Category: Education & Schools

Yeah, like maybe all that proggie political propaganda indoctrination might wear off.

Pediatrician: Keeping Children Out of School Could Have Long Term Consequences

Dr. Dimitri Christakis knows a thing or two about children as the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, including the consequences of keeping children out of a school setting for an extended period of time because of the threat of coronavirus.

His latest addition to the more than 170 original research articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics has a stern warning about decisions made in the wake of the virus: ‘They will hold us accountable,” Christakis wrote.

Arkansas Professor Arrested for Concealing Communist Chinese Funding

An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.

The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”

“He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”

Emory Prof Admits to Chinese Spy Ring Involvement

A former professor at Emory University pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns by failing to disclose $500,000 in income from Chinese sources.

The professor, Xiao-Jiang Li, worked at two Chinese universities as part of China’s Thousand Talents Program, according to the Department of Justice. Li was ordered to pay $35,089 in restitution and sentenced to one-year probation.

Court findings revealed that in 2012, while still working at Emory, Li began working for the Thousand Talents Program and continued to work for the program until 2018. During this time period, Li worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at Jinan University, where he reportedly conducted animal research. Li’s tax fraud was discovered when the National Institutes of Health examined his applications for research grants.

I think what the perfesser is really worried about homeschooling is the missed opportunities for progressive indoctrination.

Harvard ‘Anti-Homeschooling’ Event ‘Cancelled’ Amid Conservative Backlash

Opponents of a controversial Harvard homeschooling summit claim the event has been canceled, but the Ivy League institution is still tight-lipped as to whether that is indeed the case.

The purpose of the invite-only event, “Homeschooling Summit: Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform,”was to “discuss child rights in connection with homeschooling in the United States,” with a focus on “problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight.”

With agenda items such as “Concerns with Homeschooling” and “Litigation Strategies for Reform,” the aim of the event was to equip critics of homeschooling and educators against the practice with “strategies for effecting such reform.” The co-organizer and one of the most controversial featured speakers was Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor of law and faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program.

Campus Reform previously reported that Bartholet framed homeschooling as “authoritarian” and suggested the government ban it.

In an interview with Harvard Magazine, Bartholet said, “We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling.” Her reasons for wanting to ban homeschooling include the lack of regulations setting standards on which parents are allowed to homeschool, the isolation of children, the absence of teachers who could act as “mandated reporters,” and the threat it creates that will ultimately jeopardize America’s democracy……………

This is not an article from the Babylon Bee.

Arizona: Muslim Students Threaten to Kill Prof for Suggesting Islam Is Violent.

This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: a professor is facing death threats for suggesting otherwise. Nicholas Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.

Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has worked at the school.

Professor Damask’s troubles began during the current Spring semester, when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:

  • Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed
  • Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]
  • Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of jihad.

Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.

Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was “offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.” Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed the course.”

Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages about the quiz, the school, and myself.”

At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”

On May 1, Damask had a conference call with Kathleen Iudicello, Scottsdale Community College’s Dean of Instruction, and Eric Sells, the College’s Public Relations Marketing Manager. Damask recalls: “I was not offered to write any part of the school’s response, and there was no discussion of academic freedom or whether the College was even supportive of me to teach about Islamic terrorism. The very first point I made with them on the call (and virtually the only input I had) is that I insisted that the College’s release was to have no mention of any actions to be required to be taken by me personally, I was very clear about that.”

Predictably, Iudicello and Sells ignored that. They issued an apology to the student and to the “Islamic community,” and stated on the College’s Instagram page that Damask would be “required” to apologize to the student for the quiz questions, as the questions were “inappropriate” and “inaccurate,” and would be permanently removed from Damask’s exams.

Damask also had three phone calls with Iudicello, who gave him a bracing introduction into today’s academic funhouse world, where if someone is offended by the truth, it’s the truth that has to be deep-sixed. “During one call with Iudicello,” Damask recounts, “she stated that my quiz questions were ‘Islamophobic,’ that before continuing to have any further class content on Islamic terrorism I would likely need to meet with an Islamic religious leader to go over the content, and that I would likely need to take a class (perhaps at Arizona State) taught by a Muslim before teaching about Islamic terrorism.”

