Tag: education

The Atlantic simply cannot solve the mystery of ongoing US illiteracy:

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

My guess is because the teachers have lower-than-average IQs and they can’t read either.

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine – I got out of the lion’s cage and then I got back in to taunt the lion again. Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I’d been through high school and college without getting caught – so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read. 

You’ve got much bigger problems, science fans:

A new survey has found that a third of young millennials in the U.S. aren’t convinced the Earth is actually round. The national poll reveals that 18 to 24-year-olds are the largest group in the country who refuse to accept the scientific facts of the world’s shape.

YouGov, a British market research firm, polled 8,215 adults in the United States to find out if they ever believed in the “flat Earth” movement. Only 66 percent of young millennials answered that they “always believe the world is round.” Science teachers across the U.S. will be shaking their heads after learning that nine percent of young adults answered that they have “always believed” the planet was flat.

Another nine percent said of young adults said they thought the planet was spherical but had doubts about it. In a disturbing display of indecision, 16 percent of millennials said they weren’t sure what the shape of the planet was.

And good luck with that “global warming” narrative.

I suspect that this lawsuit, if successful, will spell the beginning of the end of the Jewish century in America:

A group that is suing Harvard University is demanding that it publicly release admissions data on hundreds of thousands of applicants, saying the records show a pattern of discrimination against Asian-Americans going back decades.

The group was able to view the documents through its lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 and challenges Harvard’s admissions policies. The plaintiffs said in a letter to the court last week that the documents were so compelling that there was no need for a trial, and that they would ask the judge to rule summarily in their favor based on the documents alone.

The plaintiffs also say that the public — which provides more than half a billion dollars a year in federal funding to Harvard — has a right to see the evidence that the judge will consider in her decision.

Harvard counters that the documents are tantamount to trade secrets, and that even in the unlikely event that the judge agrees to decide the case without a trial, she is likely to use only a fraction of the evidence in her decision. Only that portion, the university says, should be released.

“This is an important and closely watched civil rights case,” William S. Consovoy, the lawyer for the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in his letter to the court. “The public has a right to know exactly what is going on at Harvard. Even if this were a commercial issue — as Harvard would like to portray it — the public would have a right to know if the product is defective or if a fraud is being perpetrated.”

At stake in the dispute is the secrecy of the university admissions process, especially at elite institutions like Harvard that are competing for a small pool of highly qualified students, and whether and how race and ethnicity play a role.

Students for Fair Admissions includes more than a dozen Asian-American students who applied to Harvard and were rejected. They contend in their lawsuit that Harvard systematically and unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants by penalizing their high achievement as a group, while giving preferences to other racial and ethnic minorities. They say that Harvard’s admission process amounts to an illegal quota system.

U.S. Jews have perpetrated four self-serving myths that have contributed to their control of the intellectual high ground in the United States. One, Judeo-Christianity. Two, the historically nonsensical “nation of immigrants” narrative. Three, that they are unusually intelligent. And four, that their statistically improbable success in Hollywood, the media, and the financial sector is primarily a consequence of that superior intelligence.

Those myths have been severely eroded, but not exploded entirely yet. The primary reason that Harvard is so desperate to conceal the extent to which it has engaged in racial, ethnic, and religious favoritism is that it will a) reveal how far superior the Asian intellectual elite is to the Jewish intellectual elite, and, b) expose the extent to which Jewish admissions officers have compromised Ivy League admissions on behalf of their co-ethnics for the last five or six decades.

At a certain point, even those who are not particularly bright will eventually grasp the significance of the fact that the supposedly brilliant guys whose whip-smart intelligence is supposed to be the basis of their success reliably turn out to be the Sam Harrises and Ben Shapiros of the world, intellectual charlatans with elite degrees who are observably third-rate intellects at best.

