Category: education

New film series on evolutionary biology

April 28, 2025 • 10:15 am

There’s a new series of short films about evolution, all of them part of a larger project, “The closer you look, the more you see.”  I’m boosting it because it not only involves work at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), where I got my Ph.D., but also stars my friend Andrew Berry, who’s a great presenter. And, of course, it’ll teach you about the evidence for evolution.

Here are the details from the site:

Evolution is the most powerful, revealing, transformative, inevitable truth that humans have ever discovered. Andrew Berry, Lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, takes you behind the scenes to explore groundbreaking research in evolutionary biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a renowned research center not open to the public. Harvard scientists reveal the inner workings of the evolutionary process and ponder challenging questions about who we are and where we came from. The film demonstrates the rewards of patient, rigorous, detailed observation. The closer you look, the more you see. 

The film’s twelve captivating episodes give a clear understanding of how evolution works and why we know it’s true. 

It’s free, and the episodes (on Vimeo) range from 3 to 17 minutes long, most running around 6 minutes. (Click on the screenshot below to go to them.) That means you can pick one or two per day, and get an education in evolution in a week or less. There are some very cool things shown, including butterflies collected by Vladimir Nabokov, who worked at the MCZ.

But start at the beginning with episode 1, “Taxonomy”.

College students no longer want to read books

October 15, 2024 • 12:00 pm

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.

Critic of “Woke Kindergarten” suspended

February 13, 2024 • 10:30 am

Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)?  The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school.  And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped after the wokeness was sprayed on the students. (To see how completely bonkers this program is, go here or to the program’s website here.)  All power to the little people! Sadly, the program appears to be designed for black students and the students are 80% Hispanic.

After an article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the program, there was a huge backlash from people who, properly, thought it was bonkers.  So what did the school district do? Did they drop the program? There’s no indication of that. Instead, they did what defies common sense:  they put one of the teachers who criticized the program in the article on leave (with pay) for unknown violations. They are actually defending Woke Kindergarten when they should be defunding it. I suspect, however, that we’ll see no more of the program. It’s simply too stupid, woke, and embarrassing.

At any rate, the Chronicle has a new article (click headline below, or find it archived here), discussing the firing and giving the school’s defense.

First, though, this is how the teacher critic was quoted in the first Chronicle article:

 Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

And from the new piece, his punishment for such heresy:

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle.
Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

 

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

District officials declined to comment on his status or any allegations, saying it was a personnel matter.

A defense of Woke Kindergarten from the original article:

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Defenses in the second article. Yep, they refuse to say that adopting it was a bad move:

District officials declined to comment on their social media posts, given Gross was paid using taxpayer-funded federal dollars.

“We cannot comment on her personal political or social views,” Bazeley said.

Some teachers have defended the Woke Kindergarten program, saying that after years of low test scores and academic intervention, they believed in a fresh approach. The training was selected by the school community, with parents and teachers involved in the decision.

“We need to try something else,” said Christina Aguilera, a bilingual kindergarten teacher. “If we just focus on academics, it’s not working. There is no one magic pill that will raise test scores.

“I’m really proud of Glassbrook to have the guts to say this is what our students need,” Aguilera said. “We didn’t just do what everybody expected us to do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Sixth-grade teacher Michele Mason said the Woke Kindergarten training sessions “have been a positive experience” for most of the staff, humanizing the students’ experiences and giving them a voice in their own education.

These are clearly teachers who want to keep their jobs.  Finally, a bit about how Craven-Neeley was treated by his colleagues:

The Wednesday staff meeting, however, was tense, Craven-Neeley said, as he tried to explain that before going to the Chronicle, he approached school and district staff as well as the school board to raise questions about the program and the expense, with no response.

“There was so much anger toward me,” he said. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking over me.”

. . . . Craven-Neeley said the meeting grew tense about an hour in, when another teacher stood up, pointed a finger in his face and said, “ ‘You are a danger to the school or the community,’ and then she walked out of the room.”