“The irony here,” says Damask, “is that literally during this phone call, I and my wife were tossing socks and jammies and our nine-year-old grandson’s toys into a suitcase to get the hell out of the house because of the death threats made by Islamic commenters on the College’s Instagram page.”

If a foreign nation forced us to have this kind of education system, it would be seen as an act of war.

Study: Historic Drop in U.S. Reading and Math Scores Since Common Core ‘Debacle’

A study released Monday by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute reveals a historic drop in national reading and math scores among U.S. students since the adoption of the Common Core Curriculum Standards a decade ago.

“Nearly a decade after states adopted Common Core, the empirical evidence makes it clear that these national standards have yielded underwhelming results for students,” said Pioneer executive director Jim Stergios in a statement. “The proponents of this expensive, legally questionable policy initiative have much to answer for.”

The study, titled “The Common Core Debacle” and authored by education policy researcher Theodor Rebarber, asserts the “shocking trends” in American student performance in critical math and reading skills since the creation of the U.S. Education Department 40 years ago recommends reevaluation of federal involvement in education.

Performance in reading and math since the adoption of Common Core has especially declined in the nation’s lowest-achieving students – many of whom come from low-income families and failing public schools – widening the achievement gap and creating further inequality.

Supporters of Common Core, however, touted the Obama-era federally incentivized standards would be “rigorous” and also “level the playing field.” The Common Core State Standards Initiative boasted that the standards are “important” because:

[h]igh standards that are consistent across states provide teachers, parents, and students with a set of clear expectations to ensure that all students have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life upon graduation from high school, regardless of where they live. … The standards promote equity by ensuring all students are well prepared to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad.

Rebarber observed, however, that while national fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores were rising at about half a point each year from 2003 to 2013, since that time, reading scores have dropped.

“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance,” Dr. Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said in October 2019 following the release of the Nation’s Report Card [National Assessment of Educational Progress] assessments in math and reading for fourth- and eighth-graders.

“The lowest performing students – those readers who struggle the most – have made no progress in reading from the first NAEP administration almost 30 years ago,”

 

Well, Paul did make the point that there could be what might be called a steep ‘learning curve’ for parents who start home schooling.

“4 minutes of free play and only an hour of Greek?
I just don’t understand today’s permissive parenting.”

 

Wash Your Hands, but Also Take a Nap

Now it’s naps too? Okay. I think I can handle this one as well as the others.

As our campuses prepare to close and plans are developed to move our courses online, faculty, staff and administrators are moving into crisis-management mode. At my institution, Duke University, our team has quickly come together, by circumstance and by choice. Emails are flying, spring breaks have been forgone, phone calls are being taken in the carpool lane and so forth. We are on it!

Except how long can we sustain this?

We already know that work-life balance is a myth in the academy, and it certainly gets skewed in times of crisis. But COVID-19 threatens to be a long-term crisis. We’re not just closing campuses now but also canceling important events in the future (even graduation, maybe?), impacting enrollments in the fall and beyond, for example. We can expect many continuing reverberations.

How are we going to sustain ourselves now and for the long term?…….

We can also remind each other to take breaks, to reassure each other that it is okay to log out of email once in a while. In my case, I reminded my colleagues to pay attention to nearby Duke Forest, where there are more trout lilies than I’ve ever seen! We need to get outside and breathe deeply of our spring air before pollen descends.

Given that we are responding to a public health crisis, it only makes sense to prioritize our personal health. Yet for many of us, that is the first thing to go.

School Canceled Because of Coronavirus? A Homeschooler Offers Some Tips.

