Assault on education

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Destino]

Did they remove Bill O’Reilly’s books because no teenager on earth is even remotely interested in reading a book written by Bill O’Reilly?

[Cooked Crack]

 

[youngestson]

I bet $50 bucks the people making that change think sociology has something to do with socialism.

[China]

Dictionaries among 1,600 books pulled from Florida school district

 

A Florida school district has taken 1,600 books, including dictionaries and encyclopedias, off its library shelves to ensure they comply with the state's law prohibiting books that describe sexual content.

 

Libraries in the panhandle's Escambia County School District will no longer carry five dictionaries, eight encyclopedias, some "Guinness World Records" books, various books detailing diseases and more, per PEN America, until the titles are reviewed.

 

Also on the review list, according to the Florida Freedom to Read Project, are biographies of Oprah Winfrey, Thurgood Marshall, Lady Gaga and other public figures, as well as Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl" and two books by conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly — who told Newsweek the current removal of his titles was "absurd" and "preposterous."

 

Though the books aren't banned as of now, the pulled titles will remain off the shelves until a certified media specialist can review them and determine that they abide by the terms set out in Florida's House Bill 1069.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

Meanwhile...

 

DeSantis allies start to back off book bans amid national outrage: 'May have gone too far'

 

Florida Republicans might be backing off support for Gov. Ron DeSantis' notorious book bans after being caught off-guard by national backlash, according to a report.

 

Florida has become infamous as the epicenter of book censorship activism in schools, even as DeSantis has insisted the whole thing is a liberal "hoax" to make his state look bad.

But the state's Republican legislature is starting to worry the action has gone too far, reported Politico, with lawmakers considering new rules to limit how many challenges can be brought.

 

Legislators "introduced a new idea to curb frivolous challenges to books" this month, which is "one of the first admissions the law, which tightened scrutiny around books with sexual content in K-12 schools, may have gone too far. The potential solution: allowing local schools to charge some people a $100 fee if they want to object to more than five books."

 

GOP state Rep. Dana Trabulsy, who sponsored the legislation, said, “I’m happy that we are digging in and trying to remove reading material that is inappropriate for our children. But I think [book challengers] really need to be respectful of the amount of books that they are pouring into schools at one time.”

 

Many of the book challenges have been brought by the far-right group Moms for Liberty, which works arm-in-arm on challenges with the Proud Boys, a notorious street-brawling organization whose leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

[Destino]

This legit?

[dfitzo53]

Sure, kind of, probably, after you take into account loads of caveats.

 

I'm a graduate (or whatever you call it) of an alternative teacher certification program. I don't think there's any reason you can't find good people that way. I've long said that we need to rethink the way we do teacher training and certification. 

 

That said, as with almost any news organization reporting on any topic, you have to take anything they say about studies with a grain of salt. One of the studies the article alludes to is not about classroom teachers, but about a tutoring program. Tutors who were parents in the community but not licensed teachers performed marginally better than teachers when running the tutoring groups. I think there are a lot of likely explanations for that, not many of which cast valid aspersions on teacher training. I think most people would agree that getting parents who actually want to help more involved in schools is a good thing. 

 

As one example of making sure to do more research on a given topic than just what is presented in a news article, this study looked at whether alternative certification programs had the same long-term teacher retention rates as traditional programs. Cutting to the chase, not in the programs they looked at. 

 

 

After 3 years only half of the lateral transfers (established professionals in another field moving into teaching) were still teaching. Graduates of an alternative certification program fared better, but after 3-7 years there was still a significant difference between them and traditionally-trained teachers.

 

Whether or not traditional programs produce better teachers, they appear to produce teachers who will stay in the profession longer. As always, more research is needed. 

 

On top of all of that, I will be forever suspicious of an organization (74million) founded by school-choice advocates and funded in part by the DeVos foundation. They very clearly have an agenda even if they want to present themselves as if that isn't so. 

Edited January 21 by dfitzo53

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Destino]

I’ve never considered the impact of spell check on reading instruction. 
 

has anyone done a survey as to how many young adults, say 18-20something, can actually read at an adult level? I’d like to know how much damage has been done. 

[Captain Wiggles]

[Larry]

I'm still trying to teach myself to read my posts before posting them.  

[Destino]

4 hours ago, Larry said:

I'm still trying to teach myself to read my posts before posting them.  

You and me both. God bless that edit button.

[philibusters]

On 1/20/2024 at 9:37 PM, Destino said:

This legit?

 

I don't know if that is legitimate or not.  I went to a Catholic High school.   I had some teachers who were not career teachers, but rather people who didn't like their career and decided to teach.  In generally they were not great teachers.  Not because they didn't know their material or could not speak articulately about the material but mostly because they didn't have effective strategies to prevent misbehaving students from derailing class.

[Destino]

31 minutes ago, philibusters said:

 

I don't know if that is legitimate or not.  I went to a Catholic High school.   I had some teachers who were not career teachers, but rather people who didn't like their career and decided to teach.  In generally they were not great teachers.  Not because they didn't know their material or could not speak articulately about the material but mostly because they didn't have effective strategies to prevent misbehaving students from derailing class.

public school wasn’t any better. I went to a public school and teachers trying to get a handle on students constantly disrupting class was a constant. If a proven method existed to get teens to shut up and sit quietly that could be easily replicated… I think they’d have figured it out in the last thirty years, 

 

 

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Destino said:

public school wasn’t any better. I went to a public school and teachers trying to get a handle on students constantly disrupting class was a constant. If a proven method existed to get teens to shut up and sit quietly that could be easily replicated… I think they’d have figured it out in the last thirty years, 

 

 

 

 

I was that disruptive kid in class.  Fun fact; the highest grade I ever completed was 8th grade. I would have been much less disruptive though if they had just let me sleep.

