Tag: education

Who can explain the mystery?

Isn’t it remarkable that despite the fact that everyone there so values diversity and agrees that it is the most important aspect of education, the San Francisco schools are highly segregated?

Each January, parents across San Francisco rank their preferences for public schools. By June, most get their children into their first choices, and almost three-quarters get one of their choices.

A majority of families may be satisfied with the outcome, but the student assignment system is failing to meet its No. 1 goal, which the San Francisco Unified School District has struggled to achieve since the 1960s: classroom diversity.

Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly. Six in 10 have simple majorities of one racial group. In almost one-fourth, 60 percent or more of the students belong to one racial group, which administrators say makes them “racially isolated.” That described 28 schools in 2013–2014, up from 23 in 2010–2011, according to the district.

But the San Francisco Public Press has found the problem may be even more stark: If Asian and Filipino students are counted together — the standard used by the Census — together the number of racially isolated schools in the last school year rose to 39.

The drive toward racial isolation in the district parallels a larger trend in the city: With many wealthier families opting for private alternatives, the public school system is becoming racially and economically isolated from the city as a whole.

Why does it matter whether schools are diverse? One reason is academic performance. Recent studies from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, show that many students do much better on tests when placed in integrated classrooms, and that all kids are much less likely to grow up with racial stereotypes and prejudices. Far from being opposed to each other, excellence and diversity go hand in hand.

How did this resegregation of schools happen in a city where almost everyone from district leaders to parents supports the ideal of diversity?

And they’ve got studies show and everything! How did this happen to such a nice group of diversity-loving liberals? It’s almost as if… parents are choosing something other than diversity?

Homeschool or be poor

The cognitive elite are abandoning the public schools:

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

 Jartstar observes: This will accelerate home schooling and private schooling. In a generation or before most of the major city public schools in the US will be like most of the rest of the 3rd World, poor, dangerous, and offering little education. There will be pockets of good public schools in select communities and neighborhoods. The real collapse will be when enough people take their kids out to kill the funding by stopping bonds.

I tend to suspect the influx of uneducated foreign children has encouraged more than a few parents to pull their children out of the public schools as well. Ironically, there is no state with an education system more segregated than Democrat-run New York.

Pity the poor professors

If this isn’t an excuse for well-justified schadenfreude, I don’t know what is:

“Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  That’s what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard’s health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms.

Are Harvard professors being forced onto Medicaid? Has their employer denied coverage for cancer treatment? Do they need to sign a corporate loyalty oath in order to access health insurance? Not exactly. But copayments are being raised and deductibles altered, making their plan … well, actually, their plan is still extraordinarily generous by any standard:

    The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.

Demonstrating, yet again, that nothing is more short-sighted than an activist rabbit. Give them exactly what they want, provide them exactly what they are agitating for, and they are outraged!

“When I demanded more comprehensive government services requiring more taxes, I didn’t mean that I wanted to pay for them myself!”

Is it any surprise that college educations are increasingly worthless, given that idiots like these are supposedly the creme de la creme of the professoriat?

Homeschool or Die: Pakistan

4GW prefers to aim at soft targets:

At least 126 people have been killed, more than 100 of them children, after Taliban gunmen stormed a military school in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, in the worst ever militant attack to hit the troubled region.

It was reported that one suicide bomber blew himself up in a room containing 60 children and a teacher was set on fire in front of pupils, with the children forced to watch.

The attack started with the gunmen, disguised as security guards, entering the 500-pupil school – which has students aged 10 to 18 – in the early hours.

The jihadists shot their way into the building and went from classroom to classroom, shooting at random.

Army commandos quickly arrived at the scene and exchanged fire with the gunmen. Eye-witnesses described how students cowered under desks as dead bodies were strewn along corridors. News images of the aftermath of the attack showed boys in blood-soaked school uniforms with green blazers being carried from the scene.

Around 160 children, aged 13 and 14, are being held hostage, with four gunmen still inside.  A police inspector said they had trapped the terrorists in the principal’s office. Many of the soldiers involved in the rescue operation are trying to save their own children.

And the world looks on… and learns. The strutting, swaggering militarized police in America have already seen their own families targeted in Los Angeles and Colorado, but they haven’t taken the lesson to heart yet and dialed down their confrontational tactics. And yet, how quickly the agents of the state stop strutting and swaggering when they finally grasp that their families are easily reached even when they live behind barricades and their children go to special schools protected with security guards….

