Throwing money at an inner city school never works.
Views: 51
When I first saw this, I thought it was Sacramento. Then I saw why it happened. Not One 8th Grade Student at the Lebron James Akron School Has Passed a State Math Test in 3 Years. Why has this been going on for three years? That’s right, Lebron James.
Well, the school board has said enough is enough. Despite receiving massive funding from the James Foundation along with local, state, and federal funding, the I Promise school’s “Black students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the state.”
So why did the Akron school board just now act shocked? The low test scores will now cause the Ohio Department of Education to intervene at the school in a last effort attempt to reverse the downtrend in test scores.
For decades, much has been made of the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom. But in 2022, the national governments of both nations shared a somewhat less special accomplishment: earning the least confidence from their constituents of any G7 member country.
When Gallup first measured national confidence in governments around the world nearly two decades ago, both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were well into their terms in office. The governments they led retained extensive confidence domestically — far more so than for almost all the rest of the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy).
Fast forward to 2022, and the tables have turned. Roughly one in three adults in the U.K. (33%) and U.S. (31%) say they have confidence in their national governments: putting them at the bottom of the G7 countries.
As governments on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled, other administrations in G7 nations have solidified their positions among their electorates. In Europe, confidence in Italy’s government has almost doubled since 2019 (from 22% to 41% in 2022). Similarly, confidence in the French government has increased steadily since French President Emmanuel Macron came to power: rising from 37% in 2017 to 46% in 2022. In Olaf Scholz’s first full year as chancellor of Germany, he has continued Angela Merkel’s trend of high German confidence (61%) in government — the highest confidence level in the G7.
Even though confidence in the Canadian government has slipped from its highs under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a majority (51%) nevertheless retain faith in it. In Japan, which ranked last among G7 countries between 2007 and 2012, confidence in government has since more than doubled to 43% in 2022.
Confidence in U.S. Government Continues Free Fall
The U.S. has seen a sharp decline in the public’s confidence in the national government over the past couple of years. In 2020, almost half (46%) of U.S. adults expressed faith in their government, likely boosted by the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But after President Joe Biden took office, confidence in government slipped to 40% in 2021 and again to 31% in 2022. This is on par with the lowest rates of confidence measured in the U.S. government since Gallup started tracking it globally in 2006 — with the other lows measured in 2013, 2016 and 2018 under former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Declining domestic confidence in the U.S. government has occurred alongside declining approval ratings on the world stage. Median global approval of U.S. leadership slipped to 41% in 2022, down from 45% in 2021 during Biden’s first year in office.
Turmoil in Westminster May Be Blurring the Lines
Across the Atlantic, Britons’ confidence in their national government has been relatively low since 2019. But as is true for the U.S., confidence in the U.K. also reached a near-record low in 2022, on par with its level in 2008 during the financial crash (32%).
The U.K. political system has been rocked by several major events in recent years, including Brexit, the “Partygate” scandal and frequent turnover among its prime ministers. Since 2019, the U.K. has had four prime ministers in as many years.
For countries across the globe, leadership approval and confidence in government are highly related.
The same relationship is present in the U.K., where since 2006, confidence in the government has been far higher among those who approve of the U.K.’s leadership. But this changed dramatically in 2022, as the Partygate scandal intensified and numerous stories of alleged governmental wrongdoing dominated the headlines.
In 2022, confidence in the government collapsed, especially among Britons who approved of their country’s leadership (38%). This is the lowest level of confidence in the world among people who approve of their leadership — tied with Lebanon.
After years of clear distinction, the line between governmental confidence and leadership approval in the U.K. is now blurred. This may be a concern for the conservatives — in power since 2010 — ahead of the general election likely to be held at the end of next year.
Bottom Line
Much has changed since Gallup surveyed G7 countries in 2022, and recent events could have shifted these trends even further — including the political fallout from Trump’s legal troubles and former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dramatic resignation from parliament in recent weeks.
The U.S. and the U.K. face crucial elections around the end of 2024. On both sides of the Atlantic, the election results will likely prove decisive in whether the public’s faith in their governments can be rebuilt in coming years or will erode yet further.
