Last December, Karyn Lewis and Megan Kuhfeld, two researchers at NWEA, a research organization, reported that student achievement at the start of the current school year was lower than for a typical year. There was a 3–7 percentage point decline in reading and a 9–11 percentage point decline in mathematics. That same month, education researchers Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington, Thomas J. Kane of Harvard, and Andrew McEachin of NWEA plugged the Lewis/Kuhfeld data into a model to estimate how much those declines in learning would cause their lifetime income to decline. Their answer: $43,800. This number was broadly consistent with a separate study by McKinsey & Company that found an average lifetime earnings loss of between $49,000–$61,000 per student. Aggregated across all US K-12 students, these studies show more than $2 trillion in lost lifetime earnings for our youngest generation.

A recent report released by the World Bank paints a more dire picture. In that report, it estimates that the school closures could cause a loss of between 0.3 and 1.1 years of schooling, adjusted for quality. In its most pessimistic scenario, the World Bank estimates that worldwide cumulative losses could total between $16 and $20 trillion in present value terms.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study released in November 2021 analyzed recent test score data across 12 states in comparison to previous years and found passing rates declined by 14.2 percentage points on average in mathematics and 6.3 percentage points in English Language Arts. The authors found that much of the decline was due to the closing down of schools.

Historical evidence suggests that these learning losses are likely to be permanent. A 2019 article published in the Journal of Labor Economics analyzed the effect of teacher strikes in Argentina on students’ long-term outcomes in that country. The authors found that experiencing the average number of days of strikes during primary school reduced labor earnings of males and females by 3.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively.

In another study, researchers from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics analyzed long-term outcomes from one of the most extreme examples of learning disruptions – war. In that study, the authors compared Austrians and Germans who were 10 years old during World War II with their counterparts in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden. The authors found that earning losses persisted into the 1980s. They estimated the earning losses to be about 0.8 percent of GDP.

Once these earning losses take hold, they lead to lower life expectancies. This connection was highlighted most prominently in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that analyzed data on school shutdowns early in the pandemic. The authors found that missed instruction in the United States could be associated with an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost.

What makes these outcomes even more tragic is that they were experienced by children who, as was known early on, never had a significant risk of dying from COVID-19. As of the first week of March 2022, out of the nearly 950,000 Covid-19 deaths, only 865 were children under the age of 18. That amounts to about 433 children annually. This is comparable to a bad flu season in the US. For example, the CDC estimates that the actual number of flu deaths for children in the 2017-18 flu season was about 600.

Moreover, the school closings and lockdowns have led to a noticeable loss in children’s mental health. This was apparent early in the pandemic. In a CDC report released in November 2020, researchers reported that the proportion of mental health-related visits from April to October 2020 for children aged 5-11 and 12-17 years had increased by approximately 24 percent and 31 percent, respectively in comparison to 2019 data. In a follow-up CDC report, researchers found that emergency department visits due to suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher among girls aged 12-17 years during early 2021 in comparison to the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt emergency department visits increased 4 percent.

In 2021, FAIR Health released a report that analyzed data from over 32 billion private health care claim records tracking data from 2019 and 2020. Claims for intentional self-harm as a percentage of all medical claims in the 13-18 age group were 90.7 percent higher early in the pandemic in 2020 than in the same time period in 2019. Furthermore, the authors noted, claims for generalized anxiety disorder increased by 93.6 percent over that same time.

Not much can be done about this now, other than to end the remaining restrictions on children. But there is a lesson for future pandemics: follow the science. If the data say that young people are at very low risk, then treat them as if they are at very low risk. Maybe we’re all in this together, as the propaganda goes, but we are not equally in this together. Treating children the way government officials did was morally wrong.

David R. Henderson

Ryan Sullivan

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

The post The Kids Aren’t Alright appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The same concept works with ideas. Yet, people tend to have a different reaction to loud voices, regardless of how fringe the idea. If it’s loud and repeated often enough, your average individual will grant it a degree of merit. The idea of acceptance upon repetition is stupid, but it’s the reality of how terrible ideas spread.

For a much more in depth understanding of how terrible ideas spread into acceptance, I would recommend a book called The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad.

It’s how we’ve arrived at the idea of Critical Race Theory, or state sanctioned racism being taught in public schools. Students are taught that the idea of meritocracy is a characteristic of white supremacy, and schools work to lower the bar in the name of equity, to celebrate mediocrity over achievements. 

This has been the work of loud voices being mistaken as popular or rational. The squeaky wheel has gotten the grease. As radical Left and Communist ideology achieve benchmark after benchmark, the wheel keeps squeaking towards the next ideological goal. 

The squeaky wheel gets the grease is an idiom people tell their children, that ironically conflicts with the children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. 

But outside of the world of storybooks and idioms, at some point we must ground ourselves in reality. A wheel that won’t stop squeaking needs to be replaced. Otherwise, your own well-being and that of your family’s is at risk.

