Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Saturday, September 24, 2022

A POLITICAL MYSTERY

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, GENDER FOLLIES

Generally I think I understand liberals pretty well. They like wealth and power, and they favor policies that give them more wealth and power. But some issues are puzzling, like their insistence on little children being indoctrinated in transgender ideology. This is a hill that Democrats seem willing to die on, but why? I don’t see that it brings them wealth or power, nor does it advance their cause politically.

On the contrary, voters are strongly opposed to trans propaganda, especially with regard to very young children. Take this New York Times/Siena poll, for example. The pollster asked, “Do you support or oppose allowing public school teachers to provide classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in elementary school (grades 1 to 5)?”

A large majority, 58%, were strongly opposed, while another 12% somewhat oppose such indoctrination. Conversely, only 27% expressed support for this instruction. And yet this was the issue on which Democrats attacked Ron DeSantis with their “don’t say gay” theme.

As kids get older, voters apparently become more comfortable with classroom trans instruction. Thus, when the same question was asked about classroom instruction directed at junior high school kids, grades 6 through 8, 44% supported while 54% opposed.

And when asked the same question about high school students, grades 9 through 12, 56% were willing to accept gay and trans instruction, with 42% opposed.

These findings are similar to what my organization got when polling Minnesotans a month ago. We asked, “Do you favor or oppose teaching elementary school children about homosexuality and transsexuality, and encouraging them to explore these alternative forms of sexual identity?” 33% favored such indoctrination, while 60% opposed, with by far the largest cohort, at 45%, being strongly opposed. We didn’t ask the question for higher grades.

The message seems clear: pushing gay and trans indoctrination on young children is a political loser. Yet Democrats seem undeterred. Similarly, there has lately been a recurrence of “drag queen story hours” in young children’s libraries, and of drag shows in which children as young as two or three are invited to participate. These phenomena baffle me. They must be strongly disapproved of by a large majority of Americans, and I don’t see how they bring wealth or power to liberals. So why this unwavering commitment to bizarre sex on behalf of the Democratic Party?

Maybe you can elucidate the mystery in the comments.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/a-political-mystery.php

Monday, September 12, 2022

CNN Columnist Admits Progressives Have a Problem With School Closures

Rebecca Downs

School closures due to COVID-19 absolutely devastated students in this country, something only confirmed even more so by the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress study showing math and reading scores at their lowest. Democrats, including and especially the Biden administration, shamelessly, tried to divert blame, just as they do on virtually every other issue.

In her opinion column for CNN, Jill Filipovic managed to be more clear-headed on the issue. "America has a problem. We, my fellow progressives, must admit it," the column from Tuesday now reads. Its previous title, "Before we can help students, liberals must admit school closures were a problem," was even more direct.

Filipovic's opening paragraph is strongly worded, as she mentions "unprecedented learning losses" and warns "for many students, it may simply be too late to make up such significant setbacks." This kind of stark tone continues throughout her piece.

Later on, for instance, she acknowledges that "It did not have to be this way." Although Filipovic claims that "the partisan finger-pointing that is already in full effect isn't particularly helpful," in the same sentence she writes that "progressives can look squarely at the harms that came from our own policies."

Of the long-term effects this study points to, Filipovic also writes that "it is a dark cloud looming over future generations."

Particularly worth highlighting is how schools in this country fared worse compared to European countries, and that black and Hispanic students also fared worse than white students:

But by the fall of 2020, when we knew much more, the US remained a global outlier in keeping schools shuttered, particularly for the youngest students who were at very low risk of serious illness from Covid-19 and were the least able to learn remotely. Many European countries sent children back to the classroom and found that even short school closures were remarkably disruptive and resulted in significant academic and social-emotional setbacks. In the US, our closures extended for much longer, and it seems our setbacks may be far worse.
...
Unsurprisingly, the students whose schools were remote for the longest periods -- disproportionately Black and Hispanic students, in part because those students are more likelyto be enrolled in the urban school districts that kept up remote learning far longer than their rural and suburban counterparts -- experienced the most significant learning losses. This is one of the many ways in which the pandemic response has further cleaved apart already-sprawling inequities.
...
The costs of school closures weren't just student learning losses. They included a mass exodusof women from the workforce, setting many of those women back financially and consigning many of them to an impoverished future. They included Black students who, according to a McKinsey analysis from last year, stand to lose $2,186 every year over 40 years in the labor force -- compared to $1,348 per year for White students.