Not long after, a district administrator asked him to leave the meeting.

“I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I left. I was very shaky.”

Another Glassbrook teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions at the school, confirmed that a staff member put a hand in Craven-Neeley’s face and called him a disgrace and a threat to the school.

Craven-Neeley then had a video meeting with school officials and was told he’d be placed on paid leave pending an “investigation”. The university also “denied the district’s actions were related to Craven-Neeley’s participation in the story or his complaints about the program. The district spokesperson added, ‘We would not put any employee on leave as any sort of retaliation or squelch anyone’s free speech rights,” [Michael Bazeley] said’.”

Well that sounds like a flat-out lie to me. What Craven-Neeley said to the Chronicle was indeed free speech, and there’s no other indication of anything else for which he’d be punished.  All I can say is that it looks as if Woke Kindergarten affected the teachers (if not the students). They’re all censorious and defensive!

Remember the “woke wonderings” that were part of the program? Here’s one:

The answer, of course, is “not much!”

Chicago mayor preparing to eliminate magnet schools. Is that a good thing to do?

December 16, 2023 • 11:15 am

We have a new “progressive” mayor, Brandon Johnson, and although one of his election promises was to keep our “magnet school” system in place, he’s preparing a resolution to end it.

“Magnet schools” are a form of student secondary-school tracking in which students can apply to go to any school, but the best schools, often specializing in subjects like science, are very selective. This is a form of “student tracking” in which students are grouped with others, in classes or in whole schools, of similar achievement.

The parents of high-achieving students are of course incensed at the proposal, and I initially opposed it as a misguided form of achieving “equity”. But after talking to a friend who was a long-time school principal and teacher in Boston, and whose school went from being a magnet school to a school any kid could attend, I’ve rethought my view.

This article from the Daily Mail (of all places) gives the details, and of course the paper is opposed. Click to read.

An excerpt:

Chicago’s progressive mayor has announced plans to axe the Windy City’s high-achieving selective-enrollment schools to boost ‘equity.’  

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Board of Education has proposed shifting back toward neighborhood schools – away from the system where kids compete for selective programs.

But when he was campaigning to become Mayor, Johnson put out a statement saying that he would not get rid of Chicago‘s selective-enrollment schools.

According to the Chicago Tribune, woke Johnson specifically said: ‘A Johnson administration would not end selective enrollment at CPS schools.’

Now, he is seen to be back peddling [sic] – by allowing a vote to stop gifted children from lower income backgrounds from academically competing to get into high-performing schools.

Selective schools cause a ‘stratification and inequity in Chicago Public Schools,’ according to the board’s CEO.

Chicago has 11 selective-enrollment high schools — Northside College Prep, Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, John Hancock College Prep, Jones College Prep, Lane Tech, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School.

Walter Payton College Prep, South Shore International College Prep, Westinghouse College Prep and Whitney M. Young Magnet School are also on the list.

The schools are not just the best in Chicago – but rank among the top high schools in the entire country.

Walter Payton College Prep is ranked 10th best school in the US. Northside College Prep is 37th. Jones College Prep ranks 60th.

Now, a resolution is up for a vote by the school board on Thursday.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has prepared a resolution for ‘a transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.’

It would lay out a five-year ‘transformation’ to effectively get rid of selective schools in Chicago – which have been heralded as the gems of the city’s education system.

At first I was instinctively opposed to this plan on the grounds that it was aimed at making all students perform equally, presumably by lowering the achievement of the high-achieving students, creating a kind of “equity” in which all students would perform at the same middling level, pulling down high-achieving students and preventing them from reaching their potential. (It would, of course, elevate the learning environment of low-achieving students.)

But then I had a long chat with a friend who for many years had been a teacher and then a principal in a Boston area “magnet” school that later transitioned to an “anybody can come” school. His own experience was that magnet schools were a bad idea, and that they should be eliminated in favor of neighborhood schools, as Johnson proposed.

