RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/18/teacher-pay-myths-reality-and-union-shenanigans/

Teacher pay

Chad Aldeman, a leading researcher who focuses on school finance, the teacher labor market, and assessment and accountability policy, recently wrote, “Wrong Ideas about Teacher Pay, Happiness May Keep Students from the Profession.”

The essence of the piece is that teachers generally like teaching and stay in the profession for about as long as accountants or social workers stay in theirs. “Teachers may not get rich, but they live comfortably middle-class lives. Plus, teachers get to retire a couple of years earlier than other workers.”

He then delves into the common misconception that teachers don’t earn a decent wage. “In 2021, Education Next asked a random sample of Americans to guess how much the average teacher earned in their state. Those guesses weren’t just wrong; they were consistently too low—by about 50%, or about $22,000. According to the latest data from the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in 2021-22 was $66,745.”

Just Facts takes the data one step further and adds that in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher also received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions), which brings the total annual compensation to over $100,000. Additionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, which includes time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.

The great purveyors of the underpaid teacher myth are the nation’s teachers’ unions, which continually drill into teachers, legislators, and the general public that educators are paid a peon’s wage and need the unions to raise their salaries.

Actually, the opposite is true. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has dug deeper, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBA) hurt the bottom line of all teachers. “Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers—$64,500 on average versus $57,500.” Petrilli’s study was conducted in 2011, and research by Michael Lovenheim in 2009 and Andrew Coulson in 2010 bore similar results. Also, University of California San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported in 2018 that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.

http://Under anti-divestment laws, a majority of states will be required to sever business ties with Brown should the university vote to divest from Israel.

Brown University will face “immediate and profound legal consequences” should its governing body vote next month to divest from companies with connections to Israel.

Although the university’s president, Christina Paxson, has previously rebuffed student-led divestment efforts, her administration agreed last spring to have the Corporation, as Brown’s governing body is known, vote on the divestment proposal, known as Brown Divest Now, as part of an arrangement with anti-Israel encampment organizers.

In turn, the student protesters agreed to clear out their encampment on the university’s Main Green and not stage protests through commencement. The Corporation — which is run by 12 Fellows and 42 Trustees — is slated to vote on the measure during its October meeting.

Just the agreement to take a vote on the matter was controversial enough that one trustee, a prominent New York hedge fund manager, Joseph Edelman, resigned from his post, slamming the upcoming vote as “morally reprehensible.” 

In his resignation letter, which he published in the Wall Street Journal, he criticized the administration for choosing to “lend credence” to “antisemitic voices” and choosing to “reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.” 

He continued: “Brown’s policy of appeasement won’t work. It’s a capitulation to the very hatred that led to the Holocaust and the unspeakable horrors of Oct. 7.” 

Just hours later, the president of Brown University, Ms. Paxson, published a letter in response, claiming that Mr. Edelman “misunderstands and mischaracterizes the decision behind the October vote” and that the decision reflects the university’s commitment to giving “fair and due process to formal claims challenging its ethical responsibility.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/globalizing-the-intifada-at-harvard/

The beginning of college used to be marked by parents helping their children unload their stuff from the back of station wagons and carrying those suitcases, that futon, that stand-alone lamp, that print of Picasso’s peace dove or Don Quixote, or Avedon’s photographs of the Beatles, into the waiting dormitories, after which both parents and child would go out for one last meal together before they drove off and he, or she, was left to face the school daze alone.

Nowadays it’s different. Your parents drive you up to the campus, and already the anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrators are in the quad, or in Harvard’s case the Yard, screaming their hatred of the Jewish state, accusing it of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and insistently chanting that “Palestine will be free/From the river to the sea” which everyone knows means only one thing: the disappearance of the state of Israel, the expulsion or killing of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state of “Palestine.”

And so it was for a friend of my family who is starting his first year at Harvard. He was greeted when he arrived at Harvard Yard by protesters chanting and waving signs about Israel’s need to disappear and the Palestinians’ right to replace them, renewing the screaming from where they had left off last June, at commencement.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-american-classroom-is-more-broken-than-you-think/

For those who follow politics and current events, it should be evident that something has gone wrong with America’s public K-12 schools. A recent Pew Poll found that over half of Americans believe public education is heading in the wrong direction, with 69% of those concerned saying that schools are not spending enough time on academics and 54% saying that teachers are bringing their political views into the classroom.

These concerns of the public are well-founded. Math and reading scores are at their lowest in decades. Eighty percent of recent high-school graduates report being taught Critical Race Theory concepts in school such as “America is a systemically racist society” and “White people have unconscious bias that negatively affects non-white people.” Sexually explicit LGBTQ+ books line the shelves of school libraries, with parents who request their removal smeared as transphobic book banners akin to Nazis.

For conservatives, the solution seems simple: Get rid of Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ+ ideology in schools, and education will go ‘back to normal.’ While this is a step in the right direction, things are not so simple. This is because the foundations of public education in America — instruction, curriculum, management, discipline — have dramatically eroded over the last few decades. 

Not long ago, the purpose of school was understood to be the education of students, and deviations from that purpose were regarded with suspicion. Teachers stood at the blackboard and taught from textbooks while students sat at their desks, took notes, and answered when called upon. Students were expected to be punctual and well-behaved, and to master the material given to them. Teachers were expected to be professional, knowledgeable, and impartial. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/03/one-third-of-k-12-students-behind-grade-level/

A recent study shows that roughly one-third of American K-12 students in the 2023-2024 academic school year are behind their grade level in a variety of subjects.

As Axios reports, the data was compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) through their “School Pulse Panel,” a survey of almost 4,000 grade schools that are considered nationally representative. The data from June of 2024, taken from the responses of 1,651 schools, shows that there has been virtually no change from the 2021-2022 school year, when 33% of students were learning at a level that was below their actual grade.

The study also examined the differences based on geographic region and locality, discovering that schools in the Western United States are performing worse than any other area of the country, with about 40% of students behind their grade level. When comparing urban areas and rural areas, the study found that 38% of students in city schools are behind their grade level, compared to 31% of students in suburban schools.

These findings further confirm that the long-term effects of the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns are continuing to be felt today, with the biggest impact being on American education. The quality of schooling in America plummeted sharply while schools were shut down, with virtually no improvement after the implementation of “remote learning” and “hybrid” schooling that combined partial in-person education with continued remote learning. Even after returning to full in-person schooling, many students have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels in their education.

Some of the strategies being employed by schools to combat this decline include hiring even more teachers, with 55% of schools choosing this strategy due to it being either “very” or “extremely effective.” Another 35% of schools are also spending more time focusing on target areas, while 18% are engaging in family outreach.