One of the more interesting footnotes to the Students for Fair Admissions case doesn’t involve what happened. It involves what didn’t happen. After the decision came down, liberals and the left voiced their dismay at the result. There was a little organized protesting, but it was nothing compared to the massive waves of mobilization that attended the Dobbs decision on abortion, despite the fact that the result was predictable in both cases.
Perhaps that’s to be expected. Dobbs is, in my view, the more consequential decision. It has the potential to directly affect far more people than Students for Fair Admissions. But I think there is another factor at play. Most people already suspected what the latter case demonstrated—that race-based affirmative action is a discriminatory practice. It was both unjust and unpopular, and now it’s been declared unconstitutional. The relatively muted response from some of the left could signal a tacit decision to relinquish the legerdemain and enforced silence and bad faith necessary to keep the policy going. I can’t help but think that, whatever attitude they present to the public, some affirmative action defenders are secretly relieved that they can now turn their attention elsewhere.
Of course, I’m only speculating. And the fight over racial preferences in college admissions is not nearly over. It’s too big a business to simply vanish; elite institutions have invested too much in it to just give it up. This week’s episode features Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, the man who led the herculean effort to analyze the data that made Students for Fair Admissions’ case. As Peter says, that data is clear. Now that it’s out in the open, any of the “good liberals” who defended affirmative action as a matter of principle while privately harboring doubts as to its logical and moral coherence have an offramp. They can let it go. The questions is, will they?
GLENN LOURY: Peter was the main guy—correct me if I get anything wrong, Peter—in the data analysis marathon that had to be undertaken in order to parse through the information made available by Harvard University, quantitative information on its admissions policies, what exactly was going on. And he faced off against the estimable David Card—Nobel fame, UC-Berkeley—who was the lead witness for the defendant, Harvard University, in the litigation. And he prevailed.
PETER ARCIDIACONO: Not at first, but in the end, yes.
So what were the scientific questions, the academic questions, which you’ve been engaged with that were relevant to the litigation.
PETER ARCIDIACONO: Well, what was relevant to litigation was, was there a penalty against Asian Americans? And also how big the preferences were at these different schools.
JOHN MCWHORTER: There’s nothing sadder than the position of an individual Asian student today at these universities. They are so muzzled. You can often tell what they do think about all of this, but you can’t say that in their social circles. And so they don’t. I’ve seen a couple of them actually change color as they talk about it. It’s weird.
I told one of them, I’m sorry that you are in selective university at this time, because this must be a really tough thing to have any kind of constructive conversation about. Except, I imagine, among yourselves. And one of them kind of smiled. I mean, you can tell what’s going on. It’s hard, but this had to happen. It was time.
Peter, I’m glad that you did this. What in your gut got you onto this? Because, of course, some people are going to say, “Peter, it’s just racism,” and there’s a certain kind of crowd who will applaud. I know it’s not that, but what interested you about this?
PETER ARCIDIACONO: Well, I think that came about through my own experience as an undergraduate and seeing how much easier the economics classes were than the chemistry classes, so then studying higher education. And then back in 2011 when there was a protest over one of my papers on this, seeing universities not really willing to engage in dialogue about how best to improve the experiences here.
That probably set me on this path. What that paper showed was, it was really about a data fact. You look at white males, they come in, those who want to do STEM and economics, they switch out at a rate of eight percent. This is at Duke. Black males interested in STEM and economics switch out at a rate of over fifty percent.
And nothing happened after that. You know, we just sort of let the protests happen, everything sort of died away, nothing changes. And I think it relates, actually—I know you wrote about this—the Georgetown Law professor who got caught on video lamenting the poor performance of her black students.
Sandra Sellers.
SANDRA SELLERS: I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh, come on. You get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy
PETER ARCIDIACONO: And she got torn to pieces.