Why? For two reasons. First, magnet schools reduce opportunity for many students, for they attract students whose parents who are highly motivated to get involved in schools to improve their quality. Those parents tend to be better off and educated themselves, and so provide an environment that makes their kids high achievers as well, and more likely to get into magnet schools or be put in a higher “track”. (Advanced placement [AP] classes in schools are also a form of tracking that my friend objects to.  I myself refused to take AP classes in high school because I didn’t think I was smart enough.)

In other words, either tracking or using magnet schools gives kids an unfair advantage based on their parents and their environment. Highly motivated parents also intervene in schools more often to ensure that their kids are getting a high-quality education.

The second factor, according to my friend, is that when faced with a mixed class of students with different levels of motivation and achievement, many teachers respond by getting the students to learn in smaller groups, so that high-achieving students help low-achieving ones. This, he said, raises the level of everyone’s achievement. Of course, teachers have to be willing to do this, which itself is a matter of how the teachers are trained. But my friend said that he’s seen the “mixed-class” system work in two states, and remains convinced that tracking and magnet schools, by quashing opportunity and preventing students of different levels to learn collaboratively, creates, overall, worse outcomes.

Now this doesn’t mean that tracking shouldn’t be used in colleges; that is, we shouldn’t just have a lottery for all colleges so that it becomes no harder to get into Harvard that into Grunt State University. For one thing, many elite colleges are private and wouldn’t be part of such a system. Further, parental influence doesn’t work in college like it does in secondary schools.  But we should remember that there are plenty of “non-elite” colleges where you can get just as good an education as in the Ivies.  Having been to both Harvard and the College of William and Mary, and taught at both Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Maryland, I’d prefer to send my kids—if I had any—to an education intensive William and Mary rather than a research-oriented school like Harvard. I’m convinced that the education I got in Virginia was better than the one I would have gotten at Harvard. After all, Williams College, which doesn’t have graduate students and concentrates heavily on teaching ability of its professors, is rated by Forbes as the best liberal arts college in America. It ranks #10 among all colleges and #8 among private colleges. (U.S. News and World Report also ranks it the best liberal arts college in the U.S.)

Further, getting rid of secondary-school tracking doesn’t mean you’d eliminate standardized tests or grades, either.  After all, you need some way to assess how students are doing, and these measures also help colleges select their students.

I don’t have the experience of my teacher/principal friend, but his argument seemed pretty sound. True, it’s based on one person’s experience, but there are ways of testing whether tracking is not a good way to go (granted, those tests would be hard, and parents would oppose them).

The update: according to CBS News in Chicago,  on Thursday the school board did vote to move away from magnet schools towards neighborhood schools:

The Chicago Board of Education took a key vote on Thursday that could alter the future of schools in the city.

The resolution moves away from school choice in favor of “elevating” neighborhood schools.

It is designed to guide engagement and development of the Chicago Public Schools’ five-year plan. CPS said it “outlines parameters that emphasize strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting students and closing opportunity gaps.”

“This resolution declares a new chapter in CPS,” Chicago Board of Education President Jianan Shi said in a news release. “While the strategic plan will be developed in partnership with our entire CPS community, we are centering equity and students furthest from opportunity. As such, this moment requires a transformational plan that shifts away from a model that emphasizes school choice to one that elevates our neighborhood schools to ensure each and every student has access to a high-quality educational experience.”

Do you agree with the mayor and the school board? Weigh in below.

The double irony of classes voluntarily segregated by race

November 28, 2023 • 11:15 am

Here we have a news piece (not an op-ed) from a recent Wall Street Journal, reporting that a high school in the Chicago-adjacent town of Evanston, Illinois, is offering voluntarily race-segregated classes as a way to achieve “equity”.  These classes, called “affinity classes”, are of course optional, because mandated race-segregated classes are illegal.