Resident of the Pacific Northwest, Christopher Rufo, has been a leading voice of reason to replace that wheel.

Much of his work against state sanctioned racism has resulted in legislation at state levels to ban racism from being taught in public schools.

So far Idaho has signed such legislation into law, while bills in Oklahoma and Arkansas are awaiting their Governors to sign into law, while a number of other states have passed the house and are awaiting on a Senate vote, or are in the process of amending.

Some people actively go along with terrible ideas because they believe them to be popular. Other people quietly tolerate ideas out of fear of being called names and eventually submit into acceptance.

Others stop living at the demands made by their own bane and peril, roll up their sleeves, pump up the car jack, and replace that wheel. 

It may be thankless work now, but you’ll thank yourself later.

The post The Squeaky Wheel Needs To Be Replaced appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

My brother was a bit of a jock, playing several sports, but especially excelling at wrestling. (Real wrestling, not that rasslin’ business you see on the television.) My sister was involved in cheerleading, which is at least kind of a sport. Depending on who you ask.

In any event, I was constantly jealous of them both. They were pretty and popular; I was nerdy and a bit standoff-ish. (Surprise, I know!)

My mother supported her kids’ sporting efforts. My father was more of a skeptic who thought that sports were useless. Torn between those two worlds and not blessed with much athletic talent to begin with, I generally participated in sporting activities against my will. My youthful sports adventures were mostly limited to two years of “minor league” (coach pitch) baseball and various gym class indignities.

I allegedly hit one home run in two years of organized baseball; my recollection of it was more like a single with three subsequent errors. (They didn’t really give out errors at that level.) Compounding the problem was that I was taught to bat right-handed even though I threw left-handed, and no one picked up on this obvious discrepancy.

After my parents’ divorce as an early teen, I grew more interested in sports, especially baseball. I even started crushing it in wiffleball and softball after someone thought to turn me around to bat left-handed. But I was too far behind to really catch up with my peers who had been playing baseball full-time for their entire lives.

So I overcompensated by watching buttloads of sports on television. The 1985 World Series was the first one I really paid attention to. I was thirteen. I have never fully recovered from the infamous bad call at first base in Game Six and the subsequent John Tudor/Joaquin Andujar/Whitey Herzog collective meltdown in Game Seven.

The football team of my youth was the St. Louis Cardinals. The football Cardinals. Also known as The Deadbirds. The Big Pink. Or, perhaps most colorfully, The Retardinals. I fondly recall Stump Mitchell, Roy Green, J.T. Smith, Jay Novacek, and Vai Sikahema prowling the rock hard turf of Busch Stadium II while Neil Lomax ducked and covered. Those teams were just good enough to be competitive while also being bad enough to break your heart. Then of course, they broke everyone’s hearts one final time by splitting town due to complaints about a twenty-one year old stadium. (Take notes on that stadium thing; you’ll be seeing it again in a few paragraphs.)

I didn’t pay much attention to hockey. It was an afterthought. I was well into middle age before I truly appreciated hockey and understood such things as the offside rule or a good penalty kill. Oh by the way, LGB!

Naturally on this side of Missouri, the biggest sports thing has always been the St. Louis Cardinals, perennial contenders. Everybody loves a winner. I rooted for them when I became interested in sports, but soon found them rather boring. Not because those teams were boring per se, because they definitely were not. Whiteyball, focused on speed, defense, and pitching, was the antithesis of boring. What bored me was that everyone around me was cheering for them, and that just didn’t work for me. I discovered that I liked to be different and I liked to root for underdogs.

So I instead adopted the Chicago White Sox as my main team for a number of years. The logic: Chicago wasn’t that far away, the team kind of sucked, the American League was weird and different, and the Sox needed fans since they were constantly overshadowed by the crosstown Cubs. (Plus, the mid-80’s White Sox had the absolute coolest uniforms. By 80’s standards, anyway.)

I kept rooting for the football Cardinals for a number of years even after they stopped sucking in St. Louis and started sucking instead in Phoenix. Like the White Sox, I felt sorry for them. Plus at that time in my life I was fascinated by Arizona and thought at some point I’d follow them out there. When the Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995, I switched my allegiance to them. In a cruel twist of fate, they would also split town years later due to (alleged) complaints about a twenty-one year old stadium. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t really about the stadium.)

In between, I also learned to appreciate college basketball, college football, college baseball (the local teams anyway), and just about every sport besides maybe soccer and golf. And I’m even willing to give soccer a try once the new MLS team starts playing in St. Louis.

Yet, a large part of me remains skeptical about sports and their place in American life. We don’t just enjoy sports; we are obsessed with them. Pro sports bring in at least 100 billion dollars each year; college sports also bring in a big haul, though their profit/loss figures are murkier.

