Banning Cellphone Use in Schools

5/14/26 New York Post:

"NYC teachers say phone ban in classrooms has caused ‘jaw dropping’ change in students’ attention"

Is the Goal Better Teachers or Better Paid Teachers?

 From a study of incentives on teaching skills in North Carolina at the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Graduate degrees 

One of the most counterintuitive findings to emerge from the basic models is the small or negative effects of having a graduate degree. Most of those degrees are master’s degrees that generate higher salaries for teachers. A negative coefficient would suggest that having such a degree is not associated with higher achievement.  Thus, if the goal of the salary structure were to provide incentives for teachers to improve their teaching, the higher pay for master’s degrees would appear to
be money that is not well spent, except to the extent that the option of getting a master’s degree keeps effective experienced teachers in the profession.

Aim Higher: Basic Literacy Matters

9/25/25 The Argument:

This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.

In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad....

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.

The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”

The article goes on to explain how GOP governors have led the charge to improve reading skills.  These include phonics which progressives have fought for decades and among other things reading whole books rather than giving in to the Sesame Street attention span of cellphones.

Higher Education Whining

The OBBB had a number of changes in higher education funding.  7/4/25 Inside Higher Education gives a version that certainly sounds the alarm for the greedy institutions:

"But the legislation doesn’t include some of the proposals that most worried college leaders, such as cuts to the Pell Grant program and a 21 percent endowment tax rate. Wealthy private colleges will still face a higher tax rate on their endowments, up to 8 percent. (The current rate is 1.4 percent.)...

"Eliminating Grad PLUS loans could mean fewer students attend graduate school, which would be a hit to universities’ bottom lines, especially at institutions that rely heavily on graduate programs for tuition revenue. Similarly, capping Parent PLUS loans at $65,000 per student could hurt Black and Latino families, who disproportionately use the loans. The legislation also consolidates repayment plans, giving future borrowers two options. Consumer protection advocates worry the bill will exacerbate the student debt crisis and drive students to private loans."

Is it really "hurting" families who take out student loans to get their kids degrees for which there are either no jobs,  or only poorly paid jobs?

"

Bill Codifies New Endowment Tax Rates

Private colleges with fewer than 3,000 students are exempted from the tax, up from the current floor of 500.

Table with 2 columns and 4 rows. (column headers with buttons are sortable)

$500,000 to $750,000	1.4%
$750K to $1.25M	4.0%
$1.25M to $2M	4.0%
More than $2M Yes, if you have $2 million per student endowment,  you are a hedge fund that dabbles in education. "One of the major changes ties colleges’ access to federal student loans to students’ earnings. Programs that fail to show their graduates earn more than an adult with only a high school diploma could be cut off from loans. One rough analysis found that fewer than half of two-year degree programs would pass the earnings test, but community colleges are less reliant on loans." Yes, if a degree in Victim Studies only generates the same income as not going to college, it is arguable that whatever the benefits of such a degree are to an individual or the society as a whole,  it probably does not justify federal assistance.   If it really makes you feel better, pay for it yourself.	8.0%"

Why Is DEI So Hated?

 5/22/25 ChalkTalk:

The school — which serves mainly low-income Latino and Black students — had piloted a new grading approach in 2019, then embraced it when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted students’ lives and learning. Students could redo assignments repeatedly and turn in work late. Even if they didn’t complete the assignment, the lowest score they could get was 50 rather than zero — a concept known as no-zero grading.

In Chicago and around the country, no-zero grading started to take hold at least a decade before COVID struck — part of a larger push to give students more chances to show what they learned. Its supporters argue that giving students zeros for missed or badly bungled assignments makes it too hard for them to recover, leading some to stop trying — and to stop showing up to class.

But teachers at Richards and at least one other high school in Chicago are pushing back on the controversial approach to grading. They worry it allows some students to eke out passing grades with little effort and undermines the importance of turning in work on time and coming to school regularly.

Some educators and experts think no-zero grading — and a broader push to avoid giving F’s — is one reason why CPS has experienced two seemingly conflicting trends since the pandemic: High absenteeism among high school students and increasing graduation rates.

Last year, a quarter of all high schoolers missed more than a month of school, a Chalkbeat and WBEZ analysis found. But the graduation rate has kept going up.

Principal Kennedy, at Richards, is skeptical that no-zero grading was a key factor in lowering attendance, and remains a firm believer in second and third chances for students. But she could also see where her teachers were coming from last spring.

“When students graduate and are working in jobs, what they experience around grace and flexibility at school is not going to match,” Kennedy said. “This bubble is not going to surround you wherever you go.”...

