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EDUCATION

Christopher F. Rufo Exporting the Columbia Prototype The Trump administration should leverage its successful approach to the troubled Ivy League university to fight anti-Semitism and racialism elsewhere.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/exporting-the-columbia-prototype

Last week, the Trump administration won a high-stakes showdown with Columbia University. Following the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, Columbia has been ground zero for pro-Hamas agitation on America’s campuses. It has seen marches, occupations, vandalism, and violence. In response, the White House threatened to withhold $400 million in public funding unless the university enacted meaningful reforms.

The administration’s hardball approach paid off: Columbia has now acceded to virtually all the administration’s demands. The university has banned masked protests, boosted campus security, and established administrative oversight over its radical “post-colonial” academic departments, which have been hotbeds of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism. The relationship between the White House and American universities now enters a new phase, and the Columbia episode could serve as a prototype for the administration’s approach going forward.

The administration should understand that anti-Semitism is just part of the Left’s ideological nesting doll. For campus activists, the Jews are the Middle East’s oppressors, while the Palestinians are the oppressed and are therefore justified in violent revolution. The narrative is attractive because it can be scaled symbolically: in the progressive imagination, Israel is to the Palestinians as white America is to black America and as Western society is to the Third World. Anti-Semitism is a stand-in for anti-whiteness and, ultimately, for anti-Western ideologies.

An EdTech Tragedy:A groundbreaking UNESCO book on the damage wrought by ed-tech during COVID school closures around the globe Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/edtech-tragedy?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In The Anxious Generation, we focused on the emergence of the adolescent mental health crisis that began in the early 2010s. However, since the book’s publication one year ago, we have learned even more about worrisome trends in education that closely mirror those in mental health: after decades of stability or gradual improvement, test scores in the U.S. and around the world began declining notably in the 2010s.

While widespread attention to declining test scores intensified during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—with many experts attributing the downturn primarily to COVID restrictions and the rapid movement to full remote learning—the declines actually began much earlier. Evidence from The National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP) clearly illustrates this earlier decline. As shown in Figure 1, after decades of slow and steady gains, American students started to give back those gains after 2012, particularly among students who were already performing at lower levels.

But as with the mental health crisis, it wasn’t just an American thing. In December 2023, Derek Thompson wrote an essay in The Atlantic titled, It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber.

Here’s a figure from that essay (re-graphed by us), showing that the decline is happening across the dozens of countries that participate in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). As with the mental health declines, these decline started after 2012, not 2020.

What could cause such an international decline in learning? One plausible explanation is the arrival of the phone-based childhood, which, as we showed, arrived between 2010 and 2015. However, there is a related hypothesis that is more proximal to the educational decline: the sudden appearance of a laptop or tablet on every student’s desk. To be clear, the intentions here were good. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools provide every student with “at least one Internet access device…Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes.” But the outcome seems to be bad for most students—especially students who were already struggling.

Let’s Fix Education: Episode 193, “Big Picture Thinking” Celebrating the work of Linda Goudsmit by Bruce Deitrick Price

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28433/let-fix-education-episode-193-big-picture-thinking

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com

BIG PICTURE THINKING

I want to celebrate the work of Linda Goudsmit. She is that rare miracle today, a big thinker. Her topic is understanding life in the 21st-century, the forces that are dragging it down, and how we can make it better.

The academic world forces scholars into small niches. They must all be specialists of something in particular. So, you won’t find big thinking there. I think we need more big thinking. Linda Goudsmit shows, in clear candid prose, what that looks like.

Knowledge-phobia, that’s the disease so prevalent in our world today. Apparently, the public schools will have to call 911 if any students start to learn anything. Oh, the horror. I think we need more knowledge. From K onward.

Some of the world is just lazy. Another big part of the world is constantly propagandizing. No matter what they pretend to care about, they are always pushing the same message. I think we need less propaganda, more love of Truth.