It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and in the West, the sort of easily avoidable tragedy that will nevertheless come to West in time, as we have already seen in New York, London, Madrid, and Sydney.

There is one answer, and only one answer. Mass repatriation. If it is not enacted, then America, and England, and Italy, and Sweden, and Germany, and every other country in the West will see its children subjected to the same jihadist violence. The East does not, and never has, practice the formal Western way of war. And they will prefer to target the soft targets, the women and the children who are incapable of fighting back. Note that this sort of soft-targeting is the very subject addressed by my story, “A Reliable Source”, in RIDING THE RED HORSE.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,’ said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. ‘We want them to feel the pain.'” 

Speaking of soft targets: “Over 1,000 schools have been destroyed by the Pakistan Taliban since 2010.“

The answer is not to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. It is to send them back over there so we don’t have to fight them here.


UPDATE: Final count: “Nine Taliban terrorists attacked the Army
Public School in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar today,
slaughtering 132 children in the deadliest terrorist attack in the
nation’s history.”

The college experience isn’t worth it

Not if you’re going to be paying for it for the rest of your life:

Stats from the Department of Education show outstanding student loans total more than $1 trillion. A report from The Institute for College Access in late 2013 revealed the average new graduate starts his or her life with $29,400 in student loan debt. College as we know it is clearly unaffordable.

So my question is: Why do people keep embarking on the “traditional college experience” when they know it’s going to put them tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars in debt?

And while some people say these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, let’s not pretend we don’t know better. I distinctly remember asking my friend how he would pay off the roughly $70,000 debt he would incur to obtain a major in Ancient Greek and Latin at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. His answer? A simple shrug and flippant “It’s not something I have to worry about right now — hopefully they’ll be forgiven by the government.” Now that he’s still waiting tables four years after graduation, I’d say it’s well past time to start worrying.

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans. My wonderful parents and grandmother helped me pay for my education, but in the end, it was a few decisions I made that saved me the burden of borrowing money I would never have been able to pay back. Unlike the majority of my friends who went to schools less than an hour from their parents’ homes and chose to live on campus rather than commute, my college roommates were named Mom and Dad. I chose state schools that were half, sometimes one-quarter, of the cost of the schools my friends were attending and worked a part-time on-campus scholarship job in addition to full-time hours at my retail job.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that there is an entire predatory industry, aided and abetted by the federal government, the public school system, and far too many parents, encouraging graduating seniors to make stupid and short-sighted decisions.  This doesn’t excuse the terrible decisions they are making, but it does help explain them.

I’m a little curious about what I can only presume is a new editor at TIME. They’ve been running some surprisingly good columns of late.

Mailvox: more curricula wanted

Rabbi B is interested in our future plans for more material for homeschooling and personal intellectual development:

I recently acquired the astronomy materials from Castalia House a few weeks ago, and from just a cursory review it is evident that the material is going to be rigorous, demanding, and a lot of fun.  I was wondering if you had any plans top expand this area of Castalia House in the future?

I thought it might be nice to make more material of comparable quality available.  It may be possible that more specialized subjects such as writing, rhetoric, Latin, logic, and economics would prove appealing.  In my experience, many home schoolers tend to be relatively weak in these areas, most especially writing and rhetoric.  The material wouldn’t have to be added all at once, but could be introduced gradually to assess interest and receptivity.  Perhaps there would be a way to gauge what topics would be of interest and provide material accordingly.

Even if materials couldn’t be made available, suggested reading lists for a variety of disciplines (literature, history, mathematics, sciences, philosophy, etc) and for different age groups could be posted, not unlike the reading lists on the VP site.  Obviously, you have a better grasp of what is marketable and worth your time and effort, but I for one would love to see more educational materials of comparable quality made available.

We do indeed intend to produce more material for the Castalia Homeschool line. At present, we are working on three curricula: Newtonian Physics, Military History, and Economics. The latter begins thus:

Economics is an intellectual discipline, a field of study, and a body of knowledge. It is not, however, a science, despite the best efforts of economists to establish it as one. While it has historically been called “the Dismal Science”, the truth is that economics could be more accurately described as “the Grand Illusion”.

Science is a process that requires testing, repetition, and the production of reliable, predictable, and testable results. But due to its dynamic complexity and its enormous scale, economics does not readily lend itself to either testing in a lab or repetition outside one. And because of the tremendous complications of all the human preferences and decisions necessarily involved, the predictions generated by economic models seldom prove to be even remotely reliable. Even on the rare occasions that they appear to be initially correct, economic theories often cease to hold up well over time.

