Tag Archives: education

Grading the Colleges 2019

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

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Dr. Walter Williams has the dirt on the schools:

For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That’s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA’s findings were published in their report “What Will They Learn? 2018-19.” It doesn’t look good.

No “A” schools in the Ivy League. My undergrad alma mater got an A. My grad school university a D (based on the undergrad programs).

THE REPORT

Happy Back to School Special

19 Monday Aug 2019

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More (recent) lessons on America’s schools (this example being one of the better ones):

After an interview and teaching a few “test” classes to first- and second-year students, I was hired.  Within a few days, however, it was clear that many students did not understand English grammar, much less Latin fundamentals.  In response, I taught remedial grammar and outlined how students could pass my course with a “C” or “D.”  There were some excellent students, but test scores were not distributed in a bell-shaped curve.  It was an “inverted” bell, or bimodal distribution — with scores clumped at the two extremes.

Poor preparation was only the tip of the iceberg.  Students did not bring books to class, relentlessly complained about homework, and expected high grades regardless of proficiency.  When I asked questions, I uncovered some alarming facts:

  • Latin was a dumping ground for students who already had failed another language; “picking up a few phrases” was the goal.
  • Many teachers expected little but awarded high grades.
  • Students were subjected to parental pressure to obtain good grades regardless of performance.
  • A department head had been demoted for teaching at a pre-college level and refusing to lower his standards.
  • Senior teachers were dropping out in disgust; younger teachers had no choice but to accept the situation.
  • Under parental pressure, the principal was establishing a process to prevent students from having to take more than one test on the same day.  College prep?

Tom Ironsides and I can vouch for this collapse. We will. Soon.

The College Trap

08 Thursday Aug 2019

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Maybe some Gen Zers aren’t falling for it anymore. Good.

At 19 years old, Vivek belongs to Generation Z. And while her experience isn’t yet common, Gen Z is becoming more open to doing college differently or not going at all, according to a new study by TD Ameritrade TD, +0.68%

The study surveyed over 3,000 U.S. teens and adults, including approximately 1,000 Gen Z (ages 15 to 21), 1,000 young millennials (ages 22 to 28), and 1,000 parents (ages 30 to 60).

About one in five Gen Z and young millennials say they may choose not to go to college. Many others see a less conventional path through education as a good idea. Over 30% of Gen Z — and 18% of young millennials — said they have considered taking a gap year between high school and college.

What’s more, 89% of Gen Z, along with nearly 79% of young millennials, have considered an education path that looks different from a four-year degree directly out of high school. For millennials, that’s up 18% from 2017. (Gen Z was not surveyed in 2017.)

“There are more options today,” Dara Luber, a senior retirement manager at TD Ameritrade, told MarketWatch. “More students are looking at online courses, doing classes at community college, commuting from home, or going to a trade school.”

Approximately 19.9 million students will attend college in the fall of 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 20.3 million a decade ago when some people likely decided to further their education during the Great Recession.

While college attendance has risen from 14.8 million two decades ago, the NCES expects it to remain relatively steady over the next five years. But the $1.5 trillion in student debt has given younger students pause for thought.

It’s a shame the test subject is a paperwork American, but I guess we take what we can get. And, of course, the idiot Boomers are still 96% behind the worn lies and tripe. They were on the cutting edge, stealing all they could, before the value oversupply debasement, the 500% increase in tuition, the financial wizardry, and the anti-Western biases set in.

The Effects of (Really) Counting the SAT and ACT

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Steve Sailer opts for a potential “take it if you can” approach towards the end of a very good article on some new (if unsurprising) research about elite college admissions.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

And, there’s still the Asians v. Harvard case. Me, I’m not so sure about the idea of reclaiming the Ivy League. He’s probably right – for now. Whether it will matter in the future, as with all the rest of these thorny issues, remains to be seen.

Roadblock to Reality

19 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Walter Williams questions the decline of black academic culture in New York City.

It’s taken as axiomatic that the relatively few blacks admitted to these high-powered schools is somehow tied to racial discrimination. In a June 2, 2018 “Chalkbeat” article (https://tinyurl.com/y64delc3), de Blasio writes: “The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools — including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed — it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence.”

Let’s look at a bit of history to raise some questions about the mayor’s diversity hypothesis. Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book “Wealth, Poverty and Politics.” He reports that, “In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City.” Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.

What explains the decline?

He is, as usual, on to something. However, I sense the presence of a scheme (within a scheme) along the lines of the Asian Students v. Harvard case. At any rate, this is another great advertisement for homeschooling.

The College Basket Case

17 Monday Jun 2019

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As I’ve pointed out a few times before, the American education system is, by and large, broken, from kindergarten to graduate school. A new survey reveals the magnitude of the underlying issues facing the modern college student.

A 2018 survey at 140 educational institutions asked almost 90,000 college students about their health over the past 12 months. The survey found that more than three in five (63%) respondents reported experiencing “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, while two in five (42%) reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Students also reported that anxiety (27%), sleep difficulties (22%) and depression (19%) had adversely affected their academic performance.

In the same survey, 12% of college students reported having “seriously considered suicide.” Another study, which looked at college students with depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who had been referred by college counseling centers for psychopharmacological evaluation, found that the same proportion—12%—had actually made at least one suicide attempt. Half of the students in the latter study had previously received a prescription for medication, most often antidepressants.