A few years back, I sent an email to Linda Goudsmit asking her what is the most important theme in her work. She said freedom. I had already decided that was the single word I would pick for that question. We had never discussed philosophy but somehow knew that if you don’t have freedom, you don’t really have much else.

Myself, I am a rampant generalist. Pretty much all my life I’ve been a novelist, painter, poet, art director, and now a passionate voice for education reform. But compared to Linda Goudsmit, I am stuck in a rut. So I readily appreciate her range and the tremendous amount of work that goes into studying all the facets she studies.

Now Linda Goudsmit deserves some sort of Oscar. Her most recent book is titled Space Is No Longer The Final Frontier — Reality Is. There are more than 370 pages, in 45 chapters. You will find a tremendous range with chapter titles such as:

The Angst of the Well-Endowed One enormous facet of the education controversy remains ignored Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news/p/the-angst-of-the-well-endowed
I’m sure a lot of good people are being hammered by the recent cuts, and yes, there are real speech issues in play. The reaction from academia however leads me to believe these institutions are so myopic and intrinsically exploitative that they can’t be fixed without first being taken apart. They have to be moved back to reality, but if they won’t go on their own, what is there to do?

From Thomas Edsall in the New York Times this morning:

Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned… The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?

At Johns Hopkins, the loss of $800 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants has forced the school to lay off 2,200 foreign and domestic workers… The Trump administration announced that it was cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, I’d have found these stories about Elon Von Hitler-Musk detonating thousands of campus-related jobs horrifying. But the education sob stories now flying off the presses are a Burj Khalifa of “needs context.” A gigantic lie of omission is a constant feature of these stories:

Take Johns Hopkins. NBC News was one of many to highlight the “grave consequences” the new administration’s policies have had on the famed institution, noting “the changes will also have an economic impact in Baltimore because the university is the largest private employer in Maryland.” NBC pointed out that “about half of Johns Hopkins’ funding last year came from federal research dollars, according to a letter from Ron Daniels, the university’s president.”

It seemed odd that the “largest private employer in Maryland” is half-funded by the federal “research dollars,” but I shrugged and went to the Johns Hopkins website to read the Daniels letter. When there’s money on the line and university presidents have time to compose their thoughts, expect the ultimate in soaring magniloquent resplenditude. Daniels didn’t disappoint.

Trump’s War on Woke: Columbia and Big Law Fall in Line Columbia and corporate elites cave to Trump’s crackdown on woke institutions, as his administration enforces fiscal discipline and accountability—with years left to escalate. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/23/trumps-war-on-woke-columbia-and-big-law-fall-in-line/

The parade of capitulations to Donald Trump’s instauration of America has been breathtaking. on to the phase of grumbling, then abject acquiescence. Here are a couple of notable examples from the last several days.

Columbia University, one conspicuous home of Intifada wannabes, was dinged some $400 million in government contracts because it had conspicuously failed to follow laws prohibiting discrimination. As Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained, since the October 7, 2023, slaughter by Hamas of some 1,200 Israelis in Gaza, “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them.”

At first, Columbia officials attempted to mount some moderately high, if decrepit, horses to insist on their defiance. But just a few days ago, the administration completely caved, basically acceding in substance to all nine of Trump’s demands. The university agreed to ban masks and allow campus police officers to arrest unruly students. It also agreed to appoint a senior university official to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. The university objected to the term “receivership” to describe this outcome. But as The Wall Street Journal noted, “the changes align with what usually happens in a receivership.”

Although The Wall Street Journal is not usually thought of as a comic publication, that column did contain one inadvertently hilarious sentence. The column noted that educational institutions across the country are watching what is happening at Columbia “with alarm.” They should be alarmed, for the same reason that John Donne advised readers not to ask for whom the bell tolls. Then came the funny bit. “Their primary concern,” the Journal intoned, was that “without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.”

Set the phenomenon of “intellectual curiosity” on one side of a chart. Then write down “Columbia’s Departments of Middle East and Palestine Studies.” What connects the two? It’s a baffling problem that no one has yet been able to answer.