The claim is that voluntary racial segregation produces better academic results for minorities (the minority classes are black and Latino, not white or Asian, and the “classes of color” also have race-compatible minority teachers), but the evidence for “reducing disparities” is either thin or nonexistent.

Moreover, there’s a huge irony involved in doing this: segregating classes by race reduces diversity in the classroom, yet advocates for diversity always (again, here the evidence is thin) that greater diversity of groups leads to greater achievement of those groups on average. You can’t have it both ways! (As far as I know, Evanston was also the first city in America to effect reparations for black people, giving them money for mortgages or home improvement. Voluntarily segregated classes, however, are found in other places, including, as the article below notes, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland.  There are also classes voluntarily segregated by sex.)

Click to read, or see the article archived here:

An excerpt:

School leaders in this college town just north of Chicago have been battling a sizable academic achievement gap between Black, Latino and white students for decades. So a few years ago, the school district decided to try something new at the high school: classrooms voluntarily separated by race.

Nearly 200 Black and Latino students at Evanston Township High School signed up this year for math classes and a writing seminar intended for students of the same race, taught by a teacher of color. These optional so-called affinity classes are designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class, district leaders have said, particularly in Advanced Placement courses that historically have enrolled few Black and Latino students.

“Our Black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” Monique Parsons, Evanston school board vice president, said at a November board meeting. “It’s not good.”

School districts across the country have sometimes struggled to find ways to boost the performance of Black and Latino students, who, nationwide, tend to enroll in fewer advanced classes and score lower on standardized tests than white students.

. . . Evanston is taking the strategy one step further, offering courses for Black and Latino students in core math classes: algebra 2, precalculus and AP calculus, as well as an English seminar. Evanston’s classes for Black students are known as AXLE, an acronym for Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone, and those for Latino students are called GANAS, from a Spanish expression that means “giving it all you’ve got.”

The reason this is done, so it’s said, is that voluntary segregation makes the students more comfortable, and hence facilitates learning. (Quotes from students attest to their comfort level.) There are other rationales that are not as appealing, as “white standards”:

“A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” said Dena Luna, who leads Black student-achievement initiatives in Minneapolis Public Schools. The district offers middle- and high-school students electives focused on African-American history and social-emotional support, taught by teachers of color. Created in 2015 for Black boys, the format has expanded to Black girls and will soon expand to Latino students. An internal study showed improved attendance for Black boys in the program in 2017 and average GPAs of 2.27, compared with 2.14 for Black males districtwide.

“In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness,” Luna said.

Some quotes:

Student testimonials included in a presentation Evanston teachers gave at a conference last fall described how students feel more accepted in the classes.

“I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,” said a student who took an AXLE class in 2021. “It’s a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.”

A GANAS student who identified as half-Latina said, “I feel accepted for the first time in a long time.”

Note that the difference in GPAs associated with voluntary segregation is minimal—only .13 points, or about 6%. But there’s another possible reason for that. Suppose that professors grade on the curve, or, on average, minority teachers tend to grade their minority students higher than do teachers that are “race incompatible”. In that case you’d get higher GPAs in the segregated classes than in the integrated classes. No, the only way to really test if voluntary segregation improves performance is to use standardized tests as controls—tests in which everybody has to answer the same question. If this kind of segregation works, we should see higher test scores on minority students if they’ve been in self-segregated classes.

But what if that turns out to be the case? That has potentially upsetting implications for “progressives.” First of all, the mantra is that “increased diversity within groups increases average group performance”.  That conclusion is based on very weak evidence (psychology experiments, for one thing), so I’m not confident about it.  But if the standardized test data refute it, then there goes the argument for diversity!

Further, if segregated classes improve performance of minorities, wouldn’t voluntarily segregated schools do that as well? That, of course, is the second great irony of this issue: minorities fought for years to end segregation in schools, and finally got it, both in secondary schools and colleges.  But then they claim that, well, integrated classes are inimical to minority achievement. You can’t have it both ways. If the result above proves to be true (and I have no idea whether it is), the argument for integration goes down the tubes. Further, one might argue that if this holds on the college level—and the “comfort” argument should also apply there—colleges shouldn’t be trying to get around the ban on affirmative action but should instead be urging minority students to go, for instance, to historically black colleges.