A not-entirely-unrelated thought struck me when I was reading E.O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence the other day. Although Wilson cites the way in which kinship selection has been disproven, it did strike me as a potentially useful basis for a model that mathematically quantifies the extent to which nepotism influences group outperformance, one which, in this particular application, would demonstrate the essential silliness of the myth that has snared even the likes of the eminent Jordan Peterson.

Sometimes these jokers openly admit what is readily obvious to even the casual observer: the basis for their professed knowledge is remarkably shallow. In this particular circumstance, one might even say callow.

Jeffrey Gundlach warns we may be repeating the mistakes that led to the Great Depression. The bond investor was asked for his view on the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China.

“It’s not a positive. I mean it is really interesting when I was in elementary school and high school we talked about the Great Depression … [What] my teachers told me was that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates prematurely in a not so strong economy and also the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act,” he said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Halftime Report.”

Well, if the opinions of public school elementary teachers from four decades ago aren’t a sound basis for modern economic policy, I don’t know what could be. Sure, my elementary school teacher didn’t know the difference between a triceratops and an allosaur, but I’m confident her knowledge of economic history was considerably more sound.

Instapundit is troubled by Marquette University microaggressions:

During a recent forum at Marquette University, students and faculty members enthusiastically agreed that the university’s seal is a “microaggression” because it depicts a white explorer being guided by a Native American. “According to one professor at the forum, the seal shows how Marquette’s namesake, French explorer Fr. Jacques Marquette, ‘took advantage of an economic disparity to have a Native American as his guide.’”

I agree. Shut down Marquette and give the land back to the Indians.

On behalf of my people, I accept the good professor’s gracious and historically sensitive offer. This will take Voxiversity to a whole new level!

Just in case you needed another reason to homeschool:

A high school student in Hilliard, Ohio, didn’t want to pick sides in the contentious gun debate surrounding Wednesday’s “National Walkout,” so he stayed in class instead of joining the largely anti-gun protest or an alternative “study hall.” Hilliard Davidson High School senior Jacob Shoemaker was then reportedly slapped with a suspension.

One suspects his teacher was just bitter that he was actually going to have to show up for the class.

A mother is horrified that her daughter might be forced to dance with a lower-status boy at a Valentine’s Day party:

A Utah mother is concerned after finding out her child couldn’t reject a classmate’s invitation to dance at a Valentine’s Day school party because it would be against school rules.

Natalie Richard, whose daughter is in sixth grade at Kanesville Elementary School in Weber County, told Fox 13 Salt Lake City that she was shocked to hear her child tell her she couldn’t tell a fellow student “no” if he asked her to dance at the upcoming event.

Confused, Richard told her daughter that she was “misunderstanding” the situation, because “that’s not how it is.”

The daughter’s teacher, however, confirmed to Richard that, in fact, her daughter “has to say yes” and “has to accept” such a proposal.

Still concerned, Richard took her plight to the school principal — who “basically just said they’ve had this dance set up this way for a long time and they’ve never had any concern before.”

Of course the school has to set rules like this for children. Otherwise, all the kids will all just stand around and watch as the three most popular boys and their girlfriends dance. It’s tough enough for a junior high boy to publicly ask a girl to dance even if she has to say yes. Throw in the possibility of actual rejection – as opposed to sighs, rolled eyes, and snide comments – and ain’t nobody dancing.

The alternative, of course, is the highly efficient way our fifth-grade dance teacher did it. Line up the boys in one row, the girls in another, both by height. No cutting or exchanging. Congratulations, you have a partner. Try not to step on her toes.

A California schoolboy upsets the educational authorities and their social justice applecart:

A science fair project at a California high school faced criticism earlier this week after it compared race and IQ levels in connection to participation in an elite program at the school, The Sacramento Bee reported Saturday.

The project, titled “Race and IQ,” was put together by a C.K. McClatchy High School student who is part of the school’s elite Humanities and International Studies Program. It was displayed in the fair on Monday, the outlet said.

In comparing intelligence levels, the project reportedly questioned whether particular races were smart enough for the school’s magnet program and whether a racial disparity was justified.

