Category Archives: Kids

UPDATED (4/28): Grad Inflation: American Kids Are Dumbest In Developed World, Yet Graduation Rates Keep Rising

Affirmative Action, America, Culture, Education, Kids

American school kids, in aggregate, are the dumbest in the developed world, yet their high-school graduation rates keep rising. Looks puffed-up. The Economist explains how grad inflation is carried out:

…. Nationally, high-school graduation rates have increased at a steady clip even while other measures of learning and achievement—international exams, state-mandated standardised tests, college-admissions test scores—have been flat or even slightly negative. That could be because children are doing better, or because schools are lowering standards.

An ever-present element in these stories is the reliance on online credit-recovery classes. These are remedial courses delivered via computer that students can take if they fail a class, rather than attending summer school or being forced to repeat a grade. Jeremy Noonan, a former science teacher in Douglas County, Georgia, was assigned to supervise a credit-recovery course in 2016. Mr Noonan says a colleague told him that his responsibility was to manage the course so that students received an average grade of 80 or higher, which would enable them to graduate even if they failed the end-of-term exams.

The computer programme doing the teaching allowed students to retake exams they failed, with many of the same questions. “I realised right away it was all about manipulating the system,” he says. “Most teachers just gave the students the answers without bothering to explain the course content,” says Ayde Davis, a former public-school teacher in Del Rio, Texas, who reported violations to the state education agency. “Students could finish their courses at accelerated rates, the administration was happy, and credit-recovery teachers who co-operated were feted.”

Students completed exams at unreasonably fast speeds—one finished a physics exam in four minutes and earned an 80% score, according to records she saved. In the 2015-16 school year, 144 credits were given for recovery courses completed in less than ten hours, Ms Davis’s documents show. According to the makers of credit-recovery software, each course has between 60 and 75 hours of instruction.

It is not possible to know how many credit-recovery programmes are being used as diploma mills. But these courses are now widespread. The Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, estimates that 69% of all high schools in America use them. Some high schools have more than half of their students enrolled in credit-recovery programmes. They are especially popular in urban high schools attended by poor and minority students—in other words, precisely the places where graduation rates have risen fastest.

READ: “Grad inflation: The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up. Online credit-recovery classes have been implicated in many school scandals.”

UPDATE (4/28):

And folks think their kids are so smart for flicking through mindless content.

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UPDATED (1/5/019): NEW COLUMN: Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?

Ethics, Family, Government, Healthcare, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Kids

NEW COLUMN IS  “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?” It’s currently on WND, The Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness. An excerpt:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to trace outbreaks to Patient Zero, the index case—the first patient to get, then transmit, a disease. Is this government agency doing due diligence in the cases of the polio-like paralysis infecting hundreds of America’s kids?

By the dictionary’s telling, epidemiology is “the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution, and control of disease in populations.”

By WND’s telling, “the diagnosis of the first cases of AFM, acute flaccid myelitis, in 2014,” coincided with the dispersal of thousands of Central American children among U.S. school children. More conspicuous at that time “was an outbreak of a deadly respiratory illness” that put hundreds of America’s children in intensive care. “Both types of symptoms can probably be caused by enterovirus D68, which happens to be endemic in Central America,” opines Dr. Jane Orient.

Are the state’s epidemiologists—whose job it is to trace and terminate outbreaks of contagious diseases—following these connections?

An outbreak necessitates the tracing of “Patient Zero,” the “single individual who bears the unknowing responsibility for having introduced the disease” to a certain population.

The same taxpayer-funded medical sleuths impressively tracked down the index case in the AIDS epidemic in North America. As documented in the late Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, he was Gaetan Dugas, a dashing, promiscuous, Canadian flight attendant, who had had approximately 1,000 sexual partners.

Although the CDC has provided a perfunctory status-update of its AFM Investigation, the  agency’s mention of a possible genetic etiology for Poliomyelitis, a dreadful, highly infectious viral disease, is bizarre. It reads like a cop-out.

What next? Like the legendary Lancet has done, can we expect the CDC to diagnose “right-wing politics” with folly and fervency for daring to correlate “migration to infection”?

