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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NumbersUSA: “Pres. Trump Offers Amnesty for Border Wall Trade”

Democrats, Donald Trump, Government, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Labor

NumbersUSA has this to say about the president’s immigration compromise: “The offer … is a loser for the forgotten American workers who were central to Trump’s campaign promises.”

So said the very credible Roy Beck, who wisely “seeks to reduce both legal and illegal immigration to the U.S.”

At least someone is NOT being a Trump toady.

Beck’s full statement:

Pres. Trump announced today that he’d be willing to support legislation that trades amnesty for DACA recipients and illegal aliens who have received temporary protected status (TPS) in exchange for $5.7 billion of border wall funding. The offer also would have to include additional funding for more border patrol agents and immigration judges to handle the backlog of immigration cases.

Notably, Pres. Trump’s offer fails to include any of the badly needed reforms to close the loopholes for asylum seekers and unaccompanied alien minors who are apprehended crossing the border illegally.

In response to Pres. Trump’s announcement, NumbersUSA President and founder, Roy Beck, issued the following release:

The offer the President announced today is a loser for the forgotten American workers who were central to his campaign promises. An amnesty-for-wall trade would once again reward previous immigration lawbreakers without preventing future immigration lawbreakers. This kind of amnesty deal will incentivize more caravans, more illegal border crossers and more visa overstayers at the expense of the most vulnerable American workers who have to compete with the illegal labor force.

The President’s full proposal includes:

$5.7 billion to fund a steel barrier system, including embedded investments in technology and roads, on our southern border in the priority areas cited by Border Patrol.
This is in addition to the more than 115 miles of barriers already built, replaced, or contracted under President Trump.
$805 million for technology, canines, and personnel to help stop the flow of illegal drugs, weapons and other contraband. This includes:
$675 million for drug detection inspection technology to help secure our ports of entry.
$130 million for canine units, training, personnel and portable scanners to help deter and detect smuggled narcotics, weapons, and other dangerous materials.
$800 million dollars in humanitarian assistance, medical support, and new temporary housing.
$782 million to hire an additional 2,750 border agents, law enforcement officers, and staff.
$563 million to support our immigration court system, including hiring 75 new immigration judge teams to reduce the immigration court backlog of 800,000 cases.

As part of President Trump’s willingness to compromise to reopen the Government, he is proposing to grant provisional status to current Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients.

Provisional status will be granted for three years for current DACA recipients, covering 700,000 illegal immigrants brought here by their parents at a young age.
This status will give them access to work permits, social security numbers, and protection from deportation.
Provisional status will be granted to certain current TPS recipients for three years, providing 300,000 immigrants whose protected status is facing expiration more certainty as Congress works on a larger immigration deal.

(“Pres. Trump Offers Amnesty for Border Wall Trade.”)

The base of course, of course, never critiques The Leader, but worships Him as would a serf. News flash: The only way to get something from leadership is to not worship them, but remind them THEY WORK FOR YOU.

NEW COLUMN: Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry

Canada, Crime, Feminism, Gender, Pseudoscience, Sex

NEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

Speaking recently to Fox News’ Arthel Neville, Andrew Napolitano, also of Fox News, repeated old feminist canards about sexual assault against women being an under-reported, ever-present crime in American society.

The violence-against-women industry in North America—you know, the one-in-four-women-are-assaulted rot—is propped up by the sub-science or pseudoscience of violence-against-women statistics.

In particular, violence-against-women surveys are based on inflated numbers nobody questions; numbers the advocates bandy about and the politicians rely on when drafting policy and plumping for resources.

I’m thinking of the original 1993 StatsCan Violence Against Women survey, and its preposterous statistical offshoots, which, in turn, were spinoffs of the American violence-against-women statistical sisterhood. Canada follows America’s lead.

Anyone who’s studied research methodology at a good school (check) knows that research is shaped by the researcher’s hypothesis. Duly, the corpus of violence-against-women statistics reflects an exclusive ideological focus on female victimization. It thus consists of single sex surveys—never two sex surveys—with no input from men, to the exclusion of violence females incur from other females, or acts of violence women commit against the man in the relationship.

Developed at the height of the “war against women” moral panic, these foundational questionnaires are the product of a collaboration with advocacy groups and feminist stakeholders, and are thus fraught with problems of unrepresentative samples, lack of corroboration, a reliance on anecdotes, a use of over-inclusive survey questions and, to charitably understate the problem, the broadest definition of assault.

There’s a lot that goes into skewing data.

The “statistical myths” that pervade the rape-is-rampant claims, states libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, start with “deeply biased researchers,” who proceed invariably from a “false premise or assumption,” who then use biased and small samples whose selection, in turn, is further slanted by paying participants.

Surveys are, of course, inherently dodgy. The general pitfalls of survey methodology, such as asking leading questions, are legion. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.

‘Vocal Fry’ and ‘Uptalk’: On The North American Woman’s Ghastly, Gravely Voice

Aesthetics, Comedy & Humor, Feminism, Gender

Talking in “staccato tart tones” is how I’ve always described the American Woman’s gravelly voice. These days, it’s improper to suggest that the sound emitted from the gobs of tele-ditzes, and lots of other women, is just vile.

So the famous Economist column, “Johnson,” is explaining the politically proper terms for this audial assault.  Incidentally. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the ultra-conservative polymath after whom this liberal column is named, would have taken his cane to any woman who addressed him in such “staccato tart tones.”

Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry—often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity—happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality (a bit like something frying in a pan).
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From these descriptions, an alien observer would be bemused to learn that these harmless phenomena drive some people to scorn, or even anger. But they do. When Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her, some viewers were so infuriated by her speaking style that they denounced it on Twitter: “Christine Blasey Ford’s little girl voice…vocal fry, and uptalk worse than clubbed toenails down a chalkboard.” …

… And men fry all the time, too. Critics of the fry-panic have discovered it in the back catalogues of George W. Bush, Kurt Cobain (who was the lead singer for Nirvana, a grunge-rock band), and Ira Glass (an American radio host). None are known as sexy babies.

Moreover, vocal fry is, in a way, uptalk’s technical opposite. It tends to happen when speakers are relaxing their voices to try to make them sound deeper than they naturally are.

THE REST: Johnson: “Women’s voices are judged more harshly than men’s: Assailed for imaginary vocal foibles, women walk a thin line between shrill and mannish.”