But it’s not just the money. It’s the prestige. Athletes, even mediocre ones, are placed on a pedestal in America. Go to any high school or college campus and you will find that the top of the social food chain is occupied by the jocks. Newspapers devote far more column inches covering high school and college sports than they do covering high school and college academics. Eat dinner at any red-blooded American family table and the conversation will be about the sporting exploits of the various kids. (Ask me how I know.)

It’s entirely possible to play sports at a high school, go to college for four years and play sports, then come back to your high school and coach there until the day you die. Some folks never spend more than four years of their lives outside of the high school they attended, and it’s just weird.

Also, there’s a better than average chance that the person teaching your children about history and government was actually hired mostly for his or her coaching ability. There’s an old joke that used to go around in my circles (that maybe I should’ve paid more attention to:)

Q: What is the most common first name of people who teach Social Studies?

A: Coach!

In the argument of college sports versus pro sports, they are both corrupt in their own way.

Pro sports, by definition, are mercenary. Players play for the highest bidders, and owners play in the cities that will make them the most profit or give them more money for a stadium. In fact, the public funding of stadiums is the biggest beef against professional sports.

College sports are considered more “pure.” After all, those teams can’t move. They’re stuck in whatever podunk town their college is in ad infinitum. Their players aren’t paid. Technically.

But are they really pure? The players are often “students” at the college in much the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire was “Holy,” “Roman,” and an “Empire.”

It’s an open secret that many big time athletes don’t go to class, or they receive significant assistance or leniency when they do. And though they’re not (usually) paid in the traditional (or legal) sense, many are on scholarship for their athletic abilities. “Athletic scholarship” is a contradiction in terms and always has been. We’ve simply stopped seeing the irony in it. Because, you know, go team.

Even if you disregard the free college degree, which is certainly worth something, there are many other examples of star college players receiving all kinds of other benefits. (Not even counting the groupies.) My own alma mater, while I was in school there, had a basketball player who allegedly couldn’t speak a lick of English, but got by because his brother was a famous NBA player. Bonus: our guy wasn’t even a good player.

There is some talk of actually paying college athletes above the table. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Then there’s this whole thing where college basketball or football coaches are the highest paid public employees in forty fucking states.

What I do know is that other countries are absolutely eating our lunch when it comes to education. China, for example, doesn’t much care about basketball, football, baseball, or hockey, but their kids can sure enough get a good education. In the economic war, the ability to throw a touchdown pass may not hold a candle to the ability to code. And while our big studly athletes may make for excellent foot soldiers in a shooting war, future wars are likely to be fought largely in the air and online as opposed to on the ground.

In any case, our obsession with sports is entertaining in the short run but potentially devastating in the long run. I’m not straight up saying that our focus on sports is the only reason our academics suck, because after all, it’s not a zero sum game. But there seems to be a definite relationship between those two things. It’s a cultural thing. Our priorities as a people are whacked.

Where, then, is the ideal place for sports in our future?

Pro sports would remain more or less the same, but without the ridiculous public money that goes into funding many of their palaces.

Ideally, every high school and college team would be a club team. Athletes would be real students who receive no benefit for playing, and their teams would raise their own operational funds. It would be generally recognized that sports are a distant second place priority to academics.

Render unto Education the things that are Education’s, and unto Sports the things that are Sports’.

So in other words: fat chance.

The post America’s Sports Obsession: Losing the Long Game appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

It sounds like a ridiculous anecdote, but it is a simplified representation of the current primary and secondary educational system. As a recent high school graduate, I have seen firsthand so many flaws in the education system. From my experience, as well as research, I have identified three important factors that currently negatively contribute to the education of millions of students around the country. Some of these flaws are found not only in K-12 schools, but also in colleges as well.

COVID-19 Fear Mongering

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing well into the spring of 2021, some teacher unions have lobbied to stay on an asynchronous learning basis, with schools still remaining closed and the education of the children still being jeopardized for no currently scientific-based reasons. One example of such nonsense comes in the form of a video from the Chicago Teacher’s Union, which went live on Facebook on January 23 and depicts many of the teachers dancing while a narrator and captions convey the importance of staying safe during the pandemic. While the relation of dancing and safety is unclear, what is evident is the many falsehoods that are indirectly propagated by the video. These need to be analyzed to see whether a case can be made that it is too early to go back to in-person learning.

To debunk such a ridiculous video, it is important to first look at the number of cases and deaths by age group to determine the validity of any possible claims the union might make. First, deaths have been on the decline—even on the day that the video was originally published—and future projections as of the writing of this article show a similar trend. What if the students get each other infected and spread the coronavirus even more? Good question, yet statistically the number of deaths from COVID-19, pneumonia and the flu among the sick aged 0-17 is only 978 people across the whole country.

In comparison, the average age of a teacher in the United States is 42 years old. Looking at the figures, those in the 40-49 age range, accounted for 20,148 COVID-19 related deaths. These figures are from the start of the pandemic to today. This indicates that students are more than 20 times less susceptible than their teacher counterparts and, although the student population is large, they would not be at an elevated risk of infecting each other and the teachers. With vaccines being administered in daily increasing numbers, older teachers would be at an even lower risk than everyone else. As a result, safety is not as big a concern as the unions or the media make it out to be.