Does this mean that economics is without value or that it is a waste of time to study it? Not in the least. Economics only provides us with a very limited ability to understand the chaotic complexities of human interaction, but even a faint glimmer of light is precious in a room that is otherwise pitch-black.

We actually hoped to have Physics and Economics out this fall, but events and ambitions conspired to thwart us. The problem is that Stickwick and I are both, in addition to being rather busy, more than a little iconoclastic. Which means that we’re not entirely comfortable with any of the basic textbooks available and therefore feel the need to write our own. Fortunately for me, Tom Woods has a fairly solid Austrian textbook which was released under a license that is essentially open source and will permit me to remix it to stress what I feel is important as well as to incorporate some additional elements, such as the important and groundbreaking work of Robert Prechter on social mood, Steve Keen on supply and demand, and Ian Fletcher on free trade.

Most of the homeschool curricula presently available rely upon works that were written more than fifty years ago and fail to take into account any of the lessons we have learned in recent decades about the effects of globalization, mass immigration, and credit bubbles. And the intrinsic problem of relying upon a book called Whatever Happened to Penny Candy should not be difficult to understand when even those of us who are middle-aged cannot remember a time when candy cost only one penny.

I don’t know exactly what Stickwick’s issue with the physics textbooks were, but I trust her judgment entirely in such matters and was quite happy to accept a delay in the release of the Physics curriciulum in exchange for an original textbook. It will, I am entirely certain, only improve the end result.

The Military History curriculum is being written by Dr. James Perry. A first look at the quality of his work can be seen in the forthcoming RIDING THE RED HORSE, as he has contributed a lengthy piece on Soviet strategy in Asia called “Make the Tigers Fight”. I was very impressed with the work that Dr. Perry did on the reasoning behind the strategies of WWII in the Pacific, as he pointed out some aspects that had previously eluded me despite my being a lifelong WWII enthusiast, and I am confident that his curriculum will be a solid one. Tom Kratman is an advisor on it, so I shall be very disappointed if there isn’t at least one lesson devoted to military occupations and the utility of crucifixion in pacifying defeated populations.

On the subject of Castalia House, we have a new author announcement today.

A new spin on “Homeschool or Die”

Dallas parents are pulling their kids out of school rather than risk further exposure to Ebola:

Parents rushed to get their children from school Wednesday after
learning that five students may have had contact with the Ebola patient
in a Dallas hospital, as Gov. Rick Perry and other leaders reassured the
public that there is no cause for alarm. The patient, identified
by The Associated Press as Thomas Eric Duncan of Liberia, arrived in
the U.S. on Sept. 20 to visit family. Dallas County Health and Human
Services Director Zachary Thompson said county officials suspect that 12
to 18 people may have had contact with Duncan.

“Right now, the
base number is 18 people, and that could increase,” he said. Thompson
said more details are expected by Thursday afternoon. The number
includes five students at four schools, Dallas school district
Superintendent Mike Miles said.

“This case is serious,” Perry said
during a news conference at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas,
where Duncan is being treated. “Rest assured that our system is working
as it should. Professionals on every level on the chain of command know
what to do to minimize this potential risk to the people of Texas and of
this country.”

They’ve already permitted foreigners from a land where the virus is out of control to not only enter the state, but mingle freely with a) sick people at a hospital and b) schoolchildren, but everyone is supposed to trust that they know what to do?

I don’t think so.

Liberians could see their family members if their family members were repatriated. Wasn’t the whole idea of Liberia to send Africans back to Africa? Why is the USA reimporting Africans in the first place?

The fury of the American public if white schoolchildren start dying of Ebola is not going to be pretty. Perhaps there is no cause for alarm, one hopes there is no caue for alarm, but so far, the noises out of the politicians smack more of frightened people worried about the public’s reaction if it knew the truth of the situation than of people in control of the situation. I expect we’ll find out soon enough.

Regardless, all travel from West Africa needs to be halted now. It should have been halted six weeks ago. Air France, British Airways, and Emirates stopped all flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone back in early August. Congressman Alan Grayson called for a travel ban from Liberia and other infected countries in July! So, why is anyone from West Africa still being permitted to enter the USA?

