1. Robby Soave writes about a math curriculum proposal in Seattle,

This is verbatim from the proposal: Students will be able to “identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “explain how math has been used to exploit natural resources,” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.” Each of these statements are debatable, but they are not being presented as such. It would be one thing to hold a class discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of standardized testing, but what’s happening here is that students are being trained to reject standardized testing due to its “inherent inequity,” which is asserted as some kind of proven fact.

2. Philip Carl Salzman writes,

no one was quicker to adopt grievance “social justice” than university administrators, who have hired thousands of “diversity and inclusion officers,” including at the highest levels of administration for salaries up to half a million dollars a year, to police thoughts and speech among students and faculty. A sideline is enforcing Obama administration Title IX demands that they persecute male students that any female complains about. With their “social justice” police force in place, administrators have gone on to establish racial segregation in housing, eating facilities, and university salaries, and well as to admit, fund, hire and promote on the basis of sex, gender, race, and ethnicity. Every American criterion of merit, universal values, democracy, and due process has been thrown out by just about every university administration.

If you are in the mood for a rant, read Salzman’s entire essay.

3. And if you are in a mood for another rant, there is Victor Davis Hanson.

A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.

He just takes off from there.

I never meant for the oppressor-oppressed axis to define progressivism. Eliminating consideration of all other causal factors in the world might be termed reductionist progressivism.

Ryan Craig advocates,

• Requiring colleges and universities to restructure degree programs to ensure students achieve industry-recognized (stackable) credentials.
• Mandating colleges and universities to provide experiential learning (work experience) as part of degree programs.
• Limiting short-term Pell funding to programs offered in conjunction with a qualified employer or industry group, to make sure that beneficiaries acquire the skills that lead to good, middle income jobs.
• Providing a new basis for government aid to education: not for delivering educational programs, but for achieving graduate placement into a “good job.”

I think that the very top tier of schools would and should resist this, but they should not be getting aid in any case.

My cynical view is that you cannot structure aid to higher education in such a way that the schools won’t just use it to continue to operate as they do currently.

These two books, both from Princeton University Press, struck me as taking very different views about the prospects for policy interventions to affect cognitive ability.

1. Jonathan Rothwell, an economist, wrote Republic of Equals. p. 291:

As I’ve argued, there is no logical or scientific basis for hereditarianism. The best available genetic research shows that the heritability of IQ has been greatly exaggerated, even within the same age group and by greater amounts across generations or societies at different levels of economic development. The environmental origins of the massive two-standard-deviation increase in cognitive ability over the past 100 years are themselves powerful evidence that genes cannot account for more than a modest share of variation across individuals.

p. 285:

At the heart of this book is the claim that equal access to education would have profoundly pro-egalitarian effects on the distribution of IQ, income, and wealth, among other good things.

2. Kevin Mitchell, a neuropsychologist, wrote Innate. He emphasizes that variation in brain structure occurs during gestation, meaning between conception and birth. p. 9:

In sum, the way our individual brains get wired depends not just on our genetic makeup, but also on how the program of development happens to play out. This is a key point. It means that even if the variation in many of our traits is only partly genetic, this does not necessarily imply that the rest of the variation is environmental in origin or attributable to nurture—much of it may be developmental. Variation in our individual behavioral tendencies and capacities may be even more innate than genetic effects alone would suggest.

and p. 53:

Many studies have looked for systematic associations between specific environmental factors or experiences that differ between siblings and specific behavioral outcomes. These typically fall under a number of categories including differential parenting, peer relationships, sibling interaction, teacher relationships, and what is known as “family constellation” (birth order, age difference between siblings, whether or not they are the same gender, etc.). The results from these studies are very clear. They have failed to identify any robust, consistent, or substantial effects on any of a variety of outcomes including adjustment, personality measures, or cognitive ability.

This struck me as a generalized form ot the Null Hypothesis.