Though Filipovic did not name names, there's no reason not to, especially when it comes to Democrats running for office this November.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) who is facing a surprisingly tight race in running for re-election, had quite the response while on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. As Madeline highlighted, Murray not only expressed no "second thoughts" about school closures, but claimed she was "proud" of what Democrats have done.

Then there's Karla Hernández-Mats, the running mate for Charlie Crist, who is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. Among Hernández-Mats' many terrible qualities, she denounced Gov. DeSantis for reopening schools and the economy.

Madeline Leesman

Speaking of Hernández-Mats, who is the president of United Teachers of Dade who heads the largest teachers union in the Southeast, there's no mention of teachers unions in Filipovic's columns, despite how much they've fought to keep schools closed.

Filipovic concludes her column on a hopeful note. "Liberals can win on education. But we have to get in the fight. And to do that, we must first admit that improving our nation's badly damaged educational outcomes is a battle worth fighting," she writes in her concluding party.

She can keep dreaming. Education was the major issue in the Virginia statewide elections last November that resulted in a Republican sweep, and it could very well be this year as well nationwide as Democrats appear to not just be of the mindset that school closures were not their fault or they did nothing wrong, but that their students belong to them rather than their parents.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/09/08/cnn-columnist-admits-progressives-have-a-problem-with-school-closures-n2612832

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

Becket Adams, Contributor

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated.

They warned the closures would cause serious, possibly irreversible, developmental retardation. They warned of severe learning loss.

Alas.

The critics were not just ignored, they were also maligned by a vicious cabal of politicians, news media personalities, and education professionals, most notably American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The critics were called monsters and "grandma killers." They were accused of not "trusting" the science.

"Children are resilient," the pro-closure camp smugly asserted. (No, it’s not that children are resilient. It’s that they don’t yet have the words to describe the ways in which you are harming them.)

Now, a little more than two years after the pandemic first came to America, new data confirm the mass school closures, which, by the way, Democratic politicians and teachers' unions enforced with a religious fever even long after the restrictions were shown to be little more than superstitious hocus-pokery, caused serious harm to young students.

"American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 1. "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades," the report reads , citing the first "nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."

It adds, "Math scores dropped seven points during that period, marking a first-ever decline, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called 'the nation’s report card.' The students who took the tests — given from January to March in 2020 and in 2022 — were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade."

At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the story is the same.

Who could’ve predicted this? Quite a few people, actually.

"There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic," Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, said in a 2020 paper arguing in favor of school reopenings.

However, he added, "there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home."

His and similar recommendations were rebuffed quickly by lockdown enthusiasts and teachers’ unions alike, both of whom characterized the effort to re-open schools as dangerous and even lethal.

Frustratingly enough, a not-insignificant number of parents also supported the closures, embracing the belief that in-person learning would jeopardize greatly the life and health of everyone involved. But ask yourself this: Where, exactly, do you suppose these parents got this idea? They got it from partisan state and local leaders, from grossly politicized public health agencies and teachers’ unions. They had fear pumped directly into their veins. They watched in 2020 as the Democratic National Committee ran ads claiming, among other things, that then-President Donald Trump was "risking teachers' and parents' lives" is his supposedly "desperate" push to reopen schools.

"[Trump is] ignoring how the virus spreads... going against the advice of experts," the ad said. "Do you trust him to do what’s best for our children?"