And to me, that’s a feature not a bug for affirmative action. When you come in, you’re going to be behind your peers. That’s by definition, unless we’re screening on things that we shouldn’t be screening. So that idea, you’re going to come in behind, the performance relative to your peers is going to be worse. It could still be a good thing that you’re going to the better school and have a better outcome. But it’s a definite feature of the system that you will be further down on the last rank. So now you have a system where actually they come in with the university saying, “We want you so much. We’re willing to give you big preferences.” And they come out thinking the place is racist. That doesn’t seem so good.
JOHN MCWHORTER: It’s not so good. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s one of the aspects of all of this that really is as peculiar as discussions medieval Europeans had about matters of religion and philosophy, where again, you have to be very careful to understand what the terminology is, what things you’re not supposed to look at and why. Truly peculiar that you have that kind of preference, and yet the stylish attitude by the time you’re finished is that you’ve just gone through some sort of racist hazing.
And it really will perplex people in say a hundred years, maybe even in fifty, to look back on the state of our discussion with this and to see something like what Sandra Sellers was lamenting. And for the good thinking idea to have been that there’s nothing wrong with that, that that’s not something that we need to try to fix, and it doesn’t matter.
Yes it does. And I think that everybody will understand why a few of us weird renegades back in the early twenty-first century thought it did. It does.
I think it’s going to happen a lot quicker than fifty years. I think it’s happening before our very eyes. I mean, Peter pointed out that this decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina, did not engender the same kind of backlash from the left of revulsion and political determination to do something about it that the Dobbs decision on the abortion question did, even though it is resolving in a “conservative” direction of one of the big questions of constitutional law of the last half-century. It is historic in representing a kind of transformation of the law in its way, as was the Dobbs decision. It didn’t engender the same kind of backlash.
And I think this house of cards which Peter described—I mean, the Sandra Sellers thing is a predictable consequence. As he says, it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a predictable consequence. And then you’re going to have a witch hunt and you’re going to go around and cut people’s heads off if they observe that it’s true. And then everybody can see it. It’s not like it’s not common knowledge that there are these implications of preferences. It’s corrupt.
I think Justice Clarence Thomas deserves to be recognized here as, for decades, having made this argument about the affront to the dignity of the beneficiaries of preference, the fact that they’re not being taken seriously as persons of whom it is reasonable to expect performance like anybody else. You’re patting the beneficiaries on the head. You’re turning them into baubles to wear on a charm bracelet around your wrist, representing the various colors of the demographic universe. You’re not taking them seriously. That’s what I would say.
A group of chemical engineering students was denied state funding to participate in a national competition in Florida because of California’s travel ban to certain states that don’t allow biological male athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
The ban, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in 2019, was recently expanded to include three new states, boosting the total to 26.
As a result, Will Donahue, College Republicans of America president, told the Epoch Times the Chem-E-Car team at California Polytechnic State University—Pomona, was denied state and university funding to participate in the prestigious national American Institute of Chemical Engineers conference in the fall.
“It’s a ridiculous reason why they can’t have state-funded travel,” Mr. Donahue said.
The students, he said, have worked hard to earn their spot in the competition after defeating other California college teams at the Western Regional Conference in the spring.
“It’s a talented team—really smart engineers, and it’s unfortunate that the state is not sponsoring them,” he said.
The cost of travel for the team is estimated at about $6,500 for airfare, hotels, and restaurants, he said.
Streetview of Cal Poly Pomona in March 2019. (Google Maps/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
California lawmakers imposed the initial travel ban in 2016 with the passage of Assembly Bill 1887, a law that prohibits employees of state agencies to travel to any state that has enacted laws California deems discriminatory on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It also prohibits state-funded travel for employees and students to states on the list.
Legislation targeting the transgender community is part of a “concerning trend of discriminatory practices in states across the country, aiming to roll back hard-won protections,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a July 14 press release.
The law, authored by Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), requires the California attorney general to post and update a list of states that have been targeted under the ban.
Brittani Daniels, vice president of public affairs for the College Republicans, told The Epoch Times that as a former track-and-field athlete, she is “appalled at the unfairness” of letting biological males compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
“It is insane to me that we’re acting like there’s really a debate whether or not boys and girls [should] compete in the same sports [teams],” she said.