1. Jo Craven McGinty in the WSJ:

Decades after the end of legalized segregation, and the funding disparities that accompanied it, minority students remain disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty areas. Academically, they trail students in more affluent areas, and they fall increasingly behind as the years pass. The result is an achievement gap that limits the educational and career opportunities of nonwhite children.

She refers to a study by Sean F. Reardon and others. The abstract reads

In this paper we estimate the effects of current-day school segregation on racial achievement gaps. We use 8 years of data from all public school districts in the U.S. We find that racial school segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in 3rd grade, and with the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The association of racial segregation with achievement gaps is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty: racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower-poverty schools. Finally, we conduct exploratory analyses to examine potential mechanisms through which differential enrollment in high-poverty schools leads to inequality. We find that the effects of school poverty do not appear to be explained by differences in the set of measurable teacher or school characteristics available to us.

The last sentence appears to support the Null Hypothesis. But the study and McGinty’s interpretation clearly assume that placing a child in a high-poverty school will worsen that child’s educational outcome. One possibility is that peer effects are strong, as the late Judith Rich Harris claimed. Another possibility, more consistent with the Null Hypothesis, is that the relationship between neighborhood poverty and school outcomes is not causal.

McGinty cites a paper by Raj Chetty and others that finds that moving to a different school affects educational outcomes. If these results are causal, then this would be evidence against the Null Hypothesis. But I am not convinced that moving to a different school district is unrelated to the characteristics of the parents and hence of the children.

2. Angelo Codevilla writes,

During Word War II, only 4 percent of some 18 million draftees were illiterate. Despite (or because?) of massive expenditures on education over the subsequent two decades, 27 percent of the Vietnam war’s draftees were judged functionally illiterate. Between 1955 and 1991, the inflation-adjusted average K-12 per-pupil expenditure in America rose 350 percent. In 1972, 2,817 students scored 750 or better on each half of the SAT. By 1994, only 1,438 made this score though the test had been made easier. Today, U.S. 15 year olds rank 24th out of 71 countries in science, and 38th in math. In 2018, college students spent less than a third of the time their grandparents did studying for their classes.

If you believe the Null Hypothesis, then this must be due to a worsening the innate characteristics of American children. To blame the education system, you have to believe that the Null Hypothesis is not true, and that the education establishment has found ways to achieve worse outcomes.

Either possibility is distressing.

Lauren Bauer and others write,

The teen labor force participation rate reached an all-time peak in 1979 (57.9 percent) and gradually declined until about 2000, when it then dropped precipitously to a 2010–18 plateau of about 35 percent (figure 1). While the participation rate of prime-age workers (25- to 54-year-olds) has edged down since its peak in the late 1990s and older workers’ (55- to 64-year-olds) participation has increased, the scale of the shift in teen participation dwarfs these other changes.

One of the factors reducing teen labor force participation is that high schoolers have less time for work. Included in the list of time impositions is my pet peeve: the requirement for “community service hours.” My line is that community service is for convicted criminals, but high school students are innocent.

I would like to see more young people gaining experience in working for a profit. “Community service” does the opposite.

John S. Rosenberg writes,

Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, the expert witness for the plaintiffs in SFFA v. Harvard, has shown that at Duke, 62% of entering black freshman expressed an interest in majoring in natural sciences, engineering, or economics (compared to 61% of whites), but less than 30% graduated with a major in those fields (compared to 51% of whites). In his major study of Duke, “What Happens After Enrollment?” Arcidiacono and his co-authors found that “Over 54% of black men who express an initial interest in majoring in the natural sciences, engineering, or economics switch to the humanities or social sciences compared to less than 8% of white men.”

Recruiting under-qualified students and setting them up to fail, or lowering the bar for their success, is called “inclusion.” I’m sorry to have to be so blunt, but that is the way it looks to anyone who has not drunk the social justice movement’s Kool-Aid.

There are women and minorities who can handle STEM majors, and it’s not fair to them to say that it’s the content of the courses that needs to change to accommodate students who can’t handle them.