[Destino]

This is all over Twitter today so it may as well be here too.

 

 

If half of that is true…

[Califan007 The Constipated]

10 hours ago, Destino said:

This is all over Twitter today so it may as well be here too.

 

 

If half of that is true…

 

They paid $250,000….

 

From the Woke Kindergarten website:

 

”Woke Kindergarten is community-sustained, and relies primarily on donations for the use of our resources. We believe that children, families and educators should be able to access and use our content at no cost and welcome donations as a way to support us.”

 

I guess the $250,000 is for training sessions??

 

This is the “Who We Are” page on their site:

 

https://www.wokekindergarten.org/who-we-are
 

It’s one person and like 2 sentences, and says nothing about who they are as an organization (and barely anything about who this one person is lol).

 

And apparently, “hiring” them had nothing to do with trying to raise test scores: 

 

“…Hayward district Superintendent Jason Reimann told the Chronicle that Woke Kindergarten was hired to boost attendance rates and eliminate suspensions…And, Reimann said, the school has seen improvement in those areas: only 44% of students were considered chronically absent last year, the article said, compared to 61% the year before.”

 

First: 61%? Holy **** lol…No wonder test scores are so low. 

 

Second: How was Woke Kindergarten gonna help with attendance rates? Apparently all WK does is hold workshops to show teachers how to…something lol…but how did anyone track whether or not the teachers actually utilized any of this stuff in their classrooms? 
 

Third, why did the school system think WK would help with attendance, of all things? 
 

Nothing about this seems even remotely right.

 

 

 

Edited February 4 by Califan007 The Constipated

[philibusters]

Woke Kindergarten and DEI in general, whether it be in the corporate or education setting, unfortunately doesn't really answers.  Systemic racism is probably best understood as mainly the residual effects of past racism with a little bit of subtle modern day racism here and there.  DEI is not even particularly good at rooting at the bits of subtle modern day racism because they are paid by the corporations or school system who might not want to deal with problematic issues, but even if it did deal with that well, it would be tackling the much smaller problem and not addressing the bigger issue.  The residuals are of past racism are mostly tied to economics and to a lesser extent culture.  DEI doesn't touch those. 

I feel like at this point, DEI is mainly about providing middle class jobs to people who bring very little value to organizations.

[China]

A Top College Reinstates the SAT  A Top College Reinstatest the SAT

 

Dartmouth College announced this morning that it would again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, starting next year. It’s a significant development because other selective colleges are now deciding whether to do so. In today’s newsletter, I’ll tell you the story behind Dartmouth’s decision.

 

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

 

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

 

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.  

 

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

 

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

2 hours ago, philibusters said:

Woke Kindergarten and DEI in general, whether it be in the corporate or education setting, unfortunately doesn't really answers. 

 

What?

[philibusters]

1 hour ago, Califan007 The Constipated said:

 

What?

 

Sorry for the incomplete thought.  DEI doesn't really address the problems it is supposed to address, which are racial disparities in those organizations.  In education that is often racial achievement gaps and in the corporate world, its underrepresentation at management level.  The biggest cause of those things are past discrimination which moved the starting line for people and unfortunately its impossible to change the past.  The types of policies that could address those are big economic programs and that falls into the political arenea, where they lack support and have no realistic shot of getting passed.  Instead, DEI people try to address subtle racism, which probably only play a small role in those disparities, and even there they are handcuffed by not being able to offend the people who pay them (the corporations or school system).  So it ends up going nowhere.

[Califan007 The Constipated]

21 minutes ago, philibusters said:

 

Sorry for the incomplete thought.  DEI doesn't really address the problems it is supposed to address, which are racial disparities in those organizations.

 

That's not what DEI is meant to address, though.

[philibusters]

4 minutes ago, Califan007 The Constipated said:

 

That's not what DEI is meant to address, though.

Then what was it supposed to address?   

[Califan007 The Constipated]

43 minutes ago, philibusters said:

Then what was it supposed to address?   

 

The ways in which America's business culture and educational institutions can improve the working and learning environment for all employees and students of every demographic. The sell is that--ideally-- improving company work environments for all employees will lead to improved overall performance and make companies an inviting and desirable destination for the best candidates in all demographics, instead of just the straight White male demographic...which--let's face it--we have basically always expected everyone else to conform to.

 

I'm old enough to remember when companies/corporations were more or less forced to stop long-held traditions like schmoozing up perspective clients by taking them to places like strip clubs, and just expecting the women in the company to either go along to the strip club or just not go...and of course to not complain about men getting more opportunities because of it. When companies and corporations were told that their practices were naturally putting women at a disadvantage and making them feel hella uncomfortable, there was a lot of grumpy men complaining about ending those types of practices back then. It wasn't called DEI but the principles were more or less the same...

 

So, no...DEI is not really about addressing past wrongs to marginalized groups.