While the figures are not in the favor of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, I am not arguing that there should be no masks or social distancing in place. What I am saying is that schools need to open up and allow students to have face-to-face interactions with their teachers. What are the implications of continuing online learning? According to one Gallup poll, 30 percent of parents said that their child’s mental health has worsened as a result of online schooling and restrictions that are in place. In terms of education, it has been estimated that the students are only receiving 70% of their knowledge for a typical school year, while in mathematics that figure drops to 50%. Children are simply not learning the material that they would be able to learn in person.

Speaking from experience, I spent my last semester of senior year, and now my second semester in college being stuck with online learning. Many of my lectures are asynchronous only. I have rarely been able to ask my professors for help, and I had to resort to using outside sources and spending more time than necessary just to be able to pass many of my basic general education classes. Although I have made some friends through my online interactions with other students and through clubs that I virtually attend, I have not been able to meet most of those people in person. It is time to open up the schools and get everyone back to normal and into the classroom.

Reject Alternative Schooling Options and Parental Choice

One key aspect that is ignored by many politicians is the many alternative options to public schools that could be available to students through the use of student vouchers. Parents could select where they want to place their children. The Department of Education itself admits that funding would not solve all of the problems that cause disparity in the performance of students from low-income and high-income families. One option that they themselves proposed is community schools, which allow a greater involvement of parents and the local community in the structure of the learning curriculum as well as spending. Instead of having the state or federal government make those decisions on behalf of a local community, the local ordinance should decide how to approach its wants and needs and how to resolve any issues that may arise.

Charter schools have gained a lot of ground in the past 20 years, and now more than 7,200 exist in 44 different states. The main benefit is the increase in parental choice and satisfaction ratings. Among the different types of schooling, charter schools had 13% higher satisfaction ratings than district schools. Charter school parents also indicated that they were able to have more extensive communication with their teachers by 15% more than parents in district schools. Of course, private schools scored at the top of the satisfaction ratings, as parents with more money are able to send their children to an even wider array of schools. However, since charter schools are free to the public and take a huge portion of low-income students there is more competition to get in. Instead of being stuck in a low-income area and having one’s child go to that one school, parents are able to take their children to a school of their choice that is more competitive and provides more opportunities to their students. Even under Barack Obama’s administration, millions of dollars were spent on the development of charter schools. If there was little belief in them, why would they be funded so heavily? Students would be able to attend a school that fits their learning needs and desires and a general district school is not always able to provide that.

In my high school, for instance, we had only a small fraction of the classes for humanity-related courses compared to other schools in my county. Students have asked for many years to add courses to the registration list, yet they were always denied for unclear reasons. I wanted to take Russian as my foreign language instead of French, and to have more classes that would have been more applicable to my future career goals instead of being stuck with math all of these years. I understand that it is not possible to please everyone, but I have not heard of a single class being added from student requests. What time we did have to take an interesting elective was taken up by physical education or other unimportant classes—at least in my opinion.

Force Standardized Testing On All Students

One of the bigger downsides of high school that every student knows, including myself, is studying for the SAT/ACT tests. Colleges heavily rely on this metric, claiming that it provides a standardized baseline for applicants across the country, so that the performance of each of them can be accurately measured, as opposed to a grade point average (GPA), which might vary from school to school. The main problem with the SAT (and this is coming from a person who scored in the top 2% of the percentile range) is that it only accesses two subjects—math and English. Students come from different backgrounds, have different skillsets, and, as a result, might struggle with one or both of these subjects. A more artistically inclined student might be trying to become an art major, yet he or she might not get in due to doing worse on two subjects that are almost unrelated to future prospects. Since many colleges have begun to realize the flaw in these standardized tests, almost a third of schools do not require standardized test scores for admission. Instead, they rely on other metrics, such as the GPA, Advanced Placement test scores, the quality of the admissions essay, etc..

This trend will most likely be seen in secondary level education as well. If charter schools and even district schools decide to do away with standardized testing entirely, students will be under less stress, and their performance can be measured with standard class tests created by that very institution. This will help address the problem of having teachers “teach to the test”, and allow them to have more creative control and do a much better job of educating their students. Teachers are often evaluated and promoted or fired on how students perform on this flawed metric, and in many cases, negative results may be out of the educators’ control. For the same reason, besides discontinuing the requirement of SAT and ACT tests for students to get into college, schools should also drop the various other tests, like the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) in their entirety, and having a more flexible approach in teaching students.

What Does the Future Hold?