"One cannot overstate what a large role the political reaction against Trump, and his early failures on the pandemic, played in the extended closures in blue states and cities," ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis rightly observed last week. "Democrats saw a political opportunity in fanning the flames on school reopening, and it came at a cost."

Indeed.

Check this 2020 headline from the New York Times: "How Trump’s Push to Reopen Schools Backfired." The subhead reads , "Distrust of the president and his motives hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe, helping drive union opposition."

On Thursday, after the learning loss data were released, AFT president Weingarten responded.

"Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 [million] Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive," she said. "This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics."

The gall of this woman.

Weingarten acts as if the pandemic alone is responsible for the learning loss -- as if the restrictions she and her ideological allies promoted and enforced played no significant role. It's utterly shameless. Indeed, her comment is nearly as shameless as when National Public Radio declared this month, "Resistance to nuclear power is on the decline worldwide — and environmentalists helped lead the push. Here's why it's gaining support."

Yes, like Weingarten’s response this week, this actually happened. NPR actually said this.

And, yes, like Weingarten’s response, it’s a malicious, self-serving rewriting of history.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/critics-of-the-pandemic-school-closures-have-been-vindicated

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Here’s Why College Prices Have Spiraled Out Of Control And Bailouts Won’t Help

OPINION

Here’s Why College Prices Have Spiraled Out Of Control And Bailouts Won’t Help

BY REALCLEARWIRE

By Kenneth Schrupp for RealClearHistory

With the Biden administration’s announcement this week that it would continue the moratorium on student loan payments through the beginning of next year and will forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt per student, student loan forgiveness is at the top of the current political agenda. Meanwhile, there’s little talk about bringing the cost of college under control, or why the cost of college became so outrageous in the first place.

While proponents of student loan forgiveness argue American taxpayers need to pick up the student debt tab to level the racial and socio-economic playing field, the reality is debt forgiveness disproportionately benefits the well-off and educated, as the wealthiest 40% of Americans hold 58% of student debt, and 56% of debt is held by those with prestige and income-boosting post-bachelors’ degrees.

Instead of forcing the 87% of American adults who don’t have student loans to pay for the college experience of educated elites, American leaders must reform the universal federal student loan program that has driven the cost of college to grow eight times faster than wages.

Until 1965, the cost of college at private and public institutions remained fairly in line with inflation — these were the good old days, when a minimum wage summer job could cover all of one’s annual tuition, and then some. So what happened in 1965? President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Higher Education Act, which created guaranteed student loans by subsidizing capital for banks that would provide loans to low and middle income students.

This simultaneously expanded college access, especially for less privileged students seeking to attend private institutions, while keeping loan burdens manageable because private banks still controlled who could receive student loans and for how much. From 1964-77, the tuition at private universities grew 11.5% more than inflation as rising demand oustripped supply, while that at public institutions, it grew 1.6% less than inflation as the government massively expanded public college systems to accommodate an exploding college-age population fueled by the Baby Boom.

Carter created unlimited, guaranteed college demand

This bank-dominated system remained in place until 1978, when an economy in shambles and the pressures of the Baby Boom’s succeeding Baby Bust on empty college classrooms prompted President Jimmy Carter to pass the Middle Income Student Assistance Act, which eliminated income requirements for student loans.

At a time when colleges otherwise would have had to cut tuition or cohort sizes to stay full, this new bill ensured that anybody could be a full time student.

With this bill creating unlimited, guaranteed college demand, college tuition hikes were off to the races; from 1978-92, tuition at private universities grew 50.7% more than inflation, while that at public universities, it grew 25.4% more than inflation. Pretty dismal, right? Well, things got worse.

In 1992, the Higher Education Reauthorization Act introduced direct, guaranteed loans from the Department of Education itself, and, in response to higher tuition, removed borrowing limits, which removed any last incentive for schools to keep costs down. From 1993-2006 (the endpoint of the common data set used in this analysis), tuition at private schools grew 39% more than inflation, whereas that at public schools rose 47% more than inflation.