One possible counterargument to the above is to claim that = students do mix racially outside of class.  But I’m not sure that is the case.  I’ve often heard that in both colleges and secondary schools (and witnessed this when I was young, though racism was more prevalent then) students self-segregate outside the class, also for “comfort” reasons.  We all know that minority students tend to eat lunch together in secondary schools, and colleges are even pushing for “affinity dorms”, in which students can voluntarily choose to live with others from their same ethnic group.

My question, then, is this. If you want integration, but claim that integration is bad for minority achievement, then aren’t you being a hypocrite?

My own view is that the differences in achievement due to voluntary segregation are small, and may be due to factors other than “comfort.”  The proper tests have not yet been done. But even if they show some boos in achievement boost due to segregation, there are other advantages to integration beyond possible boosts in achievement, which I would imagine at any rate to be small.  Those advantages include learning to get along with different types of people, which is a personal and societal good. If you always segregate yourself voluntarily, or are given the opportunity to do so, then America once again becomes divided into racial groups with little mixing. So much for E Pluribus Unum!

Now perhaps this whole problem will disappear as minorities increase in achievement. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I have no dog in this fight except to say that I favor integration because of its social benefits, not necessarily academic ones.  But if liberals encourage self-segregation as a way to boost achievement, and it does, then they will have to structure schools and curricula on that basis. And that will lead them back to how schools were in the 1950s.

How Palestinian kids are taught to hate Jews

October 27, 2023 • 10:45 am

It doesn’t take much studying or Googling to learn that Palestinian kids, like many kids throughout the Middle East, are taught from a young age to hate Jews, to embrace the goal of killing them, to be joyful when Jews are killed, to celebrate the “martyrs” who die while killing Jews, and sometimes to aspire to martyrdom.  Their textbooks and teachers encourage that, as does the state-run media and the schools run by the UN organization UNRWA (see below). It’s simply the way that society runs.

Now that’s not the way Israel conducts its schooling. Yes, you may be able to find one or two textbooks that criticize Palestine, but you simply don’t find the overweening hatred and joy at killing the Others that you see in Palestinian education. This is an important difference between Israel and the true apartheid states.

You can see the glorification of jihad and murder in the video and two articles below. The first is a short piece from Palestinian Media Watch that includes the video.

Click the screenshot to read:

 

The text:

Four young Palestinian girls, approximately 4 to 6 years old, carry a younger girl around in an infant seat.

It could be a normal children’s game. Only the infant seat represents a stretcher and the baby is the “dead Martyr.”

The children are playing “the Martyr game.”

During the game, the girls giggle and praise the “Martyr” child because: “The Martyr is the beloved of Allah.”

This game, and the girls’ joy is the terrifying result of decades of PA education of Palestinian children to see death for Allah and “Palestine” as an ideal and a goal. Palestinian Media Watch has documented hundreds of statements elevating death as a Martyr to a supreme and praiseworthy goal, even for children.

In Fatah’s Waed magazine for 6-15-year-olds Palestinian children are taught:

“We will die, and Palestine will live.”  [This link goes to Fatah’s magazine for kids]

In 2002, at the height of the PA’s 5-year terror war against Israel (the second Intifada), PMW likewise exposed a video of young Palestinian boys playing “the Martyr game.” For over two decades nothing has changed.

I’ve posted similar videos before showing Palestinian kids (not even teenagers) putting on school plays in which they pretend to kill Jews, but this one is especially depressing as it involves a child playing a “martyr”. The video speaks for itself, though the YouTube caption is this:

Four young girls, approximately 4 to 6 years old, are seen carrying a younger girl in an infant seat that is supposed to resemble a stretcher. The baby in the seat is the dead “Martyr.”