With Joe Biden as President, it is unclear what will happen with secondary education in the United States. In his campaign, he pledged to spend more money funding low incomes areas, while improving teachers’ salaries. On his website, there is no mention of alternative schooling options, and the cycle of perpetually throwing money in hopes to solve the various flaws in the education system continues. At this point in time, not much can be done to make the mentioned changes necessary on the federal level. Yet, states have the power to design their own educational systems. Hopefully, they will realize that the current school districting system needs to be redone instead of slapping on band-aids time and time again. Charter and private schools need to be allowed to compete for students instead of having a government monopoly on education.

The post How to Destroy Your Child’s Education in 3 Easy Steps appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

Prominent Professors Push Back

This week, some prominent university professors spoke out against these new woke math education recommendations. Princeton mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman wrote a guest post on the topic at journalist Bari Weiss’s website. He says: “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”  

Klainerman, who grew up in communist Romania, warns that this current classroom dogma is dangerous. He writes: “When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.” 

Columbia University English professor John McWhorter also chimed in against this math education document and its recommendations. 

“This lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math,” he writes in a blog post. “To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.”

While the growing emphasis on critical theory in American classrooms has broader societal implications, including the devaluation of objectivity and individualism, the real victims of this educational approach are the students themselves. In one of his final articles before he died last December, economist Walter Williams decried the poor academic performance of students in large urban school districts. 

“In two city high schools,” Williams wrote of Detroit, “only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English. Yet, the schools spent a full week learning about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘Black Lives Matter activism.’”

Public School Exodus

As this “woke” worldview continues to penetrate classrooms with mandatory curriculum standards, families who don’t agree with this ideology—or who simply want their children to learn basic academics—should have the opportunity to pursue alternatives to their assigned district school. Currently, 26 states have active school choice legislation that would enable funding to follow students, including adopting education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarship programs. Meanwhile, overall support for school choice policies has grown since last spring. 

The COVID-19 school shutdowns have put parents back in charge of their children’s learning in ways that were unimaginable pre-pandemic, with many parents leaving their district schools in droves. Indeed, the Associated Press reported a sharp decline in public school enrollment this academic year across the 33 states for which data were available. Millions of families have pursued private education options such as independent schooling and homeschooling that can offer more consistent, higher-quality in-person instruction than a district’s Zoom schooling or hybrid offerings. 

As the New York Times reported on Monday, fewer than half of K-12 students are currently attending full-time, in-person schooling and families are increasingly seeking other options. 

“Now many parents are beginning to rebel, frustrated with the pace of reopening and determined to take matters into their own hands,” the Times reports. “Some are making contingency plans to relocate, home-school or retreat to private education if their children’s routines continue to be disrupted this fall — a real possibility as some local school officials and teachers’ unions argue for aggressive virus mitigation measures to continue, potentially even after educators are vaccinated.”

The amplification of “woke” ideology in classrooms is likely to accelerate the current exodus from district schools. Parents have experienced a renewed sense of responsibility over their children’s education. Now they in many cases have had a front-row seat to what their children are actually learning through Zoom school, and hopefully will feel more empowered to push back against new critical theory curriculum standards—and choose education that values individualism over collectivism.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: woodleywonderworks on Flickr

The post Woke Educators Release Letter Declaring Objective Math a Form of ‘White Supremacy’ appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

In the government’s response to COVID-19, schools have been shut down, including ours. This has created several problems with every student’s progress. We live in southern Idaho and our local school has issued packets and set up an online environment. The learning platform is called Seesaw and allows parents and teachers to interact. Lessons and learning material can be created and uploaded for students to work through.

My wife was sitting in the living room when my oldest daughter, 8, told her that she saw the ‘Illuminati triangle’ in her homework. My wife initially brushed it off, but then one of my other daughters said she saw it as well . Curious, my wife walked over to the computer and sure enough, there was the ‘all-seeing eye’. The contrast was turned down on the image, but it was clear that my oldest daughter wasn’t just seeing things.

My wife took some pictures and turned up the contrast. Once the contrast was turned up, there was no doubt. She began to post online about the homework. The teacher was contacted and promptly deleted the assignment. When she was pressed on the issue, the teacher replied that the lesson was developed by another teacher and was picked by her as a resource.  The teacher proceeded to then tell me that teachers have to create their own lessons.

This was unclear, and while the teacher stated she removed the lesson and apologized, there has been no effort to question the administrator who uploaded the lesson plan or review the rest of the work she has uploaded.

This has made me very uncomfortable. I am happy that we have worked with our kids outside of the classroom to help their awareness. I know that at this point we are going to take another route with education. Idaho has the most lenient laws in the country on homeschooling, so it should’t be a  difficult transition.

My advice to parents whose children are in the public school system is to take the extra time to work with your kids outside of school. Even though we are schooling at home during this pandemic, we must still be vigilant in being fully aware of what our children are being taught in public school curriculum.

I am still in contact with the teacher in an attempt to find out more information surrounding the curriculum, and will update this with any new developments.

The post Government Schooling At Home Still Requires Vigilance appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Indeed, the coronavirus has meant that “We’re All Homeschoolers Now.”