As part of efforts to help students stay on track at Richards in 2019, Kennedy and a group of her teachers read a 2018 book, “Grading for Equity,” by Joe Feldman, which makes the case for rethinking how schools grade students. Feldman, a Harvard-educated former school district administrator, runs a consultancy that works with districts on implementing equity-based grading. In recent years, Feldman and others had questioned the zero-to-100 grading scale, arguing that it’s slanted toward failure. Feldman’s approach has gained traction — and spurred debate — in recent years.

Feldman argues that traditional grading often does not reflect whether students have learned something or gained skills, and grades based on attendance, along with homework grades, can be unfair to low-income students and students of color, who are more likely to contend with homelessness, responsibilities such as sibling care, and other hurdles....

Student Kayla Saffold loves that Richards has fewer than 400 students and so many teachers like Brahm who work to make the school a welcoming, understanding place. “It is like a family,” she said.

As she wraps up her senior year, she can name a long list of her activities, from basketball to founding the student council.

But Saffold said the no-zero grading system was a disappointment.

“I was a witness to kids just coming in, like, twice a week and doing two assignments and then passing the class,” she said. “It was just crazy to me.”

“It felt like I had to put in the effort to get the A, and someone else ends up barely putting in any effort at all, and ended up passing the class. It felt unfair to me,” she said.

If this was not so transparently racist in intent, it would be laughable.  Equity is really "the soft bigotry of low expectations."  Assuming that BIPOCs are incapable of performing like white kids is really a leftist admission that they think they are too stupid to compete on an equal basis with whites.

This is Sad, At So Many Levels

4/21/25 AP:

"WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department will begin collection next month on student loans that are in default, including the garnishing of wages for potentially millions of borrowers, officials said Monday.

"Currently, roughly 5.3 million borrowers are in default on their federal student loans."

1. Biden should not have tried to buy off young people with forgiving student loans.

2. Young people should not have been sold a bill of goods that a degree, any degree would make enough economic difference,  to justify getting tend of thousands of dollars in debt.  There were degrees that would lead to good jobs.  Many would not.

3. The article says that less than 40% are current on their debt.  I suspect many stopped making payments during COVID when the government stopped requiring payments.  I suspect more than a few saw Biden's pandering as an excuse to not even try.

4. Sending these debts to collections is going to impair  credit scores for many years.

5. The entire student loan process has been a huge subsidy to universities.   Some, such as the Ivy League schools with huge endowments,  did not need it.  Even at the more typical schools, the effect was to drive up tuition. 

8th Grade Final Exam

I am sure that you have seen this exam that most college graduates could not complete today:

Arithmetic (Time Limit - 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at 20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

That is the arithmetic section.  Some of this is sort of obsolete.  Few people know or need to know how long a rod is.  Revise it using feet and many college graduates in the whining degree fields would still never get the right answer or even know how to set up the algebra.

I see stuff like this and I get skeptical for two reasons:

1.  At the high school level, such exams overlook that high school was a fairly elite education.  My father went to high school after eighth grade.  His brother went to sea.

2. A big chunk of Americans were attending schools of very inferior level; blacks in the South were given educations markedly inferior to whites. The assumption was that they were not going to college.  I doubt black schools in Alabama expected this much from kids who were expected to go into the fields.

I found this exam on a NASA web site, so I find it plausible.

They Will Blame it on Systemic Racism

 6/16/22 TaxProfBlog about how the ABA is dropping the LSAT as a requirement to apply to ABA law schools.  He mentions that LSAT scores are the best predictors of later bar exam passage.  Law schools desperate for money can now admit less qualified, but BIPOC students who will drop out, or fail the bar exam, stuck with six figure student loans.  This will become yet another example of "systemic racism."

This Will Cost the Students Nothing, Of Course

 2/17/22 College Fix:

An initiative by the University of Michigan to hire 20 new “anti-racism” faculty has moved into the third round of hiring, according to a recent statement from the school.

“The Anti-Racism Faculty Hiring Initiative, one of the Office of the Provost’s programs and activities to address systemic racism, will begin its third round of proposal submission and review in March,” the Feb. 11 announcement stated.

In 2021, the Michigan provost announced the school would be hiring 20 new tenured or tenure-track faculty members with scholarly expertise in racial inequality and structural racism to schools and colleges across campus.

Will this be a new department:  Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE)?  Could that money have spent tutoring BIPOC students who find a college campus a challenging environment?  (Of course, many white students find that as well, but white people do not matter to the privileged whites that cause these programs.)

Do You Have Kids in Public Schools?

What is the situation about discipline and behavior?  Do kids generally make an effort to learn and treat teachers with respect?  Do teachers have talk extraordinarily loud to overwhelm students who are talking to each other instead of listening?