Just as athletes compete in national championships, the Chem-E-Car competition is important to chemical engineering students.
“It’s national,” she said. “This is a big deal … and they’re missing out on the opportunity because Governor Newsom wants to let boys play with girls.”
The Cal Poly Pomona team stands a good chance of winning the competition, according to Ms. Daniels, who added the event can open up job opportunities for students after graduation.
“They can’t even go, and they’re brilliant,” she said. “It’s extremely disappointing that students—especially students of color [and] women students—[who] put so much time and energy into being chemical engineering students are not going to have the opportunity to showcase their talents and all their hard work because of a travel ban based on not allowing biological males to compete with women in sports.”
In the competition, students must build a miniature vehicle that starts and stops as a result of a chemical reaction. Each team is given a specific distance that their car must travel, with the goal of achieving as close a distance as possible to the prescribed target.
At the regionals this year, the goal was a distance of 18 meters, and the Pomona team came within 10 centimeters of the target, claiming first place by a wide margin.
The University of California (UC)—San Diego came in second, missing the target by 1.1 meters, and UC Berkeley came in third at 1.75 meters.
Students pass through Sather Gate of the college campus at the University of California–Berkeley, in a file photo. (David A. Litman/Shutterstock)
Mr. Donahue said College Republicans are “incredibly disappointed” and blamed the travel ban for “stifling student growth.”
“Governor Newsom is preventing Cal Poly engineers, a team comprised mostly of women of color, from competing in a prestigious student competition—at the biggest chemical engineering conference in the world—because Florida doesn’t allow men to compete in women’s sports. This is absurd,” Mr. Donahue said in a July 21 press release.
The College Republicans have started a campaign to raise the funds within the next couple of weeks to send the student engineers, Mr. Donahue said.
“If Governor Newsom doesn’t want to sponsor women of color in STEM, the College Republicans will because this isn’t about political orientation. It’s about doing right by students when radical progressive policy restricts their ability to flourish academically,” he said.
My new American Hero.Sonja Shaw, President of Chino Valley Board of Education
Views: 22
Affirmative action Ass is shown the door. California Has No Right to Stop Parental Notification on Transgenderism. We did a article on this last week, but I missed this tweet.
OMFG! Chino Valley Unified board President Sonia Shaw just kicked Tony Thurmond, California State Superintendent of Schools, out of their board meeting.
CVUSD is trying to pass a controversial policy to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender.
My new American hero school board President Sonja Shaw told Breitbart News on Sunday that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the State of California were trying to intimidate parents across the state on transgender policy.
Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) sent the board a letter in which he said: “In addition to infringing upon student privacy, forced “outing” of students to their parents is very likely to result in significant emotional, mental, and even physical harm and subject students to discriminatory harassment.” And Shaw’s response.
“They go into ed[ucational] codes and things like that, which are laws, but then there’s that area where it’s ‘guidelines’ … and guidelines, we both know, are not laws. We keep showing them, and telling them, ‘Show us the law that we’re breaking?’ … They can’t do that. That’s why they’re upset.” The state had sent Thurmond to the school board meeting to intimidate the board and the parents — and to send a broader message, Shaw said.
Flag of hate. (Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Views: 50
Researchers horrified, decry rise of ‘fascism’ as students send mocking responses to woke survey.
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushbackindicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an articlefor the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields.
The team claimed 50 of 349 responses to their questionnaire on the topic contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.” Labeling them “malicious respondents,” they adapted their project to examine how the joke responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”
The result was the paper titled, “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences.”
(Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)
The paper broke the responses down into themes like demographics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, “anti-trans, anti-queer,” racism, antisemitism and “online hate subculture references.” Several answers contained profanity and other offensive and obscene language and many referenced memes.
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.” In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender. Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
Other responses to questions about identity rejected the researchers’ project entirely, with answers such as “My skin color is not important,” “Come on man, these questions are stupid. Everyone is a grab bag of genetics from all over the world,” and “What else do you want to know? What I ate for breakfast. [T]his question is unnecessary.”
“Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture,” the researchers further claimed.
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.