Oh, and the text is also given in the article and the YouTube notes.

Reader Norman sent me the following article (click to read; it’s from the Jewish magazine Forward) with this comment:

You’ve mentioned education in Gaza a few times, but here is an essay calling out how Palestinian children are being indoctrinated into Jewish and Israeli hate. Every time I read that 50% of people in Gaza are children [JAC: that’s close; I think that 47% are under 18], I am reminded of how they are educated. They are poisoned, probably for life. Even if a serious and sustained peace process were to begin today, it would take generations to achieve peace.

You can also click the screenshot below to read it. Do so; it’s short.


The author was a member of the Democratic Party, and also a commentator for CNN.

An excerpt:

While serving in Congress between 2001 and 2017, I studied what goes on in Palestinian schools. I reviewed their textbooks, met with educators and diplomats, and introduced legislation and amendments compelling the Department of State to monitor antisemitism in foreign classrooms. I saw firsthand that a generation of Palestinian children were being taught at an early age to reject living peacefully with Israel. They read about it in their schoolbooks and heard about it from their teachers. They were raised on a steady curriculum of violent rejectionism. My colleagues and I in Congress were unable to change that reality.

Now, as the world reels from the devastation of Hamas’ terrorism, understanding how Palestinian children are taught is essential to any discussion of the future in the region.

. . . The children of Gaza have three education options: Those classified as refugees attend schools run by the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency. Most others attend schools run by Hamas, the de-facto governors of Gaza. And there are a handful of private schools.

A 2013 New York Times article said that Gaza schools run by Hamas and the U.N. both use the Palestinian Authority curriculum that is also taught throughout the West Bank, but that “Hamas has added programs, like a military training elective” and other teachings to “infuse the next generation with its militant ideology.”

This curriculum “includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as ‘fabricated,’” the Times reported, and a description of Zionism as a racist movement whose goals include driving Arabs out of the entire area between the Nile in Africa and the Euphrates in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.”

This is a curriculum designed to indoctrinate and radicalize its students in support of Hamas’ terrorist aims.

Even the comparatively moderate Palestinian Authority textbooks are problematic. In 2020, the European Union’s Parliament adopted three resolutions condemning the authority “for continuing to teach hate and violence in its school textbooks,” following a study confirming incitement in the curriculum. To teach physics, a textbook showed students “a picture of Palestinians hitting Israeli soldiers with slingshots,” the study found, while another “promotes a conspiracy theory that Israel removed the original stones of ancient sites in Jerusalem and replaced them with ones bearing Zionist drawings and shapes.”

UNRWA schools in Gaza, too, are replete with antisemitism. A 2018 article in The Times of Israel cited examples including the lionization of Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led a 1978 attack on a bus in Tel Aviv that killed more than 30  people, as a “heroine and martyr of Palestine,” and the description of the victims of an attack in Psagot, a settlement in the occupied West Bank, as “a barbecue party.”

When I hear Israeli survivors of the massacre describe the sheer hate and absence of humanity in the eyes of their attackers, I’m unsurprised. Those eyes were forced open to a false, hate-filled view of Jews for years.

I could show you more videos or textbook excerpts (but check this link given above), but you can find them yourself if you’re interested.

Is it any wonder that the Hamas butchers showed no hesitation, and certainly no contrition? They were brainwashed.

h/t: Malgorzata, Norman

New Zealand educational attainment plummets, as does school attendance, all while students demand a four-day school week

October 6, 2023 • 10:50 am

I’ve regularly posted about the declining quality of New Zealand’s secondary schools, a trend that’s been going on for about two decades.  While quality is being further eroded by the government and school authorities’ attempts to imbue the curriculum with indigenous ways of knowing, this trend preceded that sacralization of the oppressed, and has affected all ethnicities. It’s something wrong with the whole damn system.

Three things are going on, each the subject of one recent article that you can access by clicking on the headline. Indented bits are excerpts.