From ZEROHEDGE: Now that Ebola is officially in the US on an
uncontrolled basis, the two questions on everyone’s lips are i) who
will get sick next and ii) how bad could it get? We don’t know the
answer to question #1 just yet, but when it comes to the second one, a
press release three weeks ago from Lakeland Industries, a manufacturer
and seller of a “comprehensive line of safety garments and accessories
for the industrial protective clothing market” may provide some insight
into just how bad the US State Department thinks it may get. Because
when the US government buys 160,000 hazmat suits specifically designed
against Ebola, just ahead of the worst Ebola epidemic in history making
US landfall, one wonders: what do they know that we don’t?

And then there is this from the CDC: “Because we still do not know exactly how people are infected with Ebola,
few primary prevention measures have been established and no vaccine
exists.” 

UPDATE: The magic of diversity and geographical translocation in action.

Two days after he was sent home from a Dallas hospital, the man who is the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States was seen vomiting on the ground outside an apartment complex as he was bundled into an ambulance. “His whole family was screaming. He got outside and he was throwing up all over the place,” resident Mesud Osmanovic, 21, said on Wednesday, describing the chaotic scene before the man was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday where he is in serious condition. 

UPDATE 2: “TEXAS HEALTH OFFICIALS INCREASE NUMBER OF POSSIBLE CONTACTS OF EBOLA VICTIM TO 100″

That’s up from 12…. 

Shut them up twice as hard

Since academic freedom does not prevent a professor from being denied a tenured position due to his anti-semitic statements, there is no reason not to put pressure on universities to begin cracking down hard on any expression of anti-Christian views by university professors:

Steven Salaita, who was set to begin teaching at the University of Illinois this fall, says he was simply speaking his mind when he tweeted out messages during Israel’s military conflict in Gaza earlier this year. But the school deemed the tweets offensive and pulled its offer of a tenured position in its American Indian studies program.

“We believe that our classrooms ought to be a place where opinions, regardless of their origin or their perspective, ought to be able to be offered freely and students not feel intimidated or unable to express their opinion and that’s what led us to the decision,” said University of Illinois President Robert Easter.

Every single Christian at the University of Illinois should begin compiling a list of offensive anti-Christian statements by members of the university faculty and demand that all of the responsible professors be fired. After all, Christian students should not feel intimidated or unable to express their opinions in the classroom.

Freedom of speech and expression are now dead in America. So, it’s time for Christians to stop playing by the old rules and start flexing their demographic muscle at the expense of all the various minorities who demanded the rules be changed.

To paraphrase Breitbart, shut them up twice as hard.

Welcome, fucktoys

I was genuinely astonished when I read about this insane plan. I know the fraternities at my heavily Greek alma mater would have killed to be permitted to rush girls:

Wesleyan University in Middletown plans to change a more-than-century-old tradition by ordering fraternities with on-campus houses to go coed. The school sent out a letter Monday to the university community saying: “We have decided that residential fraternities must become fully co-educational over the next three years. This change is something that Wesleyan and the fraternities have been contemplating for many years, and now the time has come.”

The move follows lawsuits and fraternity incidents involving alleged rapes that led hundreds of students to sign a petition calling on the fraternities to start admitting women. The goals are to reduce sexual assault and gender inequity.

The ways in which this lunatic policy is going to backfire should be spectacular. Do these people have any idea what fraternity-associated “little sisters” were generally known for? Ordering fraternities to accept female members is essentially mandating temple prostitution for college girls.

It’s also only a matter of time before the men get the bright idea to start rushing sororities and suing for their right to do so. Perhaps that’s the goal; it’s a roundabout way to attempt to ban the Greek system.

Anyhow, all this is going to accomplish is to lock down the most attractive girls for the more popular fraternities.

Johnny’s teacher can’t read either

The fruits of the ongoing demolition of public education are being harvested around the world:

As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice. Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’

I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’

I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.

‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’

I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Many years later, I still feel there was no excuse for his rudeness, but I can understand why he was so angry. I’d feel the same if a child of mine was being taught by a teacher like me.

And the shocking truth is that there are thousands of teachers in schools the length and breadth of the country who are just like me. We have degrees in English from respectable universities, yet wouldn’t know a subjective pronoun from an objective one if it hit us in the face.

Public school is dead, it merely hasn’t stopped moving yet. It is an archaic artifact of 18th century industrialization that is technologically outmoded, societally destructive, and observably dysfunctional.