For those parents who haven’t already converted to home schooling to remove their children from public school those cesspools of leftist indoctrination

COVID-19 is in the news with new cases reported every day. The list of schools, colleges, and other institutions suspending their efforts is also adding up. But there’s one education sector that may get away with minimal disruption: homeschoolers. Families that take responsibility for their kids’ education have a distinct edge in terms of flexibility and adaptability when it comes to unexpected events like … well … a worldwide pandemic that has people on edge.

“Closing schools and using internet-based teleschooling to continue education” was the scenario envisioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr. Nancy Messonier in a February 25 press conference. “You should ask your children’s school about their plans for school dismissals or school closures. Ask if there are plans for teleschool.”

Teleschool? Homeschoolers are so on that. Or if they’re not into teleschooling, they have a stack of books and papers, kitchen-counter science experiments, video lectures … The list goes on, and much of it adds up to the “social distancing measures” of which teleschooling is supposed to be part.

What’s “social distancing”? As Messonnier noted, social distancing is “designed to keep people who are sick away from others.” That means breaking up large gatherings where germs can be shared and spread.

Discouraging gatherings is an important move from a public health perspective, but it’s enormously disruptive to businesses, government bodies, and organizations that are designed around assembling large numbers of people in one place. That means big challenges for, among other institutions, traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Homeschoolers, however, have an edge because their efforts are not inherently constructed around large gatherings.

That doesn’t mean that homeschoolers never get together. Contrary to accusations from critics, family-based education is not an inherently solitary venture.

Homeschooling often involves group lessons that take advantage of specialized expertise, collaborative projects, field trips with homeschooling associations, sports teams, and more—which means that homeschoolers have changes to make in a time of pandemic, too, in terms of reducing or eliminating outings and activities. But that doesn’t mean cutting down on education; these days, there are loads of relatively easy work-arounds for homeschooling families.

If you’re new to family-based education, and especially if you’re busy with your own remote work, you may find it best to go with a comprehensive online program, like a virtual publicly-funded charter school or tuition-charging private school.

Virtual private schools are available anywhere in the United States, while the availability of charters depends on your local laws. Arizona, where I live, maintains a list of virtual charter schools, but you’ll need to do a bit of research for your own state.

Besides full schools, the Internet is a treasure-trove of learning materials that don’t require you to trek to a bookstore, a lecture hall, or even to wait for package delivery. Classic literature is available for free in electronic format through Project Gutenberg, Khan Academy has long since expanded beyond its original mission of delivering math lessons, the American Chemical Society gives away a complete chemistry curriculum, and a variety of lesson plans are freely available from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Edsitement. If you’re interested, I’ve prepared a downloadable list of resources.

I’ve never met a conference software that I’ve loved—video sometimes freezes, audio drops out, and connections fail. That said, my son has used both Blackboard and Zoom in the course of his lessons, and he and his peers as young as 10 or so took to it naturally, even troubleshooting glitches as needed. Conferencing software will accommodate presentations, feedback, shared screens, and other means of simulating a classroom across distances and without putting students in one place to share germs. Teachers and students can even transfer files back and forth.

Skype is an excellent stand-by for online meetings with teachers. Yes, your kids can be verbally quizzed in a foreign language across that platform while the teacher looks on to check for cheat sheets or other shortcuts. The kids might then receive messaged feedback through the same software.

For teamwork on projects, I think working online may be more effective than getting a bunch of kids together in one room. Recently, I got to listen to a bunch of 14- and 15-year-olds collaborate on a script for a skit that they edited in Google Docs. For presentations, they’ve worked the same way in Google Slides. One nice feature is that the technological solutions really cut down on the “I left my work at my friend’s house” factor. No, you didn’t, kid; it’s sitting in the cloud.

(Incidentally, collaborative software doesn’t make teenagers act any less like teenagers. If forced to listen in, you will still want to bang your head on a table.)

When it comes to sharing short pieces of work, art, and the like, my son and his friends sometimes take photos of their efforts and text them to each other or to an instructor. That’s a quick and easy solution in many cases when uploading and downloading documents is more effort than necessary.

