Just when you thought the American education system couldn’t get more lunatic, they surprise you.
First, at the college level.
Hundreds of professors at the University of North Carolina signed a public letter Tuesday opposing legislation that would require university students to take courses on America’s government and founding documents. The 673 UNC Chapel Hill professors revealed the public letter Tuesday, arguing the new courses and another bill in the North Carolina House of Representatives would constitute an infringement on the university’s “academic freedom.”
Really? Infringe your academic freedom? But wait, there’s more.
The first piece of legislation, House Bill 96, would require students to take a 3 credit-hour course covering America’s founding and history. Required reading for the course would include the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, at least five essays from the Federalist Papers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Gettysburg Address. The 673 professors decry both bills as an attack on “expertise,” arguing the American government courses constitute little more than indoctrination. “Our leaders continue to disregard campus autonomy, attack the expertise and independence of world-class faculty, and seek to force students’ educations into pre-approved ideological containers,” the letter reads. “We must protect the principles of academic freedom and shared governance which have long made UNC a leader in public education.”
This would be laughable if it wasn’t reality. “Ideological containers?” What the heck has college become these days but one big expensive four-year indoctrination into critical race theory, pop Marxism, and gender studies? Clearly, these super expert world-class faculty don’t know what publicly funded university means. So Professor Smartypants, it means that the people who pay your clearly inflated salaries have a say in what they want their children to learn. The sad part is, that even if this law passes, some gender-fluid professor will simply rail on the structural racism of the Constitution and wax endlessly on how America is just a misogynist, racist, homophobic land filled with meanie poopoo heads. But kudos to the legislature for at least trying to slow down the inexorable decline of American state-funded universities into Marxist pits of gender studies majors that can’t understand why they aren’t employable and end up as baristas.
But the rot is sinking further into the public schools with this little gem.
The debate over grading has swept institutions in recent years as schools adopt new policies that in some cases have given students more opportunities to make up or avoid poor grades. It is important for schools to get scoring right, teachers argued, because in many ways grades are the stepping stone to students’ futures.
This really means that teachers just want to keep the kids moving through the production line whether they are ready or not. This has become an issue even here in my home county, long considered one of the best school systems in the country before woke madness started deteriorating everything. Now even some teachers are alarmed at what’s going on.
In the wake of the pandemic, Welch told Mathews how one of his students wrote on a scholarship application that because of a policy prohibiting teachers from lowering grades after the first semester, he stopped working the rest of his sophomore year. The student also said he lost interest in schoolwork his junior year when he was told that he could turn in work late and that no assignment would be graded less than 50 percent. Welch wrote that while most people pushing for grade reforms are well-meaning, implementing measures that may help the approximately 20 percent of low-performing students who would fail without them across the board could be “dangerous.”
Instead of standardized test scores as the key measure of high school quality, Welch laments that administrators have found “creative ways to help students meet the standards — re-take tests, accept late work, don’t count attendance or participation in class toward a grade, don’t put zeros in the grade book for missing work, … do a one-month online course in the spring or summer that can be substituted for a year-long class and thus allow a student to pass a required course.”
When teachers actually write Fox News with their concerns, you know it’s bad.
Fortunately, some parents are starting to pay attention, and the rapid deterioration of American students’ literacy, math, and science scores has reached such a low point that it’s news. Will it change anything? Who knows.
Schools still seem more fixated on gender issues, drag queen story hours and books, and making sure students know their pronouns. (of course, if they are functionally illiterate will they be able to spell their pronouns?)
As this academic year comes to a close, I would expect a lot of parents to have some serious discussions about little Johnny and Sally’s education next year. The lost learning of the pandemic is coming home to roost and the ultimate loser may be a tone-deaf public education system.
Failing school systems and teachers who don’t teach plus demonrat gov’t equals FAILURE.