What All States Should Do

4/6/21 Inside Higher Education reports (unsurprisingly ) that employers really want people with liberal arts degrees.  Employers under 40 want more evidence of community involvement and practical application (burning down federal buildings?).  They contrast this with 3/17/21 First Coast News about Florida is discussing reducing financial aid for students majoring in fields that have limited job opportunities.  Students are complaining that this, "would toy with their ability to attend school for their passions and interests."  Not toying with but not wasting money on education in degrees such as "gender studies" and "gay studies" that lead to jobs at Starbucks. 

The Inside Higher Education article points to a 2018 Gallup survey that found an unusually larger drop in confidence in the highest education system.  Can you imagine that or why?

Book I Am Reading

James K. Wellman, Jr.,Katie E. Corcoran,  Kate J. Stockly,  High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America.   The authors are sociologists,  and the first few chapters are awash in the technical jargon of the field with frequent references to sociologists that every sociologist knows,  and of whom the rest of us have never heard.  

It is not a hostile book.  Along with trying to understand how the megachurch's model influences people to stay and become members, it recognizes that the needs they meet in the lives of people are very real and very productive.   They admit that these megachurches are not just talking Jesus, but engaged in a variety of activities that help people in need in ways that even a secularist would consider useful and socially productive (even if they lean vigorously right and pro-Trump).

I am only partway through the book.   Later sections examine the beliefs and emotional reactions of congregants.   Part III examines the often headline-getting moral failures of pastors of these churches fall into,  and how it often destroys these churches. 

I have been a member of several megachurches or at least megachurches-in-training.  Many of the patterns described in this book were immediately recognizable.  When analyzed sociologically,  how these patterns work are obvious.  There is no implication that these patterns are intentionally manipulative; they satisfy deeply felt human needs and they are straight out of the New Testament. 

All of which is leading to my call to arms: megachurches build incredibly expensive buildings for evangelism and worship.  Watching the public K-12 schools botch everything from reading to economics and history, it is clear that every megachurch should build with the plan to create and run K-12 schools, and subsidized rather heavily.   

Why the subsidy? My wife has taught at a couple of Christian schools.  Even when affiliated with a church (in one case, a megachurch) they are largely, if not entirely,  self-supporting. When you spend $500 a month sending your perfect snowflake to school, you get pretty entitled to call the tune, even when that is neither good educationally nor good for character development.   Also, too many of the parents are at best nominally Christian.  Johnny is at a Christian school in the hope that he will get a better education,  or at least associate with kids more moral than they are.  The results should be obvious. 

If churches subsidize schools heavily,  one irritated parent threatening to pull Johhny out because he did not get an A on an obviously plagiarized paper will not cause administrative brain seize.

What I do not want are schools trapped in Young Earth, dinosaurs on the ark crap.  This does not prepare students for any secular college or even many Christian colleges.  Learn what the world knows well enough that if you need to challenge them on the details, that you do not look like an idiot or a well-trained robot.

I have in mind the Dissenter academies that turned out a couple generations of scientists and engineers in 19th century Britain, when Oxford and Cambridge were Church of England, excluding Dissenters as well as science.  They were stuck in classics, which has a place, but was not quite as relevant as the education that gave Britain engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Bruneel.  Produce a generation of kids who know American history, math (even white math), science, and composition, and America can be reclaimed. Otherwise,  we are ceding the future to the left.  

Hitler observed that it did not matter what older people thought.   His control of the schools would determine what the next generation thought.   You can see the proof all around us: white privilege,  cancelling Dr. Suess (a prominent anti-Fascist, New Dealer, and environmentalist), Coca-Cola telling its workers to be less white.

Robert Browning's Ordinary Men tells the story of a police reserve battalion that participated in the Holocaust following the blitzkrieg invasion of the East.  Those old enough to be educated before Hitler rose to power, were far less enthusiastic about these monstrous crimes.  The Hitler generation had far less difficulty. 

It does not take a megachurch.   Ten small churches of a few hundred could do the job.  First Baptist proves classrooms for K-4, House of Love does 4-8. Covenant Community does classrooms for 9-12.  All the churches provide funding to hire teachers, and subsidize tuition, with a joint school board to administer the whole district.   But this would require churches to put education of children first, not a sanctuary that seats 6000.

Not that anyone listens to me.

Affirmative Action for the Rich and Powerful

3/25/19 Guardian prints an anonymous article:

What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them
A professor at an elite US school says an influx of unskilled and entitled students is monopolizing faculty time: ‘They will eat you alive’

If you think corruption in elite US college admissions is bad, what happens once those students are in the classroom is even worse.
I know, because I teach at an elite American university – one of the oldest and best-known, which rejects about 90% of applicants each year for the small number of places it can offer to undergraduates.