But it is probably not as baffling as the suggestion that what goes on in those politicized, anti-Semitic redoubts has ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy” or that, absent such putative “discoveries and innovations,” said the economy would “decline or even grind to a halt.”

That would be like saying that Columbia’s “Women’s and Gender Studies” Department featured “intellectual curiosity,” as distinct from politicized grievance-mongering, or that any verbiage emitted from those hothouse quarters ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy.”

A Reckoning for Higher Education? Are American colleges and universities finally getting their comeuppance? By Teresa R. Manning

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/21/a-reckoning-for-higher-education/

On Friday, March 14, Trump‘s Education Department announced an investigation into more than 50 colleges and universities for their continuation of racial preferences despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (“SFFA”) which found such practices both illegal and unconstitutional. The March announcement, which specifically mentioned race-based scholarships in a program called the “PhD Project,” was a follow-up to a February 14 “Dear Colleague Letter” by Acting Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Craig Trainor, which told schools to get rid of diversity ideology (aka “DEI” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion)” or lose federal funds.

Things are getting real.

“Diversity” has been all the rage in business and academia for decades now. The word took hold in the 1990s when the prior terms “affirmative action,” “reverse discrimination,” “racial quotas,” and Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) were almost universally denounced as unjust and destructive. Though more pleasant sounding, “diversity” is actually just more of the same, the same wine in a different skin, as they say. A poisonous ideology that pits Americans against each other based on race or sex.

All these movements attack America, aiming to divide and conquer citizens by fomenting racial discord and creating a race industrial complex that enriches some—think the 6-figure salary of “White Fragility” author Robin DeAngelo or the million-dollar homes purchased by BLM founders—while leaving most others demoralized or puzzled. After all, obsession with race crowds out consideration of real aptitude and talent for jobs, scholarships, and school admissions.

With talent yielding to race politics, mediocrity becomes the norm. (Professional athletics, where champions like Tom Brady or LeBron James shine, would never put up with it!) Mediocrity then becomes ruin; the recent DC plane crash, for example, was immediately connected to “diversity hires.”  Ignoring or even penalizing real competence guarantees this result.

But Trump has other plans.

Micromanaging Microschools Government intrusion in education must be reined in. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/20/micromanaging-microschools/

In 2020, the concept of home-based “pandemic pods” went viral. At the time, Cato Institute scholar Jason Bedrick and EdChoice fellow Matthew Ladner released “Let’s Get Small: Microschools, Pandemic Pods, and the Future of Education in America,” a report on the phenomenon. They wrote that COVID-19 has “spurred the dramatic rise of microschools and ‘pandemic pods’ as school districts’ reopening plans (or lack thereof) drove desperate parents to explore alternative education options. For many microschooling or podding families, these options are merely temporary, intended to get them through the pandemic. However, given the considerable growth in microschooling in recent years, there are reasons to believe that the pandemic accelerated a growing trend that could significantly reshape K–12 education in the United States.”

A microschool is the reimagining of the one-room schoolhouse, where class sizes are usually fewer than 15 students of varying ages, and the schedule and curriculum are tailored to fit the needs of each class. Most microschools are independently parent-led, but some are affiliated with a formal network that offers paid, in-person instructors. Lessons are taught in various environments, such as homes, libraries, and other community centers.

The government, however, is very intrusive in this area. While parents can coach Little League teams, throw parties for their children, and take them and friends to a house of worship, when it comes to educating them, the government is in charge, even in homeschools and microschools.

In Iowa, for example, parents can go to jail if they talk about reading, writing, or arithmetic in a homeschool environment with more than four unrelated children. As the Institute for Justice’s Erica Smith and Darly James note, penalties for unauthorized teaching include “imprisonment not exceeding 10 days or a $100 fine. This is for a first offense. If parents continue dispensing knowledge without government permission, prosecutors can charge them with a serious misdemeanor.” Enacted in 2013, the law had a chilling effect on education innovation during the COVID-19 lockdown hysteria when parents sought alternatives.

