It wasn’t COVID that caused these unprecedented declines, it was the public policy response to COVID that drove this destruction.

The cries that “we must do something!” will soon fill the airwaves—with “doing something” generally meaning writing bigger and bigger checks to the public K-12 educational leviathan. They will do this, despite the fact that no correlation between public K-12 spending and student achievement has ever been found.

But it’s clear to anyone who cares to look that public K-12 education has been doing a lousy job for decades. It’s not really a secret. Every single president since at least John Kennedy has had some plan to improve this country’s K-12 public education system. That’s over 60 years and the problem not only persists, it’s gotten worse.

We’ve had “blue ribbon” panels and loads of smart people telling us what must be done for over half a century.

In 1983, “A Nation at Risk” exposed the failures of the public education system. It was supposed to be a wake-up call:

Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament . . . Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/proof_that_critical_race_theory_is_being_taught_in_schools.html

Across the nation, war rages between parents who charge that schools are teaching their children race-based Marxist Critical Race Theory and school boards and educators who deny their accusations. 

Finally, we have definitive proof that students actually are being taught these dangerously divisive concepts.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York  City–based free-market think-tank, commissioned a study of a national sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-olds who were still in high school or had just graduated.  (Of these, 82.4% reported attending public schools.)

The participants were asked whether they had ever been taught in class, or heard from an adult at school, these following six concepts, of which four are central to Critical Race Theory.  The percentages are those who answered “yes.”

1. America is a systemically racist country.  (62%)

2. In America, white people have white privilege.  (69%)

3. In America, white people have biases that negatively affect non-white people.  (57%)

4. America is built on stolen land.  (67%)

5. America is a patriarchal society.  (53%)

6. Gender is an identity choice, regardless of the biological sex you were born into.  (51%)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/toxic_english_departments_and_the_students_who_now_avoid_them.html

The decline in the study of undergraduate English proves the proposition that the Left ruins everything it touches There has been a precipitous drop in the number of English majors across the country, and our “progressive” professors have only themselves to blame.

The National Center for Education Statistics publishes its annual Digest of what undergraduates study. In 1970 there were roughly 840,000 undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States. Of these approximately 64,000 were degrees in English Literature and Language. This made it the fourth most popular major across the country.

Since 1970 there has been a vast increase in the number of undergraduate degrees conferred: over two million in 2020. Yet, despite this huge influx of students, the number of degrees in English has dropped to just over 38,000 in 2020.

If confronted with this decline in student interest, the professors would no doubt point to economic and vocational concerns and to our crass American culture. The unstated premise for this rationale, which is ludicrous on its face, would be that there were no economic or vocational concerns then, and that American culture was somehow less crass in 1970. The professors would shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s not our fault.”

When we were undergraduates at Kenyon College, it had an English Department as formidable as any. The professors were serious about literature, its criticism, and the quality of our written expression. They weren’t interested in nurturing resentment, grinding axes, psychotherapy, or the creation of like-minded political cadres. The materials were chosen based on what Mathew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” We read the best and worked to understand the authors as they understood themselves. English was a very popular major.