In this setting, where teaching quality is at a premium and students expect faculty to give them extensive personal attention, the presence of unqualified students admitted through corrupt practices is an unmitigated disaster for education and research. While such students have long been present in the form of legacy admits, top sports recruits and the kids of multimillion-dollar donors, the latest scandal represents a new tier of Americans elbowing their way into elite universities: unqualified students from families too poor to fund new buildings, but rich enough to pay six-figure bribes to coaches and admissions advisers. This increase in the proportion of students who can’t do the work that elite universities expect of them has – at least to me and my colleagues – begun to create a palpable strain on the system, threatening the quality of education and research we are expected to deliver.

What is interesting is to discover that I attended an "elite" university, University of Southern California:

Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of Southern California, and who announced last August to her huge YouTube following that “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying … I don’t really care about school.” 

A longstanding criticism of affirmative action is that by admitting students who are not up to the university's standards, they are increasing the risk that those students will drop out, where they might have graduated from a school with a less demanding set of peers.  The example often used is UC Berkeley vs. San Jose State University.  Of course, that assumes a student who is trying but is simply less intelligent or a victim of the low-grade public schools in many poor neighborhoods.  But Olivia Jade Gianulli (who I have never heard of before) is admitting that she is not even going to try, wasting space for a poor kid with a fine high school education (like mine, Santa Monica High School). 

Trump's Free Speech on Campus Executive Order

3/21/19 Chronicle of Higher Education: It includes something even more dangerous to the Left.  Study of making universities risk-sharers with their students on loans.  Watch the risk-sharing idea get turned into "Trump is against the liberal arts" and "why is he trying to bankrupt America's best universities?" If abolishing tuition is cool, order private universities receiving federal funding to stop charging tuition. They can take it out of their endowments or reduce faculty and staff salaries. Then watch the screaming.

Two Stories That Explain Each Other

Inside Higher Ed on Trump's proposed cuts to federal government funding to universities; increasing number of states letting illegal aliens go to college tuition-free.

Don't Complain About Your Miserable $100,000 Student Loan Debt

TaxProfBlog talks about:

Due to escalating tuition and easy credit, the U.S. has 101 people who owe at least $1 million in federal student loans, according to the Education Department. Five years ago, 14 people owed that much.

The Reality Optional Zone

Why universities are increasingly held in contempt:


As Instapundit observes:

I predict that it will be harder and harder to argue that higher education adds value, either for individuals or for society.

I keep wondering why Republican state legislatures do not defund the identity politics departments of state universities.

Making the Obscenely Rich Pay More Taxes": Democrats Furious

Along with the loss of interest deduction on mortgages larger than $750,000 (because that's atypical middle class mortgage), another part of the tax bill (not a tax cut bill because it raises taxes on the rich).  12/22/17 Politico:

The Republican tax bill directly targets the nation’s elite private universities — including Harvard, Yale and Princeton — with a new levy aimed at multibillion-dollar endowments that have never before been taxed.

Under the bill headed to President Donald Trump’s desk the most well-to-do private universities would have to pay a 1.4 percent tax on earnings from their endowments, which are largely built on donations from prosperous alumni and enhanced by investments. Although scrutiny of wealthy college endowments has grown in Congress in recent years, the reality of the new tax has left higher-education leaders reeling.

No Easy Way to Summarize This Article

Except state legislatures need to look at how public funds are being misspent.  11/16/17 College Fix:

White inventor of ‘white fragility’ tells University of Texas: Whites must stop becoming teachers

Glad I Do Not Teach At a Prestige School Like Reed

9/11/17 Inside Higher Education:

Among activists’ sticking points, especially for a group of students called Reedies Against Racism, was Hum 110. The course, which faces a curricular and pedagogical review every 10 years but has maintained a fundamentally Western orientation, is simply too white, too male and too Eurocentric, critics charged, especially for a course required of all students. Moreover, the student activists said, Hum 110 largely ignores how these works may have been used over time to perpetuate violence against people of color.

Reed takes a dialogue-based approach to conflict resolution and engaged the students about their demands. Regarding Hum 110, Reed promised to begin reviewing the course one year earlier than planned; a faculty group got to work last year and professors' recommendations are expected later this fall. But in the interim, throughout last year, a group of 12 to 15 students has occupied the class -- surrounding the lecturing professor in silent protest -- for each session.

My son's former girlfriend told me about their readings for this class, and I was most impressed.  No wonder progressives want it destroyed.