How Trump Can Reform American Education By Jordan Adams

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-trump-can-reform-american-education/

President Trump has a crack team this time around. The president has come out swinging on parental rights, protecting girls in schools and sports, and stomping out CRT, DEI, and the rest of the insane woke agenda. 

With the White House’s statements on the disastrous new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, President Trump has even shocked  and received heavily caveated approval from many in the education punditry class, an almost exclusively left-of-center crowd. On top it all, Trump publicly directed Linda McMahon, his Secretary of Education, to prepare for the controlled demolition and hollowing-out of the Department of Education, whose workforce has now been reduced by roughly half.

Yes, we’re off to a great start. But there be dragons.

New to the Party

Republicans have long neglected education, partly because the teacher’s union arm of the Democratic Party controlled the space, but often because conservatives simply were not interested. Education was “boring” compared to fighting communism and bombing third-world peasants; curriculum reform didn’t get you invited to Wall Street soirees. After all, Jeb Bush — who admittedly did a tremendous amount to reform education in Florida — was the face of conservative education policy, and we know what Trump did to Jeb. School choice was about as daring as Republicans would get on the issue, and even that was tepid. Many still viewed local schools as a quaint bit of Americana, a trustworthy and decidedly small-c conservative system. The Left traded on that goodwill and trust for decades, quietly pushing their garbage down from on high, even as achievement eroded.

Then came the lockdowns, the remote schooling, the wokeness, and the National School Board Association collusion with the Biden administration to blacklist concerned parents as terrorists. 

Naomi Schaefer Riley, James Piereson Trump’s College Crackdown: It’s Their Own Fault Universities spent decades prioritizing activism over education.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-funding-anti-semitism-bias-universities

The federal government has some “legitimate concerns,” said Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong last week, after the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of $400 million in federal grants because, it claimed, Columbia had not addressed rampant anti-Semitism on its campus. Armstrong’s words suggest that Columbia received the message. But have other institutions of higher education?

A recent survey of university presidents suggests not. Unless they take steps to address not just anti-Semitism but also the profound ideological bias that has facilitated it and other forms of radicalism on campus, they may be in line for similar sanctions. If they fail to act, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The poll, conducted by Inside Higher Ed, reveals the extent to which higher ed is in denial about its predicament. It asked university presidents about the causes of declining public confidence in higher ed. Only 11 percent identified “ideological bias” as the biggest cause of public mistrust (though twice as many acknowledged it as a “valid concern”).

The vast majority are clearly misreading the public mood. A decade ago, 56 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education; by last year, that number had dropped to just 19 percent. A 2018 Pew poll found that 73 percent of Republicans believed higher education was headed in the wrong direction—and of that group, 79 percent cited politicization of the classroom and curriculum as a major reason. Among those voters, higher ed has been in free-fall for some time.

Columbia Now Faces an Expensive Day of Reckoning A cost to the Jew-haters and brownshirts. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/columbia-now-faces-an-expensive-day-of-reckoning/

On many American campuses, antisemitic nitwits have ever since the beginning of the war in Gaza storm-trooped around, calling for the disappearance of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), expressing a wish for homicidal violence against Jews (“Intifada Forever”), and accusing the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” (“Stop the Genocide”). The worst of these offenders have been the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University, who have created that awful mess — physical and moral — on Morningside Heights, whom Columbia’s administrators have until now been treated with kid gloves, creating an environment where anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior goes largely unpunished.

Now the Trump administration wants Columbia’s tolerance for antisemitism to be investigated. Columbia, after all, receives $5 billion from federal contracts and grants, and that money which be at risk if Columbia is weighed and found wanting in its failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from the antisemitic bullyboys and brownshirts who threaten them, harass them, surround and hold some of them prisoner, while attacking others, and interrupt, in order to shut down, the classes taught by Israeli and Jewish professors. More on the Trump administration’s investigation — by three different federal agencies — of Columbia, and the possible action by the government to be taken against the university, can be found here: “Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, March 4, 2025:

The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.

Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.