High School, College and University Cringe MegaThread

[LifeisTiresome]

Found something on Neo Gaf:

Look Who’s Talking About Educational Equity

However well intentioned, these programs will likely increase inequities rather than reduce them, and push the nation’s colleges still closer to the low level of its public schools.

quillette.com

Excerpts below, but worth a full read at the link.

In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, college presidents scrambled to issue condemnations of racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. They often buttressed those condemnations with promises to expand their institution’s administrative bureaucracy. For instance, among other things, theUniversity of Kentucky will institute cultural proficiency and diversity training for faculty and students, and install “diversity and inclusion officers” within each of its 17 colleges. Out west, the University of the Redlands issued an 18-point plan, including an “Activist Residence” program, racial climate surveys, anti-racism workshops, racial healing workshops, and enhanced hiring procedures and performance evaluations that will monitor contributions to “diversity and inclusion.” Similar plans are afoot in colleges across the nation.

However well intentioned, these programs will likely increase inequities rather than reduce them, and push the nation’s colleges still closer to the low level of its public schools. The reason? As I have explained before, most of the college administrators who work in offices promoting “Diversity and Inclusion” and “Equity and Social Justice” and the like have been credentialed by the same dysfunctional institutions that have monopolized the training and licensure of K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) teachers, principals, and superintendents for 50 years—education schools.

A century ago, Harvard president Lawrence Lowell described the university’s education school as “a kitten that ought to be drowned,” and in the decades since, successive studies have reached the same conclusion: Most of our training schools for K-12 teachers lack rigorous standards for admission, graduation, and research—but they’re filled to the brim with ideology.

Worse still are ed school programs in leadership, from which most student-facing college administrators now take their degrees. As early as 1987, when the focus of these programs was almost entirely on K-12 administrators, the National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administrationrecommended closing more than 300 of the nation’s 500 educational-leadership programs due to lackluster academic standards and professional irrelevance. Because these programs raked in tuition dollars, however, that advice was ignored.

It would be one thing if ed schools had demonstrable expertise in achieving the laudable goal of educational equity. Ideological bias and even low academic standards might be a price worth paying if the institutions had a record of helping low-income and minority students close the learning gap that exists between themselves and their more advantaged peers. But they have no such record—just the opposite in fact.

Their longstanding opposition to coherent, grade-by-grade, knowledge-based curricula, for example, is one of the reasons why colleges and universities have had to spend seven billion dollars a year on remedial courses in an attempt to get 40 percent of first-year college students ready for college-level work. For more than half a century, most ed schools have been in thrall to “constructivist” and “child-centered” theories of learning which stigmatize content-specific curricula as being intellectually stultifying and politically repressive. So it’s no surprise to learn that a recent call to “defund math and STEM” is issued from a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Illinois College of Education. As fashionably radical as it may sound, the defunding proposal is just the latest variation on a century-old set of bad ideas, ideas which have contributed significantly to a situation in which “America’s high-school graduates,” to quote an NPR headline, “look like other countries’ high school dropouts.”

There is, then, no small irony in the fact that the very institutions whose putatively “progressive” agenda has for 50 years militated against coherent K-12 curricula, ignored the science of reading instruction, and thus hobbled generations of disadvantaged students, have been sending their graduates to “reform” what has been the one bright spot in the American educational system, its colleges and universities. There, from administrative offices in “Equity and Inclusion” or “Diversity and Social Justice,” they promote the view that it’s really faculty “microaggressions,” or their “implicit bias” and lack of “cultural awareness” which are the real obstacles to educational equity. It’s an expensive bureaucratic ruse.

The 2019 National Report on Educational Progress reveals shockingly low levels of subject proficiency among high school seniors: only 37 percent are proficient in reading, 27 percent in writing, 25 percent in math, and 12 percent in American history. College professors have experienced these deficits first hand for decades. They know how ill-prepared most first-year students are for college-level work, and they know too that it’s the lack of content knowledge, not its possession, that’s genuinely repressive.