A protester voices support for the promotion of transgender ideology in schools during a pro-transgender march in October 2022.(Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
The scholars concluded the “malicious responses” indicate that fascism has become a common ideology in engineering and computer science academia. They suggested the counter responseshouldbe“social justice STEM education” that includes “perspectives on online hate radicalization and center anti-colonial, intersectional solidarity organizing as its opposition.”
The researchers appeared surprised that their own findings had been “ultimately rejected” by many academic journals, leaving them with the impression that their research decrying so-called fascism in academia is viewed by some as “irrelevant to engineering education, if not alarmist.”
They claimed their research methods used “antifascist and trans/queer methodologies to transform the raw data” and “make effective interventions and transformations to our programs and institutions.” They described “Anti-fascism” in particular as a framework that connects “contemporary fascist movements to the foundation of the U.S. as a racial project,” noting elsewhere that “White supremacy” remains ubiquitous in the U.S.
Saying the solution for the rise of fascism is to change education itself, the team wrote, “The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation.'”
It was suggested the plight of transgender citizens be used as a teachable example of “experiences with power and oppression — and that categories such as race, gender, and sexuality have roots in European colonial logics shared by fascist movements.”
Engineering in particular, they argued, is a critical field to teach their far-left ideology because such graduates “frequently work in fields such as fossil fuels, defense, construction, and technology upon graduation, and could be taught about these field’s relationships with national and global racial capitalism and ongoing apartheid in Palestine, as an example.”
Alexander Hall is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Alexander.hall@fox.com.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Views: 16
Glenn Youngkin Education Guidance Puts Parents Back in Control.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has directed public schools to help parents shield their children from transgender advocacy.
The new guidelines require all state-funded schools to abide by the names and pronouns listed on students’ official birth records unless parents submit a written request asking otherwise, according to a report by msn.com.
Additionally, schools are mandated to ensure that students participate in the athletic program and use facilities — such as restrooms and locker rooms — that correspond with their biological sex.
Parents are reportedly allowed to “opt-out” if they want their child to have access to a separate facility, such as a single-user restroom.
Notably, the guidelines also prohibit schools from hiding information about students from their parents. For example, schools are now forbidden from allowing teachers to conceal a student’s gender confusion from their parents.
“All children in Virginia deserve to have a parent engaged in their life and to be treated with dignity and respect,” Gov. Youngkin said in a statement.
“The [Virginia Department of Education’s] updated model policies reaffirm my administration’s continued commitment to ensure that every parent is involved in conversations regarding their child’s education, upbringing, and care,” the governor added.
Some school districts in Virginia, however, are threatening not to follow the law.
Richmond and Alexandria, for example, have reportedly vowed not to adhere to the guidance, maintaining that they will “continue the previously adopted policy and practice respecting individual rights and protecting students from discrimination due to gender expression, gender identity, sexual harassment, and transgender status.”
Last year, Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said they expect school districts to comply.
“It’s the law, and so I don’t really have a lot of patience for folks that see a law and don’t comply with it,” Youngkin affirmed in September.
“Protecting parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions for their children is in the Virginia code, and I fully expect that each one of the school divisions should comply,” the governor added.
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
Views: 21
The Great Correction, between choosing a trade or higher education, is in motion.
CINCINNATI, Ohio —It is just days before Kayla Hill is graduating from one of the four sprawling facilities that make up the Great Oaks Career Campuses — and the Pendleton neighborhood native has a broad smile on her face as she puts the finishing touches on the pitch of a roof which she is working on in her carpentry class.
The day after graduation, the 17-year-old said she already had a well-paying job waiting for her at Johnson Construction Company. “I was always drawn to carpentry watching my dad fix things around the house, so I followed him around and started asking him questions all of the time,” she said, adding, “When I found out I could go to school for this and get a job if I applied myself, I was so happy to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.”
Several classrooms away, sparks are flying as both Emma Ashcraft and Brianna Anderson, wearing their welding helmets, put the final touches on the individual projects they have been working on for their final in their welding class. Both are seniors and both took up welding in their pursuit of very different careers.
