Tag: K-12 education

The Learning Curve #91

Hoover at Stanford’s Dr. Macke Raymond on the Current State of K-12 Education Reform

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Hosted by Cara Candal & Gerard Robinson
With guest Macke Raymond

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Dr. Margaret “Macke” Raymond, founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. She shares some of the major highlights from Hoover’s recent Education Summit that featured a wide variety of national and international experts. They discuss the reasons for persistent problems, even after several federal efforts, with American students’ performance on important exams such as NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA, and the best path forward for state and federal education reforms. They discuss the shift in political support for charter schools, and the outlook for expansion among charters as well as private school choice programs. Dr. Raymond offers thoughts on the implications of the successful U.S. Supreme Court decision on Espinoza, and the likelihood of another victory in the Carson v. Makin case.

Stories of the Week: In Rhode Island, a federal lawsuit over whether there is a constitutional right to an adequate civics education has led to an agreement to improve instruction. States such as Texas and California are directing portions of the $350 billion in federal COVID relief aid to create or expand service and conservation corps programs.

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Lose Slowly or Win: Cold War and Culture War

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
2113
 

Reagan EducationRonald Reagan represented a fundamental shift from the long bipartisan consensus on the Cold War. After Presidents Truman and Eisenhower oversaw the Korean “Conflict,” our strategic leadership and thinking turned pessimistic. We shifted from an assumption that our system had greater viability and resilience to a defensive crouch, hoping the horse might learn to sing before the bear and the dragon consumed the world. Reagan radically rejected that dark view. Today, we face a continuation of the same struggle in a new guise, and once again people who identify as conservative are mostly pessimistic, believing that the best we can hope for is a long delaying action, ending in leftist victory. Donald Trump represented a shift in the cultural war, the internalized Cold War between freedom and totalitarianism.

Korea and Nuclear War: doubting democracies’ durability

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as a superpower. We alone had achieved dominance on land AND air AND sea. America alone had the demonstrated ability to rain nuclear fire on its enemies. In this context, George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram” expressed confidence that the United States could prevail, without open warfare, against the Soviet Union.* His conclusion is well worth our reading or re-reading in today’s context, so I reproduced it below.

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We Are in a War for our Constitutional Republic in Every State

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
3118
 

Red Green AZ Jump PointArizona is a swing state that has swung hard left in key offices and will likely go entirely woke if Arizonans do not fully mobilize the working class against the real upper class. We must do so in every state for the sake of ourselves, the rising generations, and our constitutional republic. We are late in the game, as the Arizona Department of Education has already shown.

Before you reflexively roll out the usual line about “conservative” and how “class” is a leftist concept, read this excerpt from “A Modest Proposal for Republicans,” then go read the whole article after this post.

Yeah, yeah, “class” sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you’re supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn’t a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You’re already doing class warfare, you’re just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words “class” and “classism”.

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Who is the Fellow in the Field of Flowers? Hiding in Plain Sight

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
4113
 

Teachers have been revealed more fully to many parents as radical leftist propagandists, party cadre members rather than the supposedly noble public servants politicians of all stripes venerate. The left is starting to notice and worry that their education allies are overplaying their hand here as the left’s black uniformed militia is on streets across the country. One story jumped out at me in Texas, not because of the teacher and selected student comments, but because of what was not said but shown. I invited others to look at the same picture. We were partially right, but the final answer was: Every Election Matters.

In mid August, the Rutherford County schools told parent not to monitor their children’s virtual classrooms. The administrators lied that this was about protecting privacy of other students, a clear fiction. Everyone knows this was about trying to intimidate parents into not collecting evidence of the ideological poison being poured into their children’s minds. We were treated a week before that to a teacher in another state musing on Twitter about losing the ability to conceal what he was doing in class from parents and saying that he had always had kids agree to keep it from parents. That is a giant red flag.

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Every Election and Office Matters: Arizona Schools Edition

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
36
 

Election and education Who we elect, through our actions and inaction, matters. This old truth has been brought to mind by government officials’ use of the latest Chinese virus. The most recent example of this is the top elected Arizona official in charge of K-12 education trying to stop schools from opening, but in reality until after the election.

We Arizona voters made the terrible mistake of electing a Democrat Superintendent of Education in 2018. Naturally, Kathy Hoffman is acting on befall of her party and the leftist teacher’s unions. While mouthing perfunctory pieties about special needs children and nutrition programs, she is firmly on the side of keeping children and parents tied down at home until after the election, all in the false name of safety.

Our Republican governor and his top doctor, a sad reflection of the national failure of supposed public health leaders, have much work to do in informing the public of real medical data, quantifying the harm inflicted on school children’s brain development and general health from the school closures. Indeed, President Trump needs to force that public discussion with a serious expansion of the medical experts advising and briefing him and the nation. He must get out of his self-justification for being deceived at the beginning by the most senior federal health officials. After all, he has already pointed to making good decisions that went against early “medical expert” advice. Now he needs to make terribly clear the carnage of the Fauci Fraud while noting Tony is limited by his narrow specialty and just could not see all the rest of medical science affecting his recommendations.

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Federalist Radio Hour

Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Demands That Schools Reopen

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Hosted by Ben Domenech

Scott Atlas joined Ben Domenech to discuss the data surrounding schools reopening and the dangers of not following the science. Atlas is a fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Health Care Policy, and the former head of neuroradiology at Stanford Medical School.

Atlas laid out multiple points of scientific evidence indicating the necessity of reopening schools. This included the documented facts that children are young people are at low risk of developing COVID-19 themselves and they’re at low risk of spreading it to others. Furthermore, he said, school closures are extremely harmful to children’s health in different ways, especially in that distance learning has proven to be a failure.

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The Fairfax County School Curriculum, Cancel Culture, and Why You Should Care

MartinKnight
MartinKnight
2814
 

I think conservatives are starting to understand – in practical terms – exactly what Andrew Breitbart was getting at when he said “Politics is downstream of culture.”

“Cancel Culture” is the direct result of the Right’s elite class turning up its collective nose at the culture fight. Cultural battles, they sniffed, were a “distraction” from the “real issues” … like reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax.

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Don’t Know Much About History: Veterans Day Edition

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
317
 

This is page one of the “Intermediate Level U.S. History since 1900” workbook, used to prepare for the citizenship exam. What, if anything, do you think current 8th-12th graders and college students would put down in each block, before peeking or asking Siri or Alexa? If you let either of those spirits into your home, what do they say about these wars?

Citizenship Study Guide page

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The Learning Curve #6

Wilfred McClay on his new book, Land of Hope

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Hosted by Bob Bowdon & Cara Candal

In the Newsmaker Interview, Cara talks with Wilfred McClay, University of Oklahoma Professor and author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, a new high school history textbook that seeks to provide an account of this nation’s rich and complex story that puts it in proper perspective, and that is both honest and inspiring.

Stories of the Week: Are retirement benefits that are crowding out spending on current teachers’ priorities a “hidden driver” of union strikes like the one announced last week in Chicago? In California, there’s a rise in “due process” settlements in legal battles over access to special education services – but who benefits?  In Rhode Island, Providence’s Mayor plans to allow a charter school network to open one additional school, but then to ask the state to limit the expansion of all other charters in that beleaguered school district.

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