The Equity mind virus is killing the American educational system.

 

[LordsFire]

Bleah. I remember reading about the decline of the American education system 20 years ago.

Broad-spectrum charter school programs seem to be the only way out that's close enough to happen any time soon. I hope it gets put into general use.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Bleah. I remember reading about the decline of the American education system 20 years ago.

Broad-spectrum charter school programs seem to be the only way out that's close enough to happen any time soon. I hope it gets put into general use.

Doesn't matter what type of school system you have if it still bows before Academia and teaches this leftist bullshit.

 

[Rocinante]

Doesn't matter what type of school system you have if it still bows before Academia and teaches this leftist bullshit.

If you look up studies (I am too lazy,) charter schools have FAR superior outcome statistics.

The thing with charter schools, is you can pick and choose. If you don't like that school? Pick a different one that isn't spouting leftism. Markets will ensure there are some, as long as there are demands for them.

I think a government subsidized move to charter schools would be better than our current system. Move that public school funding to help with vouchers for charter schools or something like that. Idk..Maybe there's better ways to do it, but my overall message is: charter schools are better than public schools in every way, but I also want every single student in America to have access to education with no upfront cost.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

If you look up studies (I am too lazy,) charter schools have FAR superior outcome statistics.

The thing with charter schools, is you can pick and choose. If you don't like that school? Pick a different one that isn't spouting leftism. Markets will ensure there are some, as long as there are demands for them.

I think a government subsidized move to charter schools would be better than our current system. Move that public school funding to help with vouchers for charter schools or something like that. Idk..Maybe there's better ways to do it, but my overall message is: charter schools are better than public schools in every way, but I also want every single student in America to have access to education with no upfront cost.

Which is all well and good. My post is not talking down about Charter Schools. But about how it doesn't matter as long as the teachers and the school itself bows before Academia. We have teachers and professors discuss about how its a problem that parents can be observing what they are teaching cause they not react well and that their purpose is to have the students lean their way.

 

[Rocinante]

Which is all well and good. My post is not talking down about Charter Schools. But about how it doesn't matter as long as the teachers and the school itself bows before Academia. We have teachers and professors discuss about how its a problem that parents can be observing what they are teaching cause they not react well and that their purpose is to have the students lean their way.

Right. And what I'm saying is that if we were to expand charter schooling, we would have more options. These schools need to compete for a student body, there would likely be more "conservative" or non biased schools around than there are now, because there is/would be a demand to send kids to schools that aren't left wing indoctrination camps.

I'm acknowledging and agreeing with your concern, and exploring solutions.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Snitching For Social Justice

Syracuse creates campus of woke informers. What happens on campus won't stay there

www.theamericanconservative.com

This is terrifying, be in the same room as a “micro aggression” and don’t condemn the guilty? Your guilty too!

I don’t think a lot of people really understand what is going on in academia. The noxious ideas that are being propounded and enforced will spread throughout society, and we could be looking at a tyranny that lasts for a long long time.

 

[Rocinante]

Snitching For Social Justice

Syracuse creates campus of woke informers. What happens on campus won't stay there

www.theamericanconservative.com

This is terrifying, be in the same room as a “micro aggression” and don’t condemn the guilty? Your guilty too!

I don’t think a lot of people really understand what is going on in academia. The noxious ideas that are being propounded and enforced will spread throughout society, and we could be looking at a tyranny that lasts for a long long time.

It never stays on campus. I'm old enough to remember 2012 and all the shit going on campus, and being told it was just college kids..and now all that shit is part of every day life.

What happens on campus is just a preview of what will happen to society at large when these people graduate and go into the workforce.

 

[Deleted member 88]

I think it came down to boomers who didn’t understand that “snowflakes” actually can get their way in numbers and with the power of accusations.

 

[Deleted member 88]

I hate medieval studies as it is now.

https://mobile.twitter.com/erik_kaars?lang=en

Read several of the links and these threads.