While millions of children—and their parents—are experiencing homeschooling for the first time this month, policymakers at the local, state, and federal level are grappling with ways to quickly adjust rules and regulations that may hamper access to content for students across the country.

Policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic should be temporary and targeted, and tied directly to the emergency itself.

One such policy reform would be to allow Americans to access their 529 savings plans for homeschooling expenses. Those 529 savings plans are tax-neutral savings accounts funded with after-tax dollars contributed by the account owner or anyone else who wishes to put money into them.

Anyone can contribute to a designated beneficiary’s 529. Interest that accrues in the fund is tax-free, as long as funds are put toward K-12 and higher education expenses. That means that there’s no “second layer” of tax on the savings and investment in the account.

Those 529 savings accounts are extremely popular, with holdings doubling to $275 billion between 2009 and 2017. Moreover, withdrawals from 529 savings accounts for education expenses are not subject to federal income tax.

Currently, 529 saving plans can pay for a broad swath of education-related costs, such as college expenses, and, more recently, private elementary or secondary school tuition in certain states.

Yet, homeschooling expenses are excluded from the eligible uses of 529 savings accounts.

In 2017, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried to incorporate such an expansion of 529s to cover homeschooling expenses into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at the same time they were expanded to include K-12 expenses.

That would have broadened access to 529 savings accounts even further. Although the amendment was stripped at the last minute from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress should immediately revisit it to help families struggling with the ramifications of COVID-19.

Families could use their 529 plans to pay for curricula, books, online classes, private tutoring (so long as the tutor does not live in the same home as the child), and other education expenses.

Making 529 savings accounts more accessible would give families easier access to their own money.

The 529s were wisely expanded at the end of 2017 to allow individuals to use their savings for more than just college expenses, enabling account holders to pay for K-12 education-related expenses.

Immediately expanding qualified expenses to include homeschooling—reflecting the fact that nearly every American family currently has to homeschool as a result of COVID-19—would be a timely and targeted policy.

More than 123,000 public and private schools across the country have had to shut their doors due to the coronavirus. More than 50 million children have been affected by these closures.

Although not every American has a 529 account, expanding the option of what families can pay for with their own savings is smart policy, as families struggle to maintain education consistency for their children.

COMMENTARY BY

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In 1899, the population of Boonville, North Carolina was under 200. It was a tiny crossroads town in the middle of farming country.

It was also the home of the Yadkin Valley Institute and School of Business, which 20 years later would become a public school.

My friend Allen, whose ancestors were among the first settlers of Boonville, loaned me a copy of the Institute’s catalogue for 1898-1899, a time machine that zoomed me off on an eye-opening ride into the past.

It’s 1898, and enrolled in this backwater school are 208 students, male and female, outnumbering the inhabitants of the town and ranging in age from 6 to 18. Most are North Carolinians, but there are three siblings from Union, Iowa, while W.L. Newton hails from New York City.

There are 10 teachers. Teachers and students use a total of 23 different texts, some of which are collections, such as “Holmes Series for Beginners.”

The older students follow three programs: college preparatory, business, or teaching. Courses for high school in the academic department – those preparing for college – include math up to trigonometry, Latin, rhetoric, elocution, the Constitutional history of the United States, and surprisingly for this time and place: psychology.

Business students study typewriting, shorthand, bookkeeping, and a subject lost to the 21st century world, telegraphy. Budding teachers prepare to teach in the public schools of North Carolina. The catalogue states, “That the work is successful and the preparation thorough is proven by the fact that during the five years of its (the Normal School) existence not a single pupil recommended to County Supervisors has failed to obtain certificate.”

The Institute also offers instruction in piano and three clubs: The Aldelphi Society, where young men polish their skills in literature, oratory, and parliamentary procedure; the Clio Society, where “the young ladies” recite verse, write essays, and sing; and the Philomathean Society, whose goals are similar to those of the Aldelphi.

Equally amazing as the inclusion of these courses of study in such a village are some of the goals of the Institute:

–  “Yadkin Valley Institute…aims to occasion the activity necessary to develop the student’s mind, to impress upon him the refinements of culture, to strengthen his body and influence his heart for the right. Character formation being the ultimate end of all instruction, we strive to educate our students morally as well as mentally.”

–  “We endeavor to create in the minds of our students a desire to be more useful.”

–  “Pupils who enter are supposed to be ladies and gentlemen of good moral character, and as such they are put upon their good behavior; it is expected that they will conduct themselves in a becoming manner.”

–  “If you are not willing to obey the rules that are for the good of the school, we do not want you.” (Though unlisted in the catalogue, the rules seem few, the system dependent on student deportment.)

–  And finally: “We do as we advertise.”

In Western society, these tenets about inculcating morality, encouraging our young to exercise their brains, developing the skills of rhetoric and elocution, and studying basics like mathematics, literature, history, and science, were long considered the building blocks of an education. The Greeks, the Romans, the teachers of the Middles Ages and the Renaissance, the schools and colleges of nineteenth century America: all paid homage to these educational goals.

