Tag Archives: education

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.

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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.

Folktale Fiction for the Fallen Nation

06 Thursday Jun 2019

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Ann Coulter writes about the rejection of truth in the burning remains of the West.

New York City public school teachers recently revealed that they have been instructed to reject “objectivity,” “written documentation” and “perfectionism” by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, as part of his effort to “dismantle racism.” Carranza identified these values as tools of the “white-supremacy culture.”

…

In our new country, nonsense like “objectivity” and “written documentation” are mere tricks, chicanery, hocus-pocus, used against “communities of color” — as Schools Chancellor Carranza explained — in order “to win victories for white people.”

And, here, the schools are behind the curve, as Coulter observes. But, we do need some new victories. Each Coulter column counts as one.

A College List

05 Wednesday Jun 2019

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10 Colleges that maybe aren’t completely converged by SJWs:

THE LIST

As our list of schools suggests, institutions of any type and size can differentiate themselves by emphasizing open inquiry in their curricular and co-curricular efforts. By welcoming diverse people with diverse views to campus—and, crucially, creating opportunities for the community to learn and practice nuanced, respectful engagement—colleges can both advance their core academic mission and equip graduates to thrive in their post-graduation pursuits.

No guarantees but it beats the now-normal horror stories. And, there are more than these ten. Maybe I’ll do another list myself. Thomas More of NH! That’s one.

Wherein Latin Rides to the Rescue of American Education – From TPC

28 Tuesday May 2019

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The Memorial Day weekend of 2019 has passed us by. Summer approaches. All across the Several States, mortarboard-wearing students graduate from the high schools. Many have had their intellectual faculties turned off since fifth grade, disengaged as much by the education system itself as by hormones, peer pressure, or electronic distractions.

 

In his 2017 book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Anthony Esolen noted two primary problems with America’s government school system: “There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. The public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform.” Ch. 3, pages 68-69.

 

His suggestion in the same paragraph I had already taken action on, even before reading the same – my own mission in partibus furibundis. But, the raging may as well have been against Stone Mountain; I’m worn out and it’s still there, unchanged.

 

A burrito is a terrible thing to waste…

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Picture by Perrin.

 

Esolen’s observations are correct. Last year, before I commenced my grand experiment (of which, more will be revealed sooner or later), I had already reached a similar conclusion. I presented some novel suggestions in the spirit of remediation. To those I now add proposed solutions to address Esolen’s dual issues.

READ MORE AT TPC