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
Anderson is set on working with her hands. “I am lined up with a pipe fitting job, and with that career choice I will travel the United States, and to be honest, I cannot wait to get my life started,” she said.
Ashcraft said she has known since she was in middle school what she wanted to do. Still, it was when she saw what Anderson was doing, making airplane parts, that she said she knew learning how to weld would only enhance her goals.
“I have been interested in aerospace engineering since seventh grade, when I came here and saw that Brianna was welding airplane parts and helicopter parts, I wanted to learn that skill so I could be the one who designed those things,” she said.
Anderson is heading off to the University of Cincinnati this fall for aerospace engineering. She said the experiences here will give her an edge in application: “I came in here not knowing anything about welding, and now I was able to build a whole model of a helicopter.”
Hill, Ashcraft, and Anderson were just three of the scores of students I met here at the Diamond branch of the Great Oaks Career Campuses that provides hands-on, practical learning for high school students beginning in 10th grade. More than 36 public school districts feed into the four campuses located in Hamilton and Warren counties, with students having over 30 career options that range from graphic arts to surgical technician to advanced manufacturing.
Brianna Anderson (left) and Emma Ashcraft are taking their welding skills in different directions; one is seeking a degree in aerospace engineering the other is off to be a pipefitter.
(Salena Zito)
If you want to be a plumber, auto mechanic, carpenter, hairdresser, or welder, this school will help you reach that goal. In fact, students who attend Great Oaks will earn professional credentials by the time they graduate from high school, with many of them walking into fields that start in the six figures.
Eight years ago, everyone from guidance counselors to parents was pushing students into higher education choices and neglecting to at least give them the option to look at a trade school or a community college, often because there was a stigma attached to vocational trades.
Our culture did a pretty good job of reflecting dismissiveness and misconceptions about the trades — offering few role models or success stories as examples of achieving the American dream by using one’s hands for a living.
One of the few people who have elevated the working man and woman in the past 20 years has been Mike Rowe, whose Dirty Jobs TV show began when his mother called him and suggested it’d be great if his 90-year-old grandfather would see him actually “doing something on television that actually looked like work.”
At the time, he was working as a reporter for a television show in San Francisco.
Rowe said the next day, he was in a sewer doing a report shoulder to shoulder with a sewer inspector. The concept of showcasing the everyman who makes our lives better had never been done before and, to everyone’s surprise, including Rowe’s, it became wildly successful.
Why? In part because there were a significant number of people watching at home who saw themselves or their parents in the segments. Remember, only 34% of Americans have a college degree.
For the past 50 years, college and university attendance has been held up as the only path to success by educators and parents alike, especially parents who attended college, so much so that the trade classes were rarely mentioned to students as a post-high school option.
That resistance to giving children an option in vocational education in the 1980s and ’90s came home to roost in the past decades when the inevitable, steep decline of available skilled workers and tradespeople hit home.
But there has been a cultural shift in the past few years that is turning that resistance to trade schools on its head. At least part of that has to do with the out-of-control costs of attending a university and the debt that follows you decades after graduation, but it also has to do with how political college campuses have become.
A new poll from Gallup has found that confidence in higher education has plunged in the past eight years. Enrollments have dropped at the same time that tuition has risen and universities have become stridently politicized in the classrooms.
The June survey showed a mere 36% of Americans have either “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in higher education, which is down from 57% just eight years ago.
Conversely, while nearly every sector of higher education has been hit with enrollment declines, trade school programs are booming, research from the National Student Clearinghouse found.
Construction, culinary, mechanic trade programs, and surgical technician programs all experienced increases in enrollment between spring 2021 and 2022, the study showed, with construction trade programs experiencing the largest enrollment increase at a whopping 19.3 percentage points year over year.
There were also significant increases in mechanic programs and culinary ones, to name just a few.
The ignorance of the education system for decades has been that trade jobs lack relevance in society. However, it seems as though it’s pretty relevant to a homeowner to be able to call a plumber if a toilet is clogged, or if a business is experiencing a backup septic system, or a church basement is flooded.
