Maggie's Farm

...and are seeking academic success or just mental challenges, there are many resources available for kids who want to advance at their own levels. Kids in "bad schools" can learn all they want, thanks to the internet.

Online classrooms have not proven to be very useful. Probably better than nothing, but barely, but Khan has it figured out for motivated kids.  

Khan Academy is excellent, and free. 

NYC has used tests, some at 5 years old, to determine who is admitted to the city's public accelerated schools. 5 years old seems a bit young to me for that, but the general idea was the same that drove the creation of the SAT: to prevent discrimination other than about intellectual potential.

In NYC, Gifted and Talented enrollment is 43 percent Asian, 36 percent white, 8 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent black.

NYC has many desirable private, parochial, and charter schools too, but, of the latter, only the private schools tend to have entry standards. 

Related,  Kids will pay a steep price for this War on Merit in schools

I was a bright kid without any particular talents, no genius and not entirely dedicated to school. I grew up in an entirely non-diverse neighborhood and town. Lily-white. Every boy wanted to be an Eagle Scout.

The notion of racial disparity did not exist, but there were clear distinctions between the smart kids and the slow kids, the athletically talented kids and the not, etc. I doubt I would have been admitted to a public NYC accelerated school, but I was forced to learn discipline when I went to a private high school with high demands and expectations.

I think what is going on in NY is about skin tone and ethnicity. 

Leftists Rewriting History Week in Higher Education, at Legal Insurrection

Bari Weiss on the elite prep schools:  (h/t K-12 Implosion)

... physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

The entirety of the glorious rant from the father of a Brearley girl. (If you do not know, Brearley is one a few very toney NYC private schools.)

Most parents will probably agree, but will be afraid to speak up. 

From a piece by a Georgetown Law Prof, at Quillette:

 The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.

The Threat to Academic Freedom: From Anecdotes to Data

 Academia has become a closed system, a moral community defined by a set of sacred progressive values. The surge of no-platformings which took off in America in 2015 and hit Britain in 2018–19, or the fivefold jump in the rate of cancelling American academics which took place in 2019, present merely the tip of an iceberg of self-censorship and conformity. In this essay, I present extensive new survey data on the scale of the problem in the US, Canada, and Britain from my new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” 

Academic freedom? Freedom of speech? In the current atmosphere, these have become dangerous. This is evil, by American values.

Government still can't censor people but your employer can censor you, or worse. It is a climate of fear, as if we lived in some foreign country. "Shut up or we will destroy you" is not an argument.  

At Quillette,  The Threat to Academic Freedom: From Anecdotes to Data

I posted about math yesterday, so today Shakespeare.

Today, math is challenging for many and so is reading Shakespeare. It's not exactly a different language, but it sort-of is.  His plots are not too difficult to suss out and his characters are usually interesting and colorful, but his language is the thing for me.

It is not for kids.  

I wonder whether the teachers just want to avoid things that are challenging to deal with. 

Powerline: WHY MATH IS RACIST

 I  suppose it would be possible to come up with a better plan to destroy black academic performance than by telling black students not to worry about getting the right answer to a math problem, but I can’t think what it would be.

At Legal Insurrection

Everybody knows about the Naval Academy and West Point, but these two are excellent, rigorous of course, and not just about driving boats:

The US Merchant Marine Academy

The US Coast Guard Academy 

 Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

San Diego’s school district tells white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy.”

I have grown weary of linking such reporting, but San Diego? 

Should Blacks Support Destruction of Charter Schools?

Everybody ought to support school choice. Why not? Let a thousand flowers bloom, including home schooling which costs the taxpayers nothing. 

At Quillette, The Lawrence Mead Affair:

 Regarding the claim that “black social problems” are due to “white oppression,” Mead argued, “By that logic, the problems should have been worst prior to the civil rights reforms in the 1960s.” Yet in his reading of events, “The collapse of the black family occurred mostly after civil rights rather than before.” Hence Mead not only suggested that Western culture is better than non-Western culture, at least when it comes to getting ahead in America, but also that higher poverty rates among blacks and Hispanics are attributable to factors other than racial discrimination. As you can imagine, this message was not warmly received...

The campaign against educational excellence spreads to the suburbs.

Last year, students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, marked a map hanging in a hallway with their families’ far-flung places of origin: from Seoul to Beijing to Hyderabad. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of TJ students were white; today, 79 percent are minority, most from Asian immigrant families.

TJ is a testament to American meritocracy’s melting pot—but last week, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced a plan to reduce the number of Asian students at this selective high school. In a four-hour online “work session” alongside the district’s all-Democratic school board, Brabrand laid out an initiative to eliminate TJ’s race-blind, merit-based admissions test and replace it with a “merit lottery” open to all eighth-graders with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in order to increase “equity of opportunity.”

A modest proposal for professors of literature

Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf either. Or not much of it. There are reasons to listen to the auguries. Most of the teaching in English departments now is done by adjuncts. The number of majors is tumbling. The profession’s on fire, and the deans, provosts, and presidents don’t hear the cries or smell the smoke...

Manhattan Contrarian: Covid-19 Is An Opportunity To Disrupt Education

 Despite overwhelming evidence that opening schools for in-person education is both safe and beneficial for children, teachers unions across the U.S. continue to try to hold families hostage in pursuit of political gains. As the unions overplay their hands, there is a great opportunity for market disruption of the dysfunctional union-controlled status quo.   

Quillette: How to Fight the Enemies of Academic Freedom

 In the worldview of the Woke, America has never been that paragon of freedom, justice, and opportunities for all that attracted us immigrants, but rather a terribly unjust, racist, and corrupt society. Its foundation does not begin with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that we proud and patriotic immigrants venerate, but rather, as the New York Times tells us in its 1619 Project, with the date when the first slaves were brought to these shores. American history is no longer taught dialectically, as a constant struggle for improvements made possible by the magnificent founding principles and institutions of the republic, but, rather, statically as a mindless sequence of acts of oppression against various groups. In fact, the founding documents are themselves often deemed to be racist and sexist, as are the historic figures who wrote them...