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EDUCATION

Terry McAuliffe’s faith in the experts Parents shouldn’t control schools, he says, but what about when expertise is wrong? Peter Wood

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.

That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.

Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.

Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.

All of which makes McAuliffe’s remarks during a gubernatorial debate in Fairfax County on Tuesday a wonder to behold. He declared, ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’. He gave this answer in response to a question about how state and local school districts should respond to parental concerns about transgender policy.

McAuliffe swaddled his anti-parent declaration in soothing assurances: ‘Locals [meaning school boards] have an input on such an important issue.’ ‘I want every child in Virginia to get a quality education.’ ‘No matter the color of your skin or who you love, I believe you should get a great quality education.’

In California and Across the Country, Parents and Their Kids are Abandoning Public Schools by Lance Izumi

https://www.pacificresearch.org/students-are-abandoning-public-schools-for-charters-private-schools-homeschooling/

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been the crack in the dam that allowed parents’ building frustration with the regular public schools to burst forth.  Public school enrollment is nose-diving across the country, with legions of parents everywhere choosing other learning options for their children.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently issued an analysis which examined data during the pandemic and found that the “public schools, including district-run schools, lost more than 1.4 million students (a 3.3% loss from 2019-20 to 2020-21).”

The report noted that the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics found that enrollment in public schools fell by the largest margin in at least in at least two decades.

Across California, state figures show that K-12 enrollment fell by 160,000 students, which was a 3-percent dip and the largest drop in enrollment in twenty years.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, enrollment dropped by 27,000 students, which was a nearly 6 percent fall.  The Los Angeles Times noted that this percentage decline “is three times what planners in the nation’s second-largest school district predicted.”

Even more ominous for the future of the regular public schools is the plunge in enrollment among the nation’s youngest students.

The Worst Campus in America for Free Speech By John Hirschauer

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/01/the_worst_campus_in_america_for_free_speech_110642.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

For the second straight year, survey data shows that a small private school in western Indiana is the nation’s worst college for free speech.

DePauw University again finished last in the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, the second annual campus-speech-related survey and rankings project sponsored by the research firm College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation. More than 37,000 students at 159 colleges and universities participated in the survey, and their responses helped determine each school’s place in the 2021 rankings.

What contributed to DePauw’s low ranking? Survey results and student responses to open-ended survey prompts suggest that DePauw’s biggest speech-related challenge may be the censorious views of its students. Only 30% of DePauw students said it was “never acceptable” to use violence to stop a speech on campus, meaning more than two-thirds of students surveyed feels violence can be an appropriate response to disagreeable speech. Seventy-six percent of students surveyed said they would oppose allowing a speaker on campus who believed abortion should be illegal. Some students feel censorship is the appropriate response to speakers with “harmful” views.

“I do not hold views that are harmful to others so [self-censorship] is not a problem I face,” one DePauw student told pollsters.

Only seven percent of DePauw students reported having “never” felt unable to express their opinion on a subject.

Many DePauw students also lack confidence in the administration’s commitment to free speech. Only 57% of DePauw students felt the administration was likely to defend a speaker’s right to express himself in a speech-related controversy, compared to 89% of students surveyed at top-ranked Claremont McKenna College.

The disastrous impact of illegal immigration on public education By Carole Hornsby Haynes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_disastrous_impact_of_illegal_immigration_on_public_education.html

Public school students have been subjected to school shutdowns, online learning at home, social distancing, plexiglass cubicles, all day wearing of masks, and now vaccinations with an experimental drug that is causing myocarditis and other serious reactions in healthy children.

At the university level, at least 78 students at LSU who have refused vaccination have been unenrolled from the university with 50 percent of their tuition forfeited.  The University of Virginia unenrolled 238 students for not complying with its vaccine mandate.  Penn State has suspended students who failed to get their weekly COVID test.  Hundreds of other universities have mandated the vaccine for this fall, with some even reimposing mask mandates on fully vaccinated students due to the rise in delta variant cases.

Yet illegal immigrants cross the southern border without being asked to show proof of vaccination.  They’re not required to wear masks or to distant themselves even though they’re bringing in communicable diseases.

With the resettlement of thousands of Afghans in 46 states, there is the frightening chance of an epidemic of diseases that have been all but wiped out in America. 

