RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/06/enduring-truths-and-neglected-lessons/

Much of the debate surrounding schools and education centres on falling standards, teacher quality, school funding and what constitutes the most worthwhile curriculum and effective pedagogy. While such matters are important, more significant is the question: what constitutes the purpose of education? Given the rise of AI and chatbots and the fear humans will soon be replaced by computers, the question is even more urgent.

Illustrated by the cultural Left’s long march and prevalence of woke ideology in the nation’s classrooms, one answer is to use education as an instrument to overthrow what is depicted as an inherently racist, sexist, heteronormative capitalist society and to bring about the socialist utopia.

Throughout their schooling, students are indoctrinated with the belief that gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless, that males are inherently violent and misogynist and that Western civilisation is oppressive and guilty of white supremacism. Add the fact the world is about to end because of the climate change, that the arrival of the First Fleet led to genocide and there is nothing beneficial or redeeming about Australia’s development as a nation, and it’s no wonder young people suffer such high rates of anxiety and depression.

When Julia Gillard was education minister, she described herself as the minister for productivity. The focus is a utilitarian one where the purpose of education is to strengthen the economy and to ensure the nation has a highly skilled, globally competitive workforce. Associated with using schools to increase productivity is ensuring students are prepared for the uncertain, ever-changing world of the 21st century.  Knowledge is secondary to teaching generic competencies and skills like creativity, working in teams, critical thinking and embracing diversity and difference.

Ensuring education, especially in primary schools, is child-centred represents yet another approach to defining the purpose of education.  Re-badged as “personalised learning” and “student agency”, the belief is that learning only comes alive when it embraces the world of the child.

While each of the above models are distinctive, what they hold in common is the failure to address the essential role education plays in enculturation.  If societies are to survive and prosper and if individuals are to find meaning and purpose, each succeeding generation needs to be initiated into the broader culture.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/naep-scores-13-year-olds-math-reading-nces-peggy-carr-education-schools-covid-bda47967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“National Assessment of Educational Progress scores decline” is a familiar story; the last installment was in May, with a report that 8th-grade U.S. history test scores hit an all-time low. The latest dispiriting data from the Nation’s Report Card is more evidence that learning loss from public-school closures won’t be easily recovered.

NAEP scores for 13-year-olds declined by nine points in math and four in reading between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported. The math decline is the largest ever for this NAEP assessment. For the lowest-performing students, math scores were the worst since the 1970s, and reading scores were lower than the first data collection in 1971.

“There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said.

In the rare silver-lining department, NCES reports that Catholic school scores “were not measurably different” between 2019-20 and 2022-23. The reasons for the difference can’t be proven, but Catholic schools reopened much faster while teachers unions kept public schools closed. The educational devastation of remote school is well documented, and it’s becoming clearer that this effect won’t dissipate merely because students are back in buildings.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-american-schools-indoctrinate-kids?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

If you read The Free Press, you know that over the last decade, an illiberal ideology that goes by various names—Critical Race Theory; Critical Social Justice—has transformed key institutions of American life. It is remaking the law, Hollywood, medicine, higher education, psychology, and more.

No area, however, is more important than our schools, which shape the minds of future citizens. And across the country, teachers are now engaged in the wholesale indoctrination of their pupils.

The Evanston–Skokie School District teaches K–3 students to “break the binary” of gender. Seattle Public Schools tell teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children, while a Cupertino, California elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Portland, K–5 students are taught to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and explore the “infinite gender spectrum.” And thousands of similar examples, perhaps in your own community.

Yet many refute the claim that this ideological transformation is happening at all. Which is why we thought it was crucial to ground the anecdotes that sometimes make headlines in representative, large-scale data. We wanted to understand the impact that this reprogramming is having on young people’s ideas about race, gender, identity and more.

A recent survey of 1,500 Americans aged 18–20 that I conducted with Zach Goldberg for the Manhattan Institute proves just how widespread and pernicious this issue has become. It has implications that should concern anyone who cares about open inquiry and free speech.

We asked a random national sample of 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had heard (from an adult in school) of pro–Critical Race Theory (CRT) concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” as well as radical gender concepts such as the idea that gender is separate from biological sex. An astounding 90 percent had been exposed to CRT and 74 percent to radical gender concepts at school. In 7 of 10 cases these beliefs were presented as fact, or as the only respectable view to hold. 

Why does this matter? Increasingly, evidence is pouring in that young people are intolerant of opposing views.