Lest you worried that “the nation’s health protection agency” was putting America First, the CDC boasts of making strides, between January 2017 and September 2018, “Toward Poliomyelitis Eradication”—in Pakistan. (I guess CDC could argue that lots of Pakistanis will end up in the U.S., “looking for a better life.”)

In any event, along for the ride with the thousands of migrants poised to pour into the U.S. from Central America is a healthy array of microbes: measles, Chagas disease, hepatitis and much more. Diversity, baby.

According to Tijuana’s Health Department, via Fox News, 60 percent of the migrants currently encamped on the U.S. border carry respiratory infections. There are, moreover, confirmed cases of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, chickenpox, and skin infections galore, in addition to lice—these “serve as vectors of diseases like typhus.”  …

… READ THE REST.  NEW COLUMN,  “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?,” is currently on WND, The Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness. 

UPDATED (1/5/019):

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen: “These aren’t my facts, these are the facts.”

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UPDATED: About An Inspiring Young Man Who Knows He Has Things To Learn

Education, English, Intelligence, Kids, Logic, Reason

The stories about youths ruined by the education system are legion. My own encounters over the years confirm that students are taught to never question the state of their knowledge; to work to a grade and to not doubt the value of that grade.

Students and parents mistakenly believe that grades correspond to the state of their knowledge. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Adoring parents enforce these misconceptions, enabling bad teachers, and giving pedagogues (mostly mediocre or sub-par minds) ample cover.

In this context, I seldom give interviews, because young interviewers, while genuinely interested, poor things, are unable to grapple with substance and content.

I feel for these promising young minds. They’ve been deprived. They most certainly have not been taught to distill, analyze and question information. Unable to grapple with content, young minds resort to process-oriented gibberish:

“How do you feel about… What made you … Who inspired you.” Sorry, old chap. That’s not going to cut it. It’s what you ask the traditional Agony Aunt.

See, your kids are taught by women and their house-trained boys. So they look at the world not in search of substance, data, insights; but by escaping into different states of feeling.

Having said that, I am so happy to report that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a young Millennial. He had “reached out”—scrap that phrase, please, use “contacted”—with a request for an interview.

After reading his questions to me, I replied somewhat curtly by saying that his were questions better addressed to a YouTube fresh face or some young social-media sensation.

I explained why and told my young interlocutor I’d be glad to look over his revised questions once he got his bearings.

I had expected that he’d huff and puff as ego-maniacal Millennials usually do, when criticized.

But what a pleasant surprise awaited.

The young conservative replied thus:

OK. That’s definitely right. I enjoy your writing very much. Will get back with different questions. Thank you very much

My reply to his:

I knew you could be pushed to grapple with material. You’re better than the previous questions you sent, smarter. Give me a week and I will get back to you with answers to new questions. Good for you for being a good sport.

 

Came his reply:

Thank you for encouraging me. I really appreciate it … [and other stuff I won’t share]

AND MY YOUNG INTERVIEWR’S REVISED QUESTIONS ARE SHARP. They’ll be shared when answered.

Pushing good minds in the right (and Right) direction, provided they don’t suffer hubris, can work.

UPDATE:

No. Traditional, teacher-centered learning is the only way to begin to reverse progressive, child-centered miseducation. Restoring hierarchy is essential.

Ideological Friction In The Trump White House Is Real—And A Real Bad Thing

Donald Trump, Ethics, Family, IMMIGRATION, Kids, Media, Political Philosophy, Politics

The president is trying to promote a radical political worldview. When you’re attempting something markedly different—and indeed the perpetually outraged media childishly call his agenda “not normal”—you need people who agree on matters philosophical. And you need a spokesperson who is able to do more than fend off media attack dogs.

President Trump has not gotten these foundations in place. And it’s getting late in the day.

It follows that Ivanka and her Kush boy, as well as those like her who vehemently oppose the Trump-Stephen Miller plank, have no place in this White House.

Let White House Chief of Staff John Kelly at it. He himself is sick-and-tired of the first daughter “playing government.”

Kelly, as was illustrated in “The Matriarchy Is Gunning For John Kelly, is one of Trump’s superb personnel choices. Let Kelly do what he has to do: replace Sarah Stumblebum and get rid of the Royal Kushner Couple (in waiting), among other people. Kelly has the skill-set to FIRE.