According to the CDC, there have already been outbreaks of viruses such as varicella, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, hepatitis A, and coronavirus.  Most frightening of all is the possibility of an outbreak of polio which can lead to paralysis or even death.   Afghans also are expected to bring in gastrointestinal infections, including shigellosis, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, hepatitis A, rotavirus, and viral diarrheal diseases.

These migrants are flooding our already packed classrooms for a free education at the expense of the American taxpayer. 

To further complicate matters, numerous foreign languages are spoken within a classroom and the children are unaccustomed to our culture — in some cases, they don’t know how to use a toilet.  These children require an enormous amount of a teacher’s time at the expense of American students.

It’s Time To End Government-Run Schooling We need to bulldoze the education establishment and privatize schools. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/29/its-time-to-end-government-run-schooling/

The National Center for Education Statistics recently published K-12 enrollment data for the 2020–21 school year, and it showed a 3 percent drop—about 1.5 million kids from the previous year. With a total k–12 enrollment of about 51 million students in the United States, that equates to a loss of 1.5 million children. The largest segment of the leavers and no-shows were kindergarteners and pre-k kids, whose enrollment dropped by 13 percent last year. As American Enterprise Institute policy maven Rick Hess points out, “Such figures are unprecedented; public school enrollment has grown almost every year during the 21st century, with any declines coming in well under 1%.” 

While the main reason for the exit is COVID-related, there are other reasons to bail. The latest NAEP—also known as the nation’s report card—reveals that just 37 percent of U.S. 12th-grade students are proficient in reading and a pitiful 24 percent are proficient in math. It’s important to note that these results are from 2019, before the teacher union orchestrated COVID hysteria forced schools across the country to shut down.

So where are the escapees going? Some parents are availing themselves of the new private school options throughout the country. According to the latest available data, 18 states have created seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones this year.

Charter schools also have experienced more growth in 2020-21 than they have in the past six years, according to data released last week from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. While traditional public schools were losing students, independently-run charter schools in 39 states saw an influx of 240,000 new students, a 7 percent increase over last year, more than double the rate of growth from the prior year.

Additionally, homeschooling has been booming. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3 percent. But by May 2020, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with school-aged children reported they were homeschooling. And by October 2020, the number jumped to 11.1 percent.

With so many government-run schools not meeting their customers’ expectations, perhaps it’s time to think about doing away with them. Entirely. I know I will be charged with heresy—being a right-wing shill for corporations, anti-union, a crackpot, and worse, in some quarters, but let’s get real. As a country we did quite well before the government stuck its large bureaucratic nose into our lives, and we can do so again.

Seth Forman: What Our Universities Have Wrought A review of “The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America,” by Bruce D. Abramson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/28/what-our-universities-have-wrought/

Abramson’s achievement is to show that trust in the neutral institutions that adjudicate knowledge has collapsed, and to adroitly locate our universities at the center of this calamity.

In the first few pages of his rigorous and incisive book The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America, Bruce Abramson sets out the features of America’s current crisis, and it’s not pretty. An authoritarian utopianism, he writes, has swept through America’s ruling institutions, carried on there by a “credentialed elite” that has become religiously attached to a particularly corrosive version of progressivism. This has led to a civil war, pitting progressives “hell-bent on transformation” against “patriots loyal to the American constitutional tradition” who “are locked in a struggle for the nation’s soul.”

The ineffectual shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, the doctor-approved George Floyd riots, and the anomalous presidential election of 2020, writes Abramson, were the events that revealed the depth and breadth of the gentry’s institutional capture. “In fact, the United States jettisoned the rule of law and ceased functioning as a republic in mid-March 2020.” 

In another context, such sweeping indictments of America’s leadership class might plausibly be dismissed as the angry hyperbole of a writer who, by his own admission, “failed” as an academic and card-carrying member of the credentialed elite. But with this book, Abramson, a widely published strategic consultant and proud member of the class of citizens he calls the “renegade elite,” has clearly found his footing. The case he makes that an American nobility has emerged, consolidated its power at the highest levels of society, sealed off these institutions from ideological opposition, and adopted a worldview substantially at odds with foundational principles of the republic, seems chillingly tenable.