For instance, nearly 70 percent of undergraduates polled in a 2021 study said that if “a professor says something students find offensive,” they should be reported to the university. The massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020–2022 find that 65 to 85 percent of American undergraduates believe universities should not permit speakers on campus who argue that some transgender people have a mental disorder, BLM is a hate group, or abortion should be illegal. 

When compared to older age groups, young people are far more intolerant, even when taking their politics into consideration. As I show in this report, over two-thirds of 18- to 25-year-olds think Google was right to fire programmer James Damore in 2017 for raising evidence-based questions in an internal memo about the firm’s gender equity policy. This compares to just 36 percent of those over 50 who backed Damore’s termination. Among liberals, I found that 82 percent of 18–25-year-olds support his firing while a much lower 57 percent of liberals over 50 do. 

Not only are educated young people intolerant of opposing ideas, they are increasingly unwilling to date or befriend Republicans. According to original data that I analyzed from FIRE’s 2020 survey, just 7 percent of female and 19 percent of male college students who are not Republican would feel comfortable dating a Trump supporter. 

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-test-scores-falling-american-schools-history/?utm_source=Spectator%20World%20Signup&utm_

“Imagine if flight schools had the same success rates as America’s teachers. Would anyone get on an airplane again? Would we hear the FAA telling us to just trust America’s pilots? Of course not; we’d see a full ground-stop until we could verify that planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies anymore.”
Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two.

The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm.

In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide. More and more students were falling short of the basic standards set out on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The New York Times reported that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in US history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” And just 13 percent of eighth graders were considered “proficient,” compared to 18 percent nearly a decade ago.

The scores match record lows in science, math and reading. The Times explained that “in history, it’s possible that reduced reading comprehension played some role in student performance.” So perhaps students can’t express a basic grasp of history because they can’t read. Reassuring, isn’t it?

The Biden administration’s education secretary Miguel A. Cardona zeroed in on the real culprit for the failures: Republicans, of course. Cardona explained that “banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

Last I checked, Republicans aren’t running teachers’ unions, teacher-training programs, the Department of Education, textbook or testing companies. In May, Cardona tweeted: “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.”

Imagine if flight schools had the same success rates as America’s teachers. Would anyone get on an airplane again? Would we hear the FAA telling us to just trust America’s pilots? Of course not; we’d see a full ground-stop until we could verify that planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies anymore.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-paid-for-free-speech-at-arizona-state-honors-college-kirk-prager-faculty-27c10a72?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I thought that Arizona State University, my alma mater and employer, was different from other schools when it came to free speech. In 2011 the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression awarded ASU a “green light” rating for its written policies on freedom of expression. The university happily complied when FIRE suggested it adopt the Chicago Principles and protect the “free, robust and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the University’s community.” The ASU Barrett Honors College has even been home to heterodox initiatives like the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, where I served as executive director for the last two years.

But beneath ASU’s written commitment to intellectual diversity lies a deep hostility toward divergent views. The latest trouble started in February when the Lewis Center hosted Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk for an event on “Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” This nonpartisan program was part of a popular speaker series focused on connecting students with professionals who can offer career and life advice.

At the names of Messrs. Prager and Kirk, the faculty of ASU’s honors college were outraged. Thirty-nine of its 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are “purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy.” The signers decried ASU “platforming and legitimating” their views, describing Messrs. Prager and Kirk as “white nationalist provocateurs” whose comments would undermine the value of democratic exchange by marginalizing the school’s most vulnerable students.

The faculty protests extended beyond the letter. Professors spent precious class time denouncing the program. On Twitter they lamented the university’s willingness to allow donor input on campus events. Mr. Prager received a death threat, forcing municipal and campus police to enact extensive security measures.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/educational-freedom-update/

As I wrote just two months ago, 2023 has seen Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and Florida establish universal school choice programs, giving all parents in those states control over the spending of their state’s education monies. According to the EdChoice dashboard, as of April 23, there were 12 states with education savings accounts (ESAs), 26 voucher programs in 15 states, and 25 tax-credit scholarship programs in 21 states.

But now, that is old news.

On April 26, Indiana expanded its voucher program so nearly all students will be eligible. The state raised the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any family under the income limit can apply. “Tens of thousands of additional students could qualify, and a legislative analysis projects that some 95,000 students might use the program in 2025, up from about 53,000 in 2023.”

The Indiana program is almost universal. Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education told the Indiana Capital Chronicle, “Early estimates suggest only 3.5% of families with school-age children in Indiana would not be eligible for the program under the new income limit.”