Colleges are feeling the squeeze, with demand growing nationally for campus mental health services. A study by Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported an average 30% to 40% increase in students’ use of counseling centers between 2009 and 2015 at a time when enrollment grew by just 5%. According to Penn State’s report, the “increase in demand is primarily characterized by a growing frequency of students with a lifetime prevalence of threat-to-self indicators.”

This is a system terminally out of control. The schools and their students are mirrors, reflecting a changed, fractured, and fragmented culture and society. Our enemies have done their jobs well, over many decades. None of this will be fixed soon nor easily.

Seminaries of the Progressive Religion

11 Tuesday Jun 2019

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The Universities:

One hallmark of religions is they often have an institution of higher learning, where the most ambitious and well schooled young people go to complete their religious training and enter the world as leaders of their faith. In Christianity, we call these seminaries. A seminary is the place where a devout believer goes before he enters ministry. Once this training is completed, he is called to go out into the world to minister to his flock and to convert the unconverted.

The Progressive Left has a seminary, too — a finishing school where the ambitious and well schooled are polished to become “ministers” of their religion. It is the American university system.

The average high school graduate of promise often has no idea what world he is entering. All he knows is that all of his teachers have encouraged him from kindergarten until the end of his senior year that, if he has the talent and ability, he must go to college. The reasons for this aren’t nefarious. He will make more money as a college graduate; he will have a lower unemployment rate as a college graduate; and his general prospects for marriage, mental health, and the chance to retire are greatly improved by college. College has been, and continues to be, a great benefit — just like the public primary and secondary schools — for these reasons. But he is also unaware that he is about to enter a world that is even more slanted against tradition and conservatism than his usually left-leaning public school teachers, where conservatives are outnumbered nationally by a ratio of only 6 to 1.

Even the American Thinker, in making a good argument, falls victim to some of the untruths (or formerly truisms) about college education.

There are alternatives. Find them.

The Curse of Credentialization

09 Sunday Jun 2019

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I rail and rant against the “public” schools and with good reason. However, fair is fair, and sometimes things go awry at nonpareil private schools. Drama a Sidwell:

School officials have repeatedly warned parents, who represent the pinnacle of elite Washington, about their offensive conduct. In January, the head of the school, Bryan Garman, sent a remarkable letter to parents of seniors in which he demanded that they stop “the verbal assault of employees.” He also reiterated a policy banning them from recording conversations with counselors and making calls to counselors from blocked phone numbers. Garman also suggested that some parents were responsible for the “circulation of rumors about students.”

Anger, vitriol, and deceptiveness have come to define highly selective college admissions. In the now notorious Varsity Blues scandal, the desire from wealthy parents to get their children into such elite institutions as Yale and the University of Southern California led them to lie on applications and obtain fake SAT scores. At Sidwell Friends, one of America’s most famous Quaker schools, the desire manifested itself in bad behaviors—including parents spreading rumors about other students, ostensibly so that their children could get a leg up, the letter said.

Why the desperation?

The War on Books

08 Saturday Jun 2019

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VP offers some shocking (if predictable) insight into the removal of books from institutions of higher “learning.”

Less intelligent, but more ignorant

The Great Enstupidation of the United States proceeds apace:

When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.

One can make a very good case for outlawing so-called “higher education” now, as the Christian university created to educate young men has now devolved into a worse-than-useless factory for transforming young women into barren SJW debt-slaves.

 

This is a continuation of the trend from middle and high schools, in keeping with the general dumbing down. In some of those schools, what books are left are being caution-taped off to protect students from any random ideas.

IMG_20190524_073529540 - Edited

Picture by me. I was not kidding, sadly.

Losing the Border Battle

07 Friday Jun 2019

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As millions of unassimilables cross into fading America, the mighty imperial military spruces up for them. Rather than repel the invasion, the Army plays Tom Sawyer’s mark, whitewashing the fence wall “barrier.”

United States military personnel deployed near the U.S.-Mexico border have reportedly been assigned to paint certain barrier structures to strengthen their “aesthetic appearance.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) informed Congress that troops are going to spend the next month painting barriers and that “the primary purpose is to improve the aesthetic appearance.”

“DHS informed Congress today that troops are going to spend the next month painting the border wall & “the primary purpose is to improve the aesthetic appearance.” A disgraceful misuse of taxpayer $$. Our military has more important work to do than making Trump’s wall beautiful.”

It’s a sad day when Dick Durbin makes sense.

Meanwhile, a Texas government school teacher is fired after pleading with Trump to do his job and remove criminal aliens from her district.

A high school teacher in Texas was fired Tuesday over some tweets she sent to President Trump, asking him to do something about the illegal immigrants in her school district.

The Fort Worth Independent School District Board of Trustees voted on Tuesday to terminate the contract of English language arts teacher Georgia Clark, who has worked for the district since 1998.

The Carter-Riverside High School teacher tweeted what she thought were private messages directed at President Trump last month, but the comments were public and sparked a huge controversy in the Fort Worth community.

“Mr. President, Fort Worth Independent School District is loaded with illegal students from Mexico. Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them. Drug dealers are on our campus and nothing was done to them,” one tweet read.

Natural conservatives, dealing the dope that lazy Americans just won’t deal anymore. Shame on this woman.

I can fully believe that nothing is done about ordinary criminality, just as nothing is done about the invasion. Maybe Mrs. Clark can get a job helping paint the fence.