Abramson’s thesis, at least in its broad outlines, has received formidable backing from other, less “renegade” critics. Former New York magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan has puzzled over the “sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites” that “has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation.” David Brooks, who wrote admiringly about his own social class in Bobos in Paradise (2004), admits he had no idea that the meritocrats would coalesce into an “insular, intermarrying brahmin elite,” or how aggressively this overclass would “impose elite values through speech and thought codes.”

“I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity,” Brooks confesses.

Why Aren’t Men Going to College? Do disappearing college males know something we don’t? Lewis M. Andrews

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-arent-men-going-to-college/

Recent reports that the male percentage of the U.S. college population has fallen to 40%, the lowest ever, have generated predictable concerns. If, as it is often said, today’s young people will need at least a bachelor’s degree to be successful in tomorrow’s economy, then the reluctance of so many men to pursue one would seem to be a threat, both to themselves and to the larger society. How will the coming contingent of low-educated men fare in an increasingly technological world? And how will the relatively high number of successful women find enough husbands to form families and nurture successive generations?

Yet history teaches that trends that at first seem irrational, anti-social, or even self-destructive can sometimes reflect an underlying wisdom. Certainly, those families that abandoned the relative security of ancient Italy for the Roman Empire’s more distant provinces ended up far less vulnerable to the later barbarian invaders. Similarly, many of the medieval patients who defied their doctors’ orders and declined the standard bloodletting treatment likely saved their own lives. Coming closer to the present, those investors who did not go along with the “can’t miss” margin account strategy so popular on Wall Street in the summer of 1928 had good reason to congratulate themselves just a year later.

Could something similar be happening with the growing number of young men who refuse to go from high school on to college? Are they smarter than they appear?

Judging by the reader comments attached to the various alarmist articles on declining male enrollment, a good number of their countrymen suspect they are. Noting that the atmosphere on the nation’s campuses has become increasingly hostile to masculinity—with courses depicting white men as intrinsically racist, a quasi-judicial system biased in favor of women, and a general elevation of emotion over rigorous debate—many article commenters, both men and women, go on to express a surprising admiration for those adolescent males who choose to avoid it.

Back to Burning Books Again • Kevin Donnelly

http://• https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/free-speech/2021/09/back-to-burning-books-again/

The Ontario Catholic School Board’s decision to burn books deemed politically incorrect, a move prompted by Canada’s activist answer to fauxboriginal Bruce Pascoe,  became a hot issue in this month’s Canadian election.  Although the book burning began in 2019 and has just come to light it represents yet another powerful warning about the dangers of totalitarian cancel-culture and mind control.

What occurred in Canada is just one example of how widespread and virulent cancel-culture has become.  Targets include Tintin and Asterix, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Noddy, Thomas the Tank Engine and six children’s books written by Dr Seuss. All are considered guilty of either sexism, racism or cultural appropriation. Adult books are also targeted including Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird for having using the ‘N’ word, Moby Dick for killing whales and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for privileging the love between a boy and girl (condemned as promoting heteronormativity).

Couched in terms of impartiality and balance, critics argue such books are offensive and discriminatory. The reality is cancelling children’s stories like Snow White — out of favour because the Prince fails to get informed consent before kissing the sleeping maiden– is as dangerous as it is absurd. Stories and books written years ago are unfairly judged and cancelled because of today’s censorious, politically correct view about what is acceptable.  Like the moralistic puritans of old, cultural-left activists refuse to allow or entertain anything that fails to conform to their strict, inflexible ideology.

Stopping students reading literature now deemed politically incorrect in the belief they will be corrupted and converted automatically into racist, sexist and homophobic bigots also ignores that the overwhelming majority of young people are smart enough and independently minded not to be conditioned.

Support for Shouting Down Speakers on Campus Spikes after Political Chaos of 2020 By Brittany Bernsteinhttps

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/brittany-bernstein/

A majority of college students support shouting down speakers with whom they don’t agree, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Sixty-six percent of students said they supported speaker shout downs, an increase of 4 percentage points over last year, the study found. Meanwhile, 23 percent said they support going so far as to use violence to stop a speaker, an increase of 5 percentage points from last year.