On May 25, Oklahoma enacted a universal choice law. Gov. Kevin Stitt asserts, “School choice shouldn’t be just for the rich or those who can afford it. Now it’s available for every single family in the state of Oklahoma.” At least $5,000 will go to parents who want to send their child to a private school or home school.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/16/lesson-learned-study-shows-charters-outperform-traditional-public-schools/

If traditional public schools want to succeed, they should follow charter schools’ lead.

People debating school choice have long had a difficult time finding a comprehensive study to really show the difference between charter schools — publicly funded schools that are run independent of a district or union — and traditional public schools. In most instances, the variables are too numerous for anything to be conclusive. Charter schools seemed to be better, but only certain charters in certain states with certain kids during certain years.

Finally, a new study has come out that indicates charters are indeed generally better than traditional public schools. Tabulating the academic progress of 1.8 million charter school students, researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes determined that these students were the equivalent of 16 instructional days ahead on English and six instructional days ahead in math. To make sure they weren’t comparing apples to oranges, these students “were each paired with a ‘virtual twin’ (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.”

Naturally, the gains varied from state to state and school to school. In states such as New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Rhode Island, charter school students outpaced traditional public school students by more than a month of instruction in reading and math. Additionally, charter schools that operate under a charter management organization (CMO), like the Knowledge Is Power Program or Founders Classical Academy, did better than their non-CMO counterparts, particularly in math.

And before skeptics give the “But Covid!” excuse, it’s worth noting that these results follow a pattern of steady progression over a decade: “The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math.” Unlike most traditional public school systems, charter schools are relatively young and have accordingly experienced growing pains; Covid was incidental to this. Even among charter schools that were part of the same CMO, older campuses outperformed newer ones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stanford-credo-charter-schools-study-student-performance-traditional-schools-education-math-reading-1d416fe5?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

School choice is gaining momentum nationwide, and charter schools are a large part of the movement. A new study shows that these independently run public schools are blowing away their traditional school competition in student performance.

Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo) report is the third in a series (2009, 2013, 2023) tracking charter-school outcomes over 15 years. The study is one of the largest ever conducted, covering over two million charter students in 29 states, New York City and Washington, D.C., and a control group in traditional public schools.

Credo’s judgment is unequivocal: Most charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” In reading and math, “charter schools provide their students with stronger learning when compared to the traditional public schools.” The nationwide gains for charter students were six days in math and 16 days in reading.

The comparisons in some states are more remarkable. In New York, charter students were 75 days ahead in reading and 73 days in math compared with traditional public-school peers. In Illinois they were 40 days ahead in reading and 48 in math. In Washington state, 26 days ahead in reading and 39 in math. Those differences can add up to an extra year of learning across an entire elementary education.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-other-crt

Public education authorities and teachers’ unions aren’t all wrong when they argue that critical race theory, referring to graduate-level legal theory, is not “taught” in K–12 schools. But with that calculated half-truth, they obscure something more troubling. Teachers in many states are being trained to suffuse critical theory throughout the entirety of the traditional curriculum, pursuing what academics call “the other CRT”: culturally responsive teaching. In fact, a majority of state education departments have adopted some form of the pedagogy.

This other CRT hasn’t faced much pushback—until now. Families, teachers, and administrators in three western Pennsylvania school districts are suing the state Department of Education over its “culturally-relevant and sustaining education” (CR-SE) guidelines, arguing not only that it illegally skirted public scrutiny but also that the competencies listed in the guidelines violate state and federal civil rights guarantees.

According to their complaint, the guidelines dictate what teachers must believe and how they must behave. For instance, one competency requires teachers to acknowledge “that biases exist in the educational system” and to become internal activists who “disrupt harmful institutional practices.” Another requires that teachers “believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real” and then commit to ridding their classrooms of them, notwithstanding the dubious research behind the concept. And yet another tells teachers to be aware of their “own conscious/unconscious biases,” implying that all must accept their guilt.

“How do you measure whether someone believes or doesn’t believe?,” said Thomas Breth, special counsel for the Thomas More Society and attorney for the plaintiffs. “Must they sign an oath and have it notarized? And how does one objectively determine a microaggression? For school districts, if they don’t comply and make students comply, they could lose their basic education subsidies. We’re dealing with very serious issues and very serious consequences.”

Donna-Marie Cole-Malott, co-director of the Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium (PEDC), which helped draft the guidelines, contends that the plaintiffs are “misunderstanding what they are reading.” The guidelines offer resources to educators, she says, to help them “create an environment of respect, to create more welcoming and confirming spaces.” And proponents claim the pedagogy will bring “equity” to public education by training teachers to use the “cultural nuances” of each student’s background to make curriculum more understandable.