1.) The educational attainment of New Zealand pupils is abysmal. First, the NCEA is The National Certificate of Educational Achievement, something you get if you pass a test near the end of secondary school. Possession of the NCEA is used to gain employment or to get into universities.

Some quotes:

More than 40 per cent of students failed the writing and maths components of the latest NCEA literacy and numeracy tests.

Results from the June 2023 tests were released last month and show only 56 per cent of the 41,000 students who took part passed writing and numeracy. Reading results were slightly better with a 64 per cent pass rate.

Reading results were up from a 58 per cent pass rate in the September 2022 tests, while writing jumped from 46 per cent to 56 per cent.

In numeracy, the pass rate dropped very slightly from 57 per cent in September last year to 56 per cent in June.

Students will be required to pass all three components of the new tests, which are still being piloted, before they can be awarded NCEA at any level.

More than 70 per cent of those who sat the June tests were in Year 10.

Initially, the tests were going to become mandatory next year but Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced in April there would be a two-year transition period when students could also gain their literacy and numeracy requirements through passing a set of maths and literacy achievement standards.

The tests will now be compulsory from 2026, but students will be able to re-sit the tests every year until they pass.

Tinetti reiterated the assessment was still in the pilot phase and the number of students who participated was very small.

“It is not appropriate to make generalisations based off this small cohort,” she said.

“Achievement rates reflect that specific assessment of literacy and numeracy skills is new, and students and teachers are still becoming familiar with the requirements of the standards, and developing targeted teaching and learning.”

Of course the authorities are defending this abysmal performance (seriously: almost half of the students fail reading, writing and numeracy!), but this isn’t a sample size effect, for achievement has been slipping for over 20 years, and is lower than comparable countries like the U.S., the U.K., Singapore, and Australia. This is a serious problem, and one the authorities need to come to grips with. If it continues, New Zealand will find itself with an undereducated population that would have to go to other countries to get a decent education.

2.) New Zealand students have a chronic truancy problem. The government defines “regular school attendance” as missing less than one school week during a term, which means they’re in school more than 90% of the required time. But in the latest statistics (below), barely half of the students meet this goal! And it can’t be blamed entirely (or even largely) on covid:

An excerpt (my bold):

The latest truancy report card is out. In term four of last year, 50.6 percent of students were regularly attending class.

The good news? It’s not quite as bad as the term before, up 4.6 percentage points. But the bad news is on average across 2022, less than half of our tamariki (45.6 percent) were attending school regularly.

The truth is our national attendance data has looked grim for a while and it left me wondering – is attendance as bad as it looks, or is something fudging the numbers?

. . . . James Cook High School Principal, Grant McMillan, says our truancy problem is bordering on a national crisis.

“Truancy is a thief. It steals opportunities, and it takes away futures.”

Agencies tasked with getting kids back to school, like Bluelight, say they simply can’t keep up with the growing numbers of truant kids referred to them.

The Government has admitted our attendance is well below where it should be, with Minister Jan Tinetti going so far as to tell me it’s her “number one goal” as Education Minister to lift attendance. The goal is 75 percent of students regularly attending school by 2026.

It’s easy to assume Covid-19 is responsible for this problem, but the data shows that while it has badly disrupted attendance, we had lower attendance rates than other countries even before the pandemic. Attendance has been dropping significantly since 2015.

It’s not just irregular attendance. In my interview with the Education Minister, she revealed approximately 9,000 children across the country missing from the education system altogether – a number that’s almost doubled in the past year.

Here are the data over the last four years, showing the big drop in 2022. Even in 2019, only about 70% of term 4 learners were “regular” attendees. And the 2022 data showed that barely half of the students came to class 90% of the time or more.

The next two charts show that New Zealand has consistently lagged behind comparable countries in regular attendance, so it’s not the pandemic. And it’s not just a gap, but a big gap. And the second graph shows that compared to the U.K. and Australia, Kiwi children still lag in attendance. This, and the data above, suggest an educational crisis in New Zealand. Other data show that indigenous people suffer greater attendance problems, but that is surely the result of cultural or socioeconomic issues, not any “indigenous ways of knowing.”