The hard part isn’t finding work for your home students to do; it’s keeping them focused. Every child is different, and some are more self-directed than others.

Yes, you will have to check on them even if you’re not directly administering their lessons. That can be a challenge for new homeschoolers, but my experience is that most kids respond better to mom and dad than they do to teachers they barely know and won’t see after the year’s end.

Socializing is where the “social distancing” recommended for our virus-ridden times bites deep. But I have to imagine that cell phones, social media, and video chat make easier work of dealing with the requirements of the pandemic than what our ancestors suffered when they dodged polio or the Spanish flu. The kids can all complain to each other over their favorite apps about the privations they’re suffering in these hard times.

Fast delivery, downloadable books, and streaming video do away with a bit of the sting, too. The kids can still consume current media and discuss their favorite shows and novels—just not face-to-face for a while.

And here’s the thing. If you try homeschooling, you may discover that it’s not just a good way to keep COVID-19 at bay, but an effective approach to education more generally and a good fit for your family. If so, well, welcome to a happy, healthy, and growing club.

Guns and behavior

Dear elected representative, I am Angie from TC High and we are learning more about guns and school shootings and speaking our opinions about it and I guess we are now writing to you. So I gotta start somewhere.

This gun situation needs to be brought up more in schools, anywhere it can influence a person to not do this type of thing. I remember in middle school we talked a lot about opioids and discussed almost every day. And have checkups on kids psychologically and do more studies to see the red flags for this behavior.

But don’t take away guns. It’s not the guns killing people; it’s the people killing people. The Second Amendment says we have a right to keep and bear arms so you can’t really take away our guns. Help the people who are thinking of doing this thing. We have to keep America safe if we want to have better lives and a better future.

Angie Maddasion

Traverse City

Pew: Only Half of Americans Think Colleges Have Positive Effect on Society

I’m surprised it’s that high.

A new poll from Pew Research revealed that only half of Americans believe that colleges and universities have a positive effect on society. Now, a George Mason University professor has some theories as to why higher education has become so unpopular with Americans.

According to a column published this week by the Daily Signal, Americans have an increasingly negative attitude towards colleges and universities. The column, which was penned by George Mason University Professor Walter E. Williams, makes the case that Americans are turning on higher education.

Williams highlighted a poll by the Pew Research Center that revealed that only half of Americans believe that higher education has a positive effect on society.

It’s not perfectly clear why so many Americans distrust academia. The rising cost of attending college has become a regular concern for Americans around the country. However, Williams has some theories as to why the poll results were so unfavorable for colleges and universities.

Williams cited a study published by the National Association of Scholars that studied the political activity over 12,000 professors. The study revealed that only 22 of the professors included in the study donated to Republican candidates for office.

Langbert and Stevens conducted the new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private colleges and two leading public colleges in 31 states.

For party registration, they found a Democratic to Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1, which varied by rank of institution and region.

For donations to political candidates (using the Federal Election Commission database), they found a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors, compared with 2,081 Democratic donors.

Williams cited other crises in higher education as reasons for the poll results such as universities failing to disclose millions of dollars in funding from foreign governments.

Gov. Andy Beshear signs bill requiring school resource officers to carry guns

Despite calls from civil rights groups to veto the legislation, Gov. Andy Beshear on Friday signed a bill requiring school police to carry guns.

All Kentucky schools are now required to have at least one armed police officer under state law, effective immediately.

While understanding opposition to the measure, Beshear said at a press conference Friday he could not allow officers to not have the weapons they may need in confronting a school shooting.

“I simply cannot ask a school resource officer to stop an armed gunman entering a school without them having the ability to not only achieve this mission, but also to protect themselves,” Beshear said. “We must be able to stop the worst of the worst.”

Signing Senate Bill 8 is best for the state as a whole, he continued.

Moving forward, Beshear said his administration will work on training officers to “start addressing the reason some kids might not feel safe because of a police officer.”

Beshear’s decision comes after the bill passed the Senate and House with large bipartisan margins, making a veto almost guaranteed to be overridden.