Cole-Malott also said, echoing claims by the State Board of Education, that culturally responsive teaching will help improve the state’s educator shortfall. She pointed to research by the left-leaning non-profit Research for Action showing that there are 1,200 fewer black teachers in Philadelphia than two decades ago and blaming the problem on “the cumulative impact of racism—systemic and interpersonal, as well as racial microaggressions.”

But it’s not readily apparent that demanding that students question “economic, political, and social power structures,” in the words of one competency, will aid in teacher recruitment. Nor is it clear that “culture” issues explain an across-the-board, 66 percent decline in newly issued Pennsylvania teaching certificates over the past 11 years.

A deep dive into the intellectual foundations of culturally relevant pedagogy show that the Pennsylvania plaintiffs are right to be concerned about the guidelines. The term “culturally relevant pedagogy” was coined by pedagogical theorist and University of Wisconsin–Madison emerita professor Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995, when she published two influential articles: “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” and “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.” The latter aimed to adopt critical race theory from the legal sphere to education. The article is an unrelenting broadside against capitalism, objectivity, and merit, which Ladson-Billings argues underpin American public education’s real goal of reinforcing “whiteness as property.” Even the civil rights reforms of the 1960s and the pluralistic multiculturalism employed in today’s schools are “mired in liberal ideology that offers no radical change in the current order.” Her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy emerged from this radical basis. In “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” she proposed that “particular kinds” of teachers must be recruited into the field—ones who “meet the cultural critique criteria” and must therefore “be engaged in a critical pedagogy.”

It took decades, but state departments of education eventually took up Ladson-Billings’s mission. In New York, for example, the Board of Regents directed the state education department to convene a panel of experts in 2018 to draft a Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework. The department credits David Kirkland of New York University’s Metro Center, a critical theorist, for drafting the “springboard” document, and several like-minded radicals from academia were members of the expert committee that contributed to the final report. Unsurprisingly, the Metro Center’s professional development training for New York teachers says that its culturally responsive education series is “based on Critical Race Theory.” And far from merely making essential curriculum understandable to students of various cultural backgrounds, districts like Buffalo Public Schools are using the pedagogy to create “social justice warrior” teachers who “liberate and emancipate” students “from predominantly eurocentric learning structures,” according to a webinar by Fatima Morrell, the district’s chief of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives.

New York’s framework is tame compared with Pennsylvania’s guidelines, which include speech and belief requirements: “The guidance and competencies created by the Wolf Administration go well beyond the intent of what the State Board of Education approved,” said Pennsylvania state senator Scott Martin, who chaired the chamber’s education committee until this year. “There was no communication from the administration about how these policies would be distorted and implemented, and there was never even a hint that this process would be misused to implement radical teaching strategies in our schools.”

Pennsylvania took the first step to adopt the pedagogy in 2020, when the State Board of Education proposed altering the regulation governing teacher certification and training to include the phrase “Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education” (CR-SE). The state’s bipartisan regulatory review board gave its support, and the General Assembly’s House and Senate education committees, both Republican-controlled at the time, received the final regulation in January 2022 and made no protest at the time. However, the regulation those committees received included none of the details that would subsequently be featured in the controversial guidelines, except for a PowerPoint Slide with a relatively innocuous and brief list of competencies.

Like New York, the Pennsylvania Department of Education had tasked a group of outside academics with drafting the more expansive and idealistic competencies. That group was led by Cole-Malott’s PEDC, which also credits the U.S. Department of Education’s regional Comprehensive Center as a co-developer. This group completed its draft in April 2021, nine months prior to the legislature’s receiving the regulatory documents that were largely free of any potentially controversial details.

It wasn’t until the guidelines were issued to local districts in November, during the waning days of Wolf’s administration, that they became public knowledge, sparking the lawsuit. “This is the government saying, you will believe this, you will state that you believe this or there will be consequences,” said Breth. “I’m against that whether its conservative, liberal, progressive, non-progressive.”

Intermingled with the sly radicalism in Pennsylvania’s guidelines, however, is a sense of desperation about improving the state’s failing public schools. Students in Philadelphia, for example, consistently trail their national peers in reading and math despite the district’s spending more than $7,000 per-student above the national average. But training teachers to see their students and peers as unwitting micro-aggressors, their schools as hotbeds of bias, and the broader society as made up of interwoven systems of oppression won’t help anyone.

Finding ways to make academics more approachable to all students is a worthy goal. So is recruiting teachers of every race. Pennsylvania’s culturally relevant guidelines, unfortunately, stray far from that path.