The whole field is infested with critical race theory and the like.

Basically a lot of academics in medieval studies are afraid their works will be used by the far right and so are doing everything they possibly can to “deconstruct”(destroy) European heritage and culture.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Cornell University, an elite Ivy League University, is taking positive steps towards decolonizing its English Department.

Rewrite the English department: Lessons in radical decolonisation

Can we reimagine the world of literatures in English in a way that puts historically marginalised voices at the centre?

www.aljazeera.com

Staff at the department voted overwhelmingly to change “English Literature” to “Literatures in English” – a symbolic shift away from an overwhelming focus on England.

Carole Boyce Davies, professor of English and Africana Studies, hailed it as a landmark moment in the decolonisation of English literature.

I'm going to have to read the article again to even understand what that means... But I had to share.

 

[Jormungandr]

tl;dr: rewrite history so it's more "politically correct". Fucking Leftards.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Decolonizing in the current ideological sense essentially means “disposal of the European element”.

In this case, it’s removing English literature with supposed African literature.

Ultimately it’s that simple. Anything that is European or of European origin must either be disposed of entirely, or mangled to be “indigenized”. Meaning having the message they desire.

tl;dr: rewrite history so it's more "politically correct". Fucking Leftards.

No, it’s far more insidious.

It’s a sustained and total attack on western civilization and history, at every conceivable level, intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political.

 

[Basileus_Komnenos]

Cornell University, an elite Ivy League University, is taking positive steps towards decolonizing its English Department.

Ah yes the elite "woke" white progressives coming to down from their ivory towers coming to lecture the masses on colonialism. As an actual Indian who still has living family members that were born under British Colonialism, I'd love to hear their "enlightened" takes on the matter. Its infuriating how they try to infantilize minorities, and rob them of agency with their cognitive dissonance. The worst type of tyrant is the one who feels justified in their own self-righteousness. This is basically an inverted caricature of Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden."

 

[Doomsought]

They are also colonizing other cutlures and subcultures with their own culture, actively demonizing the indignious members of those cultures to drive them out of hobbies and professions.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Check out that Graduation schedule... All six of them or so.

Multicultural Graduation Celebrations: Graduate Registration

Webform: Multicultural Graduation Celebrations: Graduate Registration - In honor of Columbia’s diverse student community and complementing the school- and University-wide graduation ceremonies, we are proud to also offer Multicultural Graduation Celebrations, which provide a more intimate...

www.cc-seas.columbia.edu

• Native Graduation: Sunday, April 25 at 4:00 p.m. EDT
• Lavender Graduation (LGBTQIA+ community): Monday, April 26 at 4:00 p.m. EDT
• Asian Graduation: Tuesday, April 27 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
• FLI Graduation (First-generation and/or low income community): Tuesday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. EDT
• Latinx Graduation: Thursday, April 29 at 6:00 p.m. EDT
• Black Graduation: Friday, April 30 at 4:00 p.m. EDT

Looks like Colombia College, established in 1754, is trying to embrace tradition again, though I'm not sure Segregation is the best way to go about it.

 

[LordsFire]

Wow. That's pretty special.

Um.

Is there a time for, you know, people who aren't part of the progressive stack?

 

[AnimalNoodles]

Wow. That's pretty special.

Um.

Is there a time for, you know, people who aren't part of the progressive stack?

Intersectional Dalits get to pay for it.

 

[Mimas]

It took a bit more searching than I expected, given that the multicultural graduations were very very announced on their website, but Colombia College does have their general graduation ceremonies:

Columbia College Class Day
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Columbia Engineering Class Day
Thursday, April 29, 2021

I didn't find the time for the engineering graduation, but I'd assume that it isn't booked at the same time as the Latinx one.

Edit: Given that students have to register for their multicultural graduation, I suppose that students who don't want to be separated out into a different ceremony just don't do it.

 

[Captain X]

So do people of mixed races get to go to more than one ceremony then?