The number of chronically absent students (attending class less than 70% of the time), has also been climbing over the last several years:

3.) The students’ response is to demand four-day school weeks, pleading exhaustion, too much homework, and stress. They even claim that the stress of school could increase suicide rates. Click to read:

I’m trying to be sympathetic, but it’s hard given the data above. The students are missing school, not doing that well when they do go to school, but claim that they’re stressed and would do better academically if they were given an extra day off.  Do you believe that? I don’t, but am willing to test it (see below).

An excerpt (my bolding):

Thousands of Kiwi kids have signed a petition asking the Government to change the current school system to a four-day schooling week.

More than 4,000 students have signed the “Change the school week in NZ to 4 days” change.org petition, with the creator hoping to get at least 5,000 signatures.

According to the creator, students want to change the schooling week because the current “school system is draining” and a number of schools give students “mountains of homework daily”.

The person who also started the petition claimed the current system “has an extremely heavy impact on the mental and emotional health of our tamāriki in Aotearoa”.

“So having four school/work days would change everybody’s life for the better.”

The petition organiser believes children are experiencing burnout, and with all the extracurricular activities, there is no longer any time for them to be a kid and relax.

“If things change, then our children will be happier and everyone’s dopamine levels will increase. Therefore leading NZ’s teen [suicide] rates to drop. We need this NZ, we deserve this majorly.

“With all of the extracurricular activities and tutoring, when it comes to the weekend, you barely have any time to have a genuine break. Do you want your kids to be on the edge of a mental/academic burnout? No, didn’t think so.”

Does the petition organiser’s point stack up?

A study reported by Education Week in the US in 2021 showed that students enrolled in a four-day-week school facility got more hours of sleep, on average, and reported feeling less tired than students attending school for five days a week.

Almost all the students enrolled in a four-day-week school spent their day off at home, giving more time to school activities, hobbies, homework and jobs.

Students report stress:

Kiwi students responding to the petition weighed in on the idea, with many sharing their stresses with readers.

“I don’t like the fact that we have to work on Friday. I have a lot of teachers who give me homework on Friday, so I hope this will make a difference,” one said.

Another added: “Two days is not long enough when every week we have school, people have sports homework, tutoring – there are no days to rest.”

“I get too anxious to go to school, and I sometimes can’t even get there because of the workload put on me,” a third claimed.

A fourth added: “School is just too much and very overwhelming.”

Well, I won’t dismiss these beefs out of hand, as I’m feeling charitable today. Let the government do an experiment, having four-day school weeks in half the schools and five-day weeks in the other half. Choose the schools randomly. If the five-day-week issue is the problem, we’d expect an increase in achievement in a year or two. If that doesn’t happen, it’s back to five-day weeks.

Regardless, there is clearly an educational crisis in Kiwi schools, and it needs to be addressed. There’s an election coming up, and the National Party, seen as right-wing in New Zealand but would be considered centrist in the U.S., says this:

National Party education spokeswoman Erica Stanford said the latest test results reflected the “dire state of education in New Zealand”.

“Evidence shows that without these literacy and numeracy skills, young people find it much harder to succeed in the workforce, and earn less later in life,” Stanford said.

National has promised to require all primary and intermediate schools to spend an hour a day on reading, writing and maths, rewrite the curriculum to include clear requirements about what students should learn each year, measure students’ progress twice a year, require all schools to teach reading using the structured literacy method, and ban cellphone use at school.

The Labour Party, currently in power, has presided over the decline, so maybe National deserves a chance. One thing is for sure: educational effort would be better invested in getting kids to come to school, and working on ways of improving instruction, rather than trying to “decolonize” the curriculum.  If the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. can teach their kids to a reasonable standard, so can New Zealand.