These massive increases were a result of large cuts in state funding for public universities (who increased tuition to offset these losses) and growing room and board fees (which were used to impose higher costs on students without having to increase headline tuition as much).

Debt forgiveness encourages rising tuitions

Without any changes to the federal student loan program, all debt forgiveness does is encourage a never-ending cycle of higher tuition, crushing debt, more bailouts, and more graduates lacking the positive equity to buy a house or even a wedding ring. A return to something more like the 1965 Higher Education Act but without federal loan guarantees — a mix of privately issued loans, low-interest capital, and strict requirements ensuring the loans would only serve lower and middle income students — would be a significant and realistic improvement.

Banks would be more careful in issuing loans, taking care to make sure students aren’t overwhelmed with debt they’d never afford to repay.

By combining this reform with a database of student debt-to-income ratios ranked by college and by major, students would be empowered to make more informed financial decisions, and schools with unsustainable programs would find themselves either short of students or named-and-shamed into improvement.

Requiring colleges to present average pay per major at that school upon graduation would probably also do wonders for helping students choose majors that make financial sense for them.

Purdue’s model worth considering

While politically infeasible, one could also even imagine a future where the federal government isn’t involved in issuing student loans at all, a world in which banks and schools create new financing programs on their own — and at their own risk. One school that has embraced an alternative funding model is Purdue University, a public institution ranked as one of the top 50 universities in our nation.

Purdue has not only frozen its tuition since 2012, but it has also created a viable alternative financing model that leaves students tuition-debt free while encouraging them to make effective financial decisions.

With Purdue’s Back a Boiler program, one can choose to pay no tuition during school, but pay a percentage of one’s earnings based on the typical Purdue graduate pay for that major over a period of 10 years.

Though the cost to the student over the program’s lifetime is slightly cheaper than private loans and slightly more expensive than federal loans, the real difference is the university, not the student or the federal government, is the one ultimately responsible for potential losses and benefits — it’s up to Purdue to invest in its students success or suffer the financial consequences.

This alignment of risk and reward with the agent responsible for the quality and value of the product — Purdue is incentivized to produce high quality graduates to maximize their returns, while keeping administrative bloat and other bureaucratic waste down to keep costs in check. If colleges across this country were to offer this model, it’s highly likely we’d see drastic improvements in quality and reductions in the cost of higher education across the board.

Why a bailout isn’t fair

But at the same time that we lament the cost of college, we also must remember that, once accounting for socioeconomic differences, men with bachelor’s degrees earn $655,000 more in median lifetime earnings than those with only high school diplomas, while women with bachelor’s earn $450,000 more.

With the average undergraduate student debt load at $28,400, this means the rate of return on average debt at graduation is 1,585%. A widespread bailout is hardly fair given the vast improvement in lifetime earnings that exists despite the contrivances of the federal student loan program.

Indeed, the federal student loan program has suffered the same fate of nearly every well-meaning but short-on-foresight subsidy. Modest successes from a limited-scope program drive the creation of reliant and growing constituencies who expand the program to the point of bloat and failure, ultimately doing more harm than help to the beneficiaries the program was built to serve.

In this case, the federal student loan program has financially impacted generations of Americans, leaving millions with debt and created a situation where the same government that created the problem can come in on a shining horse to save the day over and over again — politically, federal student loans are the gift that doesn’t stop giving.

To put an end to this scheme of student suffering, bureaucratic bloat, and political ponies, we have little choice but to turn back the clock on the federal student loan program, either returning loan-origination for federally subsidized loans back to banks or replacing the federal loan system entirely.

Otherwise, like clockwork every election cycle, politicians will dangle the carrot of debt relief before desperate students all too eager to vote for their own demise, over and over again until the whole system comes crashing down.

Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.