And today? It seems we’ve lost that vision.

Unlike private or religious institutions, and with the exception of the service academies, our public schools and universities cannot be places where virtue is taught, primarily because we as a society can hardly agree on the meaning of the word. Most of our schools no longer recognize character formation as “being the ultimate end of all instruction.”

On the other hand, we could educate students to think objectively, yet we are failing at that task. Faulkner University law professor Adam J. MacLeod addressed this failure in a talk he gave to his students:

Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful.

Instead of stumbling forward, always seeking new pedagogical pathways like No Child Left Behind or Common Core, maybe we should look backward at the old ways and see what we might learn.

—

This post Why We Need to Take Education Back to Past Practices was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jeff Minick.

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Mass compulsory schooling has become such a cornerstone of contemporary culture that we forget it’s a relatively recent social construct. Responding to the pandemic, the United Nations declared that “the global scale and speed of current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education.”

We have collectively become so programmed to believe that education and schooling are synonymous that we can’t imagine learning without schooling and become frazzled and fearful when schools are shuttered. If nothing else, perhaps this worldwide health scare will remind us that schooling isn’t inevitable and education does not need to be confined to a conventional classroom.

Mass Schooling Is a New Idea

For most of human history, up until the mid-19th century, education was broadly defined, diversely offered, and not dominated by standard schooling. Homeschooling was the default, with parents assuming responsibility for their children’s education, but they were not the only ones teaching them.

Small dame schools, or nursery schools in a neighbor’s kitchen, were common throughout the American colonial and revolutionary eras; tutors were ubiquitous, apprenticeships were valued and sought-after, and literacy rates were extremely high. Public schools existed to supplement education for families that wanted them, but they did not yet wield significant power and influence.

The Puritan colonists’ passed the first compulsory education laws in Massachusetts Bay in the 1640s describing a state interest in an educated citizenry and compelling towns of a certain size to hire a teacher or to open a grammar school. But the compulsion rested with towns to provide educational resources to those families who wanted them, not with the families themselves.

Historians Kaestle and Vinovskis explain that the Puritans “saw these schools as supplements to education within the family, and they made no effort to require parents actually to send their children to school rather than train them at home.” This all changed in 1852 when Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory schooling statute, mandating school attendance under a legal threat of force. Writing in his book, Pillars of the Republic, Kaestle reminds us: “Society educates in many ways. The state educates through schools.”

Society Without Schooling

We already have glimpses of what education without schooling can look like. When the Chicago teachers’ strike shut down public schools for 11 days last October, civil society stepped up to fill in the gaps.

Community organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club opened their doors during the daytime to local youth, the aquarium and local museums offered special programming, church and religious organizations welcomed young people with tutoring and enrichment activities, public libraries and parks were populated with families, and the federal school lunch program continued to nourish children in need.

This same pattern repeats itself during summer school vacation each year, with various community organizations, local businesses, and public spaces such as libraries and parks offering educational and recreational experiences for young people.

The idea that children and adolescents need to be enclosed within a conventional school classroom in order to learn is a myth. Humans are hard-wired to learn. Young children are exuberant, creative, curious learners who are passionate about exploration and discovery. These qualities do not magically disappear with age. They are routinely smothered by standardized schooling.

As Boston College psychology professor and unschooling advocate, Peter Gray, writes in his book, Free To Learn:

Children come into the world burning to learn and genetically programmed with extraordinary capacities for learning. They are little learning machines. Within their first four years or so they absorb an unfathomable amount of information and skills without any instruction. . . Nature does not turn off this enormous desire and capacity to learn when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling.

As humans increasingly coexist with robots, it’s crucial that young people retain and cultivate the imagination, ingenuity, and desire for learning that separate human intelligence from its artificial antipode. These qualities can be ideally nurtured outside of a standardized, one-size-fits-all school classroom where children and adolescents are free to pursue their interests and develop important skills and knowledge, while being mentored by talented adults in their communities.

An example of this type of learning is a series of spring daytime classes for homeschoolers at a makerspace in Boston offering up to nine hours of content each week in topics ranging from architecture and design to STEM science and art, taught by trained engineers, scientists, and artists. These are the types of high-quality educators and learning experiences that can and do flourish when we seek and support education without schooling.

In addition to its health scare, coronavirus has triggered widespread fear about how children can be educated when they can’t go to school. Despite the fact that mass compulsory schooling is a relic of the industrial age, its power and influence continue to expand. Perhaps some families will now discover that education outside of standard schooling is not only nothing to fear but may actually be the best way to learn in the innovation era.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders spent a large part of the last week defending earlier statements he made regarding Fidel Castro and Cuba. While denouncing the dictatorship of Castro, he praised the social programs that were implemented under his rule, notably with regards to literacy. He pointed out that there was a rapid increase in literacy rates in Cuba after Castro took power.