“If the average IQs of blacks, Southeast Asians, and Hispanics are lower than the average IQs of non-Hispanic whites and Northeast Asians, then the racial disproportionality in (HISP) is justified,” the hypothesis said, according to the outlet.

HISP, according to The Bee, is a separate program at the school that is meant to encourage cultural awareness and helps to provide students with different perspectives on historic moments.

It’s at times like this that one suspects the future will be in good hands. Generation Zyklon understands the war they will be waging much better than any of their generational predecessors.

Chris Langan, who is a) a lot smarter than I am, b) definitely UHIQ, and c) may in fact qualify for an entirely different category of intelligence, rightly condemns the modern system of education as a massive waste. And worse, an institution literally designed to cripple the most intelligent students subjected to it.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.

In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.

While my own background is rather exceptional, it is far from unique. Many young people are affected by one or more of the same general problems experienced by my brothers and me. A rising number of families have severe financial problems, forcing educational concerns to take a back seat to food, shelter, and clothing on the list of priorities. Even in well-off families, children can be starved of parental guidance due to stress, distraction, or irresponsibility. If a mind is truly a terrible thing to waste, then the waste is proportional to mental potential; one might therefore expect that the education system would be quick to help extremely bright youngsters who have it rough at home. But if so, one would be wrong a good part of the time.

Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system is subject to a psychometric paradox: on one hand, it relies by necessity on the standardized testing of intellectual achievement and potential, including general intelligence or IQ, while on the other hand, it is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called “gifted” are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.

This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.

The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

His experience in grade school was very similar to mine in fourth and fifth grades.

Kids who score that high on IQ tests tend to be so far ahead of their peers and teachers that they’re often bored out of their minds in school and thus, ironically, don’t tend to be considered great students by their teachers. Is this how it was for you?

Much of the time, yes. I had more than one teacher who considered me a let-down, and sometimes for what must have seemed good reason.

For example, I sometimes fell asleep in class. I can remember trying to resist it, but I wasn’t always successful. I was even known to fall asleep during tests, sometimes before completing them. And by “asleep”, I do mean “asleep”. It was once reported to me by one of my teachers that she had amused the entire class by repeatedly snapping her fingers in front of my face and eliciting no reaction whatsoever.

In fairness, this wasn’t always due to boredom alone. I was often tired and exhausted by distractions. For example, what pugnacious little thugs would be waiting in ambush as I left the school grounds at the end of the day? How many friends and helpers would this or that bully bring with him to the after-school fight for which I had been reluctantly scheduled? Would my stepfather be in his typical punitive mood when I got home? And so on.

Sometimes, I had trouble paying attention even when I wasn’t asleep. I had a habit of partially withdrawing from the class discussion and writing down my own thoughts in my notebook; this made me appear to be attentively taking notes. However, when the teacher would sneak up on me from behind or demand to see what I was writing, the truth would out, and one can imagine the consequences.

As time passed, I would have to say that I grew increasingly resistant and unresponsive to the Pavlovian conditioning on which much educational methodology is based. I suspect that between home and school, there had been a certain amount of cumulative desensitization.

These problems eventually got me stationed nearly full-time in the school library, where I greatly preferred to be anyway. Later, I was finally excused from attendance except as required in order to collect and turn in my weekly assignments.

I wasn’t beaten at home and I didn’t fall asleep in class, though. I simply read books while the teacher was talking. I’d read the textbook until I finished it, usually by the end of the first week, then whatever novel I was reading at the time. My fourth-grade teacher initially let me do that after I correctly answered the questions she directed at me during her lectures, but as my reading eventually proved distracting and even offensive to the other students, they finally just sent me to the library with the understanding that I would only be allowed to skip my classes as long as I turned in the assigned papers and did well on the class tests. They didn’t even make me do any homework, which was nice. As a result, I didn’t attend many classes for those two years, with the exception of science class, if I recall correctly.