LifeisTiresome
Well-known member
Found something on Neo Gaf:
Excerpts below, but worth a full read at the link.
The Equity mind virus is killing the American educational system.
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.