More on that outrageous educational malpractice in North Carolina.
[Update a few minutes later]
The teacher has been suspended, with pay. She should be canned. I’ll bet this isn’t a first offense, just the first time she got Youtubed.
Category Archives: Education
Winning Wars
Can we do it any more?
Not when the leadership of one of the major parties sees US weakness in the world as a feature rather than a bug.
The Unteachables
What our “self-esteem” movement and the public schools have wrought. It’s been over thirty years since that commission on education issued the report that said that if a foreign power had imposed this educational system on us, we would rightly consider it an act of war. It’s true today more than ever.
Spending Other Peoples’ Money
This is the kind of stupidity that occurs:
It didn’t make sense to buy the same size routers for a 1,800-student high school and a 100-student elementary school, according to administrators in the Department of Education’s technology division. The state is distributing 471 of the high-priced routers to schools.
“The WVDE asked if the size of the routers could vary based on the needs of a school,” said Liza Cordeiro, spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “At that time, it is our understanding that, for consistency and future expansion, the plan was to buy all the same size.”
Gianato said putting the same size router in every school was about “equal opportunity.”
“We wanted to make sure a student in McDowell County had the same opportunities as a student in Kanawha County or anywhere else,” he said. “A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students.”
Technologically illiterate idiocy.
Diversity Training
It doesn’t extinguish prejudice — it promotes it.
Students Don’t Need Cheaper Loans
They need better educations.
The Death Of The Hockey Stick?
I have a report on the latest FOIA results, over at PJMedia. And yes, I know it’s dioxide, not monoxide. I’m trying to get it fixed.
[Update a few minutes later]
Trenberth’s heat remains missing.
Free Internships
Are they moral?
Actually, what I think is immoral is some third party (e.g., the government) telling someone what they are allowed to earn in a freely negotiated contract (that is, the minimum wage is immoral, and empirically destructive of the lives of minorities, as Sowell has documented). It seems a little strange that you can pay someone nothing, but you can’t pay them four bucks an hour, even if they’re a teenager who needs some spending money and is willing to take that wage.
Speaking Truth To The Academic Mob
Naomi Schaefer Riley defends herself in the WSJ:
Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren’t even available. Which didn’t seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.
At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an “invitation to debate.” But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle’s editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: “We’ve heard you,” she tells my critics. “And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles.”
When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were “reviewing” the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well.
In a sane world, banks would put a high premium on a loan to get a degree in anything “studies.”
For those who haven’t been following this, Nick Gillespie has the whole story.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Ron Radosh.
Law School Malpractice
More thoughts on why many lawyers don’t understand the Constitution, from Jen Rubin:
…law schools have given way to the notion that the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. In a sense this is true insofar as the principle of judicial review has been concretized and the other branches assent to the courts’ decisions. But the idea that the Constitution has objective meaning that can be ascertained, in part by studying works like “The Federalist,” is still resisted by the vast majority of elite law school faculty. Even weirder from faculty members’ vantage point is the idea that you can thereby assess whether the Supreme Court got a case “right” or “wrong.” That sort of assessment, using the Constitution, its text and its meaning as the touchstone for judicial interpretation is not in fashion, and hasn’t been for decades now, at elite law schools. Students study precedent and view newer decisions as either departures from or natural consequences of earlier cases. But assess that a decision, and maybe a great number before that, are just plain wrong because they misunderstood an aspect of the Framers’ intent or the structure of the Constitution? Perish the thought.
This is why so many “progressive” lawyers (including Barack Obama) have made such fools of themselves in front of a Supreme Court that actually does understand, and care about it, and why so many legal analysts in the media have been so shocked that the court actually takes constitutional arguments seriously.