Kenneth Schrupp is a Young Voices contributor writing on the intersection of business, politics and media. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the California Review, an independent journal.

https://thepoliticalinsider.com/heres-why-college-prices-have-spiraled-out-of-control-and-bailouts-wont-help/

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Among the Greatest Partisan Rip-Offs of All Time

President Joe Biden announces student loan relief in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on August 24, 2022. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

VIEWPOINTS

Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Among the Greatest Partisan Rip-Offs of All Time

Roger L. Simon

0:003:52

Commentary

Remember 1773’s Boston Tea Party and “taxation without representation” that led to the American Revolution and our ultimate separation from Britain?

I imagine you do, but perhaps not if you are one of our younger readers and all you were being taught in one of our woke schools that skin color and gender identity were far more important than reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Nevertheless, Joe Biden—quite possibly, even likely, illegally and certainly as the most obvious kind of vote grubbing—has gone one (or multiple times) up on King George in the “taxation without representation” department with his student loan forgiveness, partial though it may be.

Consider this: The gullible poor slob (aka good citizen), whether parent or graduate, who has been paying or has fully paid his/her student loan is being asked to pay for someone else’s, once again through taxes, even though the recipient of this largesse may be less needy than the benighted taxpayer.

He or she is paying twice, rather like the estate tax but worse because it taking the money of yet more people that can ill afford it.

How much will this loan forgiveness cost all of us taxpayers? Estimates vary, of course. The other day Penn Wharton put it at $300 billion after 10 years. That translates to $2,000 per taxpayer, according to the National Review.

But those are not the most recent figures. Fox Business on Aug. 25 is estimating between $440 and $600 billion over the same time frame. Something called the Committee for a Responsible Budget has now put it at $500 billion.

In most of our experiences, these estimates tend to go up, often also in multiples, so no one knows what it will actually cost, but we can be sure it’s a stupendous amount.

Driving home from my early morning stint on the Tennessee Star Report today, I heard Glenn Beck—who immediately follows on the same station to his national audience—mention ever more disturbing numbers, comparing the expenditure to the annual cost of the U. S. Military and to the gross national product of over a hundred countries.

All this at a time when our national debt is rising exponentially, inflation (with the temporary exception of heavily-managed gas prices) is doing the same, and the Fed is working overtime to fight these trends through rapidly increasing interest rates.

And yet the man in the White House is taking us all in the opposite direction for a few votes that might not really be there, especially if the Republicans wake up, as opposed to being woke, and communicate well to the public. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has made a good start at a Senate hearing.

More, please, and as forcefully as possible—not just at hearings for the C-SPAN crowd, but everywhere for everyone.

Messaging, with exceptions (notably Trump and DeSantis), has been a weakness for Republicans, especially with the quondam-left’s stranglehold on mainstream media.

This relates interestingly to the larger higher education discussion. For the last year or so, I have been conducting a private—admittedly random and without concrete statistical value—survey of liberals and progressives to ask them whether they knew Biden had plagiarized (rather extensively at that) in law school, of all places.

Only one of seven or eight did!

When I informed the others about the plagiarism and its extent (he lifted an entire legal brief and claimed it as his own), repeated several times with Neil Kinnock and others (when he lifted their speeches), I watched as ears seemed to close and eyes grew unfocused. Some even looked away as if overcome by a sudden cognitive disorder, while trying to figure out how to walk away or change the subject. Such is communication in our times.

Which makes me wonder if Biden really respects education, whether he sees it as any more than just a road to getting votes, just as he saw a law degree as something for getting a job or getting into politics, but not as something enshrining, or even recognizing your belief in, the rule of law this country was founded on.

He clearly is acting lawlessly against the separation of powers in our Constitution in many areas—trampling on it really—whether at his own behest or that of others.

Anyway, I hope and actually suspect that this loan forgiveness will backfire.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-among-the-greatest-partisan-rip-offs-of-all-time_4689612.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-08-26&utm_medium=email&est=yx0c6Z%2B6chEb038YGA4AQoBmXF%2BL41qWGLlAT747tyCgVdTpkOpp7JHOTjbx