Wellesley College and Barnard College, both of which are elite women’s colleges, had the highest number of students supporting the use of violence, at 45 percent and 43 percent respectively.

Sean Stevens, a senior research fellow in polling and analytics for FIRE told National Review in a recent interview that the shift is likely reflective of the national political climate of the last year.

The country was rocked by months of rioting and counter-protests beginning in summer 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Protests for various causes persisted through the general election in November, culminating in the deadly January 6 Capitol riot when a mob of former President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.

Stevens noted that the FIRE study results echoed findings from similar studies by the American National Election Studies and other outlets that have asked Americans about the acceptability of violence and have seen upticks in their data as well.

The results come as part of FIRE’s 2021 college free speech rankings. FIRE, a non-partisan, non-profit group that focuses on protecting free speech rights on U.S. college campuses, worked alongside College Pulse and RealClearEducation to survey over 37,000 students at 159 of the country’s largest and most prestigious campuses.

FIRE then compiled a list of free speech rankings assessing a school’s free speech climate based on seven main components: openness to discussion of controversial topics, tolerance for liberal speakers, tolerance for conservative speakers, administrative support for free speech, comfort expressing ideas publicly, whether students support disruptive conduct during campus speeches, and FIRE’s speech code rating.

The top five colleges for free speech, according to the rankings, included Claremont McKenna College, University of Chicago, University of New Hampshire, Emory University and Florida State University. The worst five colleges were Boston College, Wake Forest University, Louisiana State University, Marquette University and DePauw University, which ranked last.

Public schools largely performed better than private schools, accounting for just five of the bottom 30 schools on the list.

Ivy League Detention Centers The cultural illiteracy of this class is of a piece with the moral illiteracy of the jury responsible for this class. To our armories of liberty, students and jurors shrug. By Bill Asher

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/21/ivy-league-detention-centers/

When a 10 percent transmission rate is 150 percent higher than a college or university’s rate of admission, when it is improbable that adults will contract COVID-19 from teens but almost impossible for teens to avoid rejection from the adults (so-called) in the room—the adults who decide whom shall enter the classrooms at Harvard or Princeton or Columbia—the life of the mind is dead. 

Or, in the spirit of and to paraphrase William F. Buckley, I would rather be judged by the first 40 people in a jury pool than by the 40 people who judge applicants to Harvard College.

I would rather be a defendant in a criminal trial, free to have my lawyer examine prospective jurors, than submit my fate to a jury whose biases are no secret and whose deliberations are a sham. 

I question this jury’s ability to deliberate, except to say the jury’s silence is deliberate: that its results lack evidence, that record-low acceptance rates do not prove an incoming class is the most learned and literate and civic-minded class in the history of Harvard or Princeton or Columbia; that this class has no class, that it is a monoculture more discriminatory than the finals clubs or eating clubs of the past, proud of its hatred and unwilling to study or emulate the best of the past.

To know the consciousness of this class is to understand the power of false consciousness.

What this class fails to convince others to believe is that all other classes are unfit to lead and are too unintelligent to learn. What this class believes about itself is that it has a mandate to rule, based not on the consent of the governed, but according to the consensus of those who demand to govern everything.

This belief, the belief that a so-called meritocracy is meritorious, is a threat to freedom and democracy.

What, after all, do meritocrats know about democracy in America, or democracy, or America?

The question is rhetorical, while questions abound about this class’s fluency in the rhetoric of Americanism. That this class is not conversant in the language of Adams or Jefferson is no surprise. That this class is ignorant of the lyricism of Lincoln and deaf to the mystic chords of memory is no accident.

The cultural illiteracy of this class is of a piece with the moral illiteracy of the jury responsible for this class. 

The two are illiterate in a tangible way, for they do not revere that which they do not know to respect. 

They see places to study, not paradises to behold, for they do not admire the architecture or honor the names engraved in stone, never stopping to hold America in their hands, never reading the works of great men or walking in humility toward works of greatness, never looking to the lights inside the Memorial Rooms of Harvard’s Widener Library or the New Lights of Princeton’s Firestone Library or at the words in lights outside Columbia’s Low Memorial Library.

To these armories of liberty, students and jurors shrug.

Because of these students and jurors, a nation weeps.