What should we make of this statement? Removing American presidential politics from the conversation, is it true that literacy rates went up under Castro? The answer is a nuanced one.

First of all, it is true that literacy did increase. It stood close to 80% on the eve of the 1959 revolution. In 1970, it stood closer to 90% and by the 1990s, virtually everyone was literate. Not only that, but it is actually true that from the 1940s to the 1960s, Cuba was bucking a trend. Indeed, in 1900, 46% of Cubans older than 14 years were literate. There was a substantial increase to 76% by 1940. However, from 1940 to 1960, there was only a three point increase. This can be seen in the figure below.

This latter element is particularly important. Economists have begun to apply econometric methods to assess the causal impact of the reforms that Castro made. This is recent because of a new tool in the toolset of economists: the synthetic control method. To use this method, we assume that a country prior to a “treatment” (e.g. getting Castro as dictator) can be predicted based on a pool of similar countries (i.e. that share the same economic process).

Once the treatment starts, we simply extend the “prediction” and compare it with the actual data. The difference is the causal role of the treatment. In essence, the “prediction” serves the role of a counterfactual scenario guided by the data. Economists Hugo Jales, Thomas Kang, Guilherme Stein and Felipe Garcia Ribeiro in an article in World Economy used this method to see the effect of Castro’s ascent to power on GDP per capita. They found that Cuba was more than 30% poorer than the counterfactual. And this is probably an understatement because the Cuban GDP figures are generally looked at with a skeptical eye (as a result of the way certain categories of added value are calculated).

In an article co-authored with Jamie Bologna Pavlik, I went through the same exercise but using infant mortality instead. We found that, in the first decade of Castro’s rule, Cuba deviated from the counterfactual by a sizable margin. Only after 1970 does it start converging back to the counterfactual (very rapidly). The rapid convergence after 1970 in infant mortality is also frequently praised by many.

What if we applied the same method to literacy rates? Given the hiatus from 1940 to 1960, it is quite likely to show that there was truly a causal effect of Castro’s ascent to power on literacy rates. While Cuba’s literacy rates from 1940 to 1960 stagnated, those of other Latin American countries (who generally constitute the pool of countries used to create the counterfactual) kept increasing and they continued to increase monotonically past 1960.

The rapid increase post-1960 in Cuba suggests that Castro did cause the country to catch up. The problem is that it is hard to replicate the synthetic control method with literacy rates. As can be seen from the figure above, there are important gaps in the data and the frequency is uneven for some countries. This limits the ability to apply the method. Nevertheless, the visual pattern of data makes it hard to argue that Castro had “no impact” on literacy rates (i.e. that rates would have been the same as in the counterfactual).

Secondly, it is also hard to dismiss educational statistics from Cuba. It’s not only that literacy rates are well above the rest of Latin America, but actual achievements in school are significantly above the rest of the subcontinent. There is probably some data manipulation. However, the presence of data manipulation cannot “explain away” Cuba’s advantage in that matter. The advantage is so large that even extreme forms of manipulation would not dissipate the country’s lead. This is similar to what happens with health care where there are clear signs of data manipulation with regards to infant mortality and life expectancy. Even if you make heroic assumptions about the extent of the manipulation, Cuba remains in the top three of Latin America.

With all of this being said, should we laud the Castro regime? I hesitate to go there because of the nature of dictatorships. Dictators select the public goods they want to produce in order to maximize their ability to stay in power. Roman emperors provided bread and games to keep the masses from revolting. Other dictators – such as Fidel Castro — may decide to use public education to keep the masses from revolting because it allows them to control the information obtained by their subjects.

Even if one takes the scholars most sympathetic to Cuba and who are most willing to try to separate the bad from the good (such as rising educational achievements), one finds that education is used for political purposes. As one scholar puts it, the “transformation [of the education system] followed in the wake of ‘the battle of ideas,’ a campaign introduced to mobilize the youth for the defence of the revolution.” The system is tightly controlled because it can be used to supervise dissent (via children) and discourage it (via propaganda and indoctrination).

In fact, the whole discourse regarding the famed literacy plan of 1961 reeks of regime-preservation: teachers were an “army of educators” whose role was to help consolidate the regime in its early years. In essence, the Cuban regime instrumentalized public education to control the information received by its citizens.

As Mary O’Grady has written:

As for Castro’s “literacy program,” its objective is indoctrination. For decades students were “taught” in work camps, away from their families, where they were forced to do agricultural labor. The lack of parental supervision led to an increase in teen pregnancy and forced abortion. To this day, access to higher education remains tied to ideological purity.

Thus, Cuban education comes as a bundle. What explains the rising literacy rates and rising levels of educational achievements is also what explains the regime’s ability to continually repress Cuban people. That is probably the biggest takeaway from the history of Cuba’s educational achievements after 1959.

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