NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
What was done to children in public schools during the Covid lock-down was inexcusable. There will never be a full accounting, but this article in the NYT gets much of it right.
Category: Education (Page 5 of 8)
This would not be an issue if parents cared about their children enough to get them flip phones instead of smart phones. However, this is a positive step.
Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday gathered school administrators from around the state to discuss how they’ve instituted policies to restrict middle- and high-school students’ cell-phone use while at school.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion, superintendents spoke about how lunchrooms and playgrounds have been falling silent as students focus on their phones instead of each other. Kids use their phones to harass other students, set up fights, or skip class.
NYT Interactive Admissions Plotter
The NYT has this fancy, interactive plotter that shows how many Black and Hispanic students will be admitted based on different criteria.
Treating people differently on the bases of race for college admissions is found to be illegal because it is, by definition, racial discrimination. Universities are looking for legal ways around that.
While browsing the *Teachers* forum on Reddit, I read this post.
If you want to keep your jobs, and preserve the education system as it currently stands, VOTE in the 2024 presidential election.
The text of the post was a rant about how Trump promised to dismantle public education and collapse democracy in America. No one had commented, so I did:
The education system, as it currently stands, ain’t that great.
The original poster and a couple of dozen other people replied. A third were supportive, so I engaged the other two-thirds. Always be polite, but give no ground.
Several other people commented to disagree with the original post and started other threads.
After 200 comments, the original author withdrew her post. My comment has 28 up votes. I figured I’d be deep in negative numbers.
That’s a win. Not only did she withdraw, but many conservative teachers know that they aren’t alone.
“When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council, which adjudicates peer academic-integrity violations. “When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” as the body declared in a Dec. 12 statement.
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
The university system’s board of regents voted unanimously to terminate University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow during a closed session Wednesday evening. UW-La Crosse Provost Betsy Morgan will serve as interim chancellor following Gow’s dismissal, university system leaders said.
What could Gow have done that was so bad?
It isn’t clear what ChatGPT is good for, but that doesn’t stop people from predicting it’s going to take all the jobs. Try hiring a handyman or someone to cut your grass. They are busy and expensive.
Free Press: David Sedaris Punching Down
Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention.
Sedaris is a cosmopolitan humorist, so he is describing coastal people and what is written by influencers on social media, but many young people don’t seem very resilient.
In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.
What one change in public education would you implement to improve the quality of education?
Teachers say, “Get better parents.” That’s true, but not helpful. We teach the students we have. Public schools are a condensed version of the community. If the community is dysfunctional, the children of the community aren’t likely to be much better.