No trade schools means no plumbers, no plumbers means no ability to fix the complicated systems that keep our homes and businesses functioning. The same goes with an HVAC technician: Who exactly did these decision-makers think would keep your furnace operating in the winter and air conditioning humming in the summer?
Unlikely it was someone with a degree in French literature or women’s studies.
Hill said she is very happy with her choice, “I get to walk out of high school with a skill and start my career. I don’t think enough high students know that is an option and that is a shame.”
Moms for Liberty are home grown American Patriots that scare leftists. Beside doing great Casseroles, ( unlike someone who mixes Ragu with can spaghetti or doesn’t know what Orzo Salad is. ) these gals know how to win elections.
Last year they entered 500 school board races and won over half of them. This year they won almost a third of the races in Wisconsin. Now at times some say some stupid things, but hopefully they learned.
They ran into a situation where in 2022 Facebook shut down 22 of their websites. Based on lies from the NEA. But they contacted Facebook and the next day were back.
Since starting in Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty has set up a national network, today claiming 285 chapters in 45 states.
What do you call an organization made up of 3 million government employees that can’t find even 3 parents per state to agree with their radical agenda?
Indeed, as chronicled in a new report from Education Week, the NEA, which is the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has just wrapped up its annual assembly – and the group’s trajectory is as bleak as it is extreme.
Those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.(iStock)
As EdWeek reports, the NEA lost 115,000 members between 2017 and 2022 and projects losing an additional 24,000 teachers as part of its latest budget (in addition to thousands of other “education support professionals”).
But the truly revealing story is the catastrophic lack of support for the NEA’s radical agenda outside of those financially profiting from its taxpayer shakedowns. In particular, parents have apparently so thoroughly rebuffed the NEA’s extremism that EdWeek reports:
“Another category of membership never fully materialized: In 2019, the NEA opened up a ‘community ally’ category for non-educators, who could be parents or other supporters of its work. The union had expected to enroll 6,300 community allies by this fiscal year – but instead, the number is closer to 150” (emphasis added).
It’s perhaps little wonder that parents would have little stomach for a group explicitly dedicated to promoting critical race theory (CRT), race-based reparations and radical gender ideology – all while it tries to brand parent groups like Moms for Liberty as “threatening” to public schools.
At the same time, even when it comes to its existing base of government employees, the NEA is in panic mode after Govs. Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation blocking the unions from automatically siphoning money out of teachers’ paychecks to pay membership dues this year. “Eliminating payroll-deduction services will have a ‘devastating and immediate’ impact on membership, NEA President Becky Pringle warned delegates,” EdWeek reports.
In short, the union recognizes that if their members begin feeling the impact of the NEA’s hand in their pocket, the group’s membership rolls may truly begin to spiral downward.
Until then, however, the organization – which has already called for the re-election of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, budgeted over $50 million for political campaigning and lobbying, and is now planning to shovel over $1 million to boost support among its anemic “community ally” (parent) program – will continue to flex its muscle over U.S. elections and the education of millions of American children.
But thanks to grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty and the leadership of governors in Florida, Arkansas and elsewhere, the voices of parents are poised to reverberate far more loudly in the halls of government and the sphere of education than those who demanded endless shutdowns, masks and federal spending during COVID-19.
Indeed, it is clear that for the first time in decades, the public school establishment is on the defensive – with universal school choice sweeping the nation in 2022 and 2023 over the howls of protest from union activists dedicated to keeping students trapped in underperforming government-run schools.
Now, it is imperative that political leaders and champions of parents’ rights continue to press forward, promoting not only school choice, but companion legislation such as full online academic transparency to disclose the course content being pushed on public school students.
Of course, victories for students will not all come overnight, and the list of union absurdities will continue to grow, as the NEA and its allies increasingly twist and abuse the English language to redefine words and concepts to suit their purposes. But if the latest NEA assembly – which, for instance, calls for renaming “right to work” states as “anti-worker” states in all union communications – is any indication of their desperation or their tenuous grasp of truth, then those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.
The NEA’s “community ally” brigade on the other hand, perhaps not so much.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.