Education

And Speaking Of DEI: The Ethical Conflict Regarding Racial Disparities In Academic Performance Raises Its Ugly Head Again In NYC

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

62 %, approximately, of the students in New York City’s public schools are black or Hispanic. In its eight most prestigious and academically rigorous high schools, however, only10% of the students in the incoming freshman class will be black or Hispanic, just like last year. 80% of the seats will be filled with Asian and white students, mostly Asians. This pattern of racial and ethnic disparity has existed for years at the city’s elite public high schools. Not surprisingly, the seeming inequity creates anger, frustration, demagoguery and and accusations of racism. Solutions, however, have been elusive and remain so.

Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, perhaps the most famous of the city’s specialized high schools (after the renowned High School For the Performing Arts), only awarded three of its 777 offers to black students, 21 to Hispanic students, and the rest to white and Asian students. Admission to these schools is considered a potential way out of poverty, but that factor (true or not), is not included in the consideration of who gets in. The sole criteria are the scores on a 114-question, three-hour exam, the Specialized High School Admissions Test. It is designed to assess a student’s math, English and critical thinking skills, along with time management ability.

Under the boot-strapping “disparate impact” logic used to find racism whenever results don’t fall neatly into demographic percentages, the admission test has been perpetually attacked as racially discriminatory, but no one has figured out how or why. Nor has anyone been able to devise a skills or ability test that does not consistently result in the same racial and ethnic stratification. Hispanics do better than blacks, whites perform better than Hispanics, and Asians perform the best of all. Sure enough, while just 19% all public school students in New York City are Asian, they received 57% of the offers for the specialized schools.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Why We Is “Getting Dummer,” Fox Weather Division

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is the second EA reference to “IQ 83” in a week, strongly suggesting that “The Great Stupid” is not slowing down, and may be accelerating.

There really isn’t much more to be said, is there?

Ethics Dunce: Brown Professor Robert Serrano

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Prof. Robert Serrano, who has been teaching in Brown University’s Economics Department for 34 years, is sounding off in horror about the scourge of artificial intelligence being used by students to cheat. He apparently missed the last two years.

Serrano had allowed the class in Econ 1170, an advanced course he has been teaching for many years, to take the mid-term exam at home. He was shocked—shocked!—that a large number of his students apparently cheated and used ChatGPT to do it. The grades for a midterm exam were not only significantly higher than in previous years, but a review of the answers submitted found that many responses were identical to those the bot came up with. Not only that, but when Serrano told the class that they could keep the midterm grade they received but that the final would be taken in an exam room with a monitor, nearly a third of the class , 27 out of 86, dropped out. Coincidentally, most the drop-outs had scored 100 on the mid-term.

This was sufficient evidence for the professor to conclude that his students had cheated on the test. No shit, Sherlock.

“This is a very challenging course that attracts typically very strong students, and in the past, the average grade for the midterm ranged from 65 to 80,” says Serrano. “The average this time was 96.” He also saw a huge increase in enrollments in his class this year. “In past editions of the course, the enrollments were at most 30, as low as 8 one semester,” he says. “This semester it jumped to 86. Perhaps many of them saw that this exam would be take-home.”

Ya think?

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The Star Spangled Naked Teacher!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s been a long time since Ethics Alarms had one of its trademark Naked Teacher Principle tales or even one of it’s many variations, like the Nearly Naked Teacher’s Volunteer Principle, the Drag Queen School Principal Principle, the Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle, and the Too Sexy Firefighter Principle, to name just a few. This one, from Alexander, Georgia, has nothing to do with July Fourth, except that I discovered the story this morning. It is certainly past time for one of these posts: the last one under the tag was here, and it was only about the related Naked Mayor Principle, involving the moronic mayor of Minot, North Dakota who accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to the city’s attorney.

Above is Maris Nichols, 25, a married Georgia high school teacher, who really likes having sex with students: she’s been indicted for showing at least six students the sweet mysteries of life in her classroom, at a golf course, and in a closet). Two of the teenagers were younger than 16. What puts Maris into the Naked Teacher Principle category is that she is a very provocative OnlyFans performer, and was being blackmailed by some of her students—it is unclear if they were among the one she was boinking—for better grades. They had discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among other things.

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“It Can’t Happen Here”? Brazil Gives Us A Glimpse Of What The Woke Passionately Wish For America

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In April, Brazilian father and mother, Audato and Ieda Denardi were found guilty of the crime of “intellectual neglect” and were sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their two daughters without sufficient instruction on“gender and sex education” or “tolerance and diversity.”

The court also found that the girls, aged 15 and 11, not enjoying popular Brazilian musical genres such as “trap” or “sertanejo” was evidence of a criminal deficiency in their cultural education.

Even though the prosecutors in the São Paulo trial requested an acquittal after concluding that the minors were not suffering from any neglect and were demonstrating appropriate academic and social development, the conviction was handed down. It is currently under appeal before the Seventh Criminal Court Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice. The Christian legal organization ADF International is representing the family, and it denounced the case as “a grotesque abuse of criminal law.”

Ya think?

Despite the fact that both girls are pianists with advanced training and are fluent in several languages, the judge accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the state’s involvement.” Julio Pohl, legal counsel for Latin America at ADF International, neatly pointed out the obvious: to be concise, the verdict is crackers.

“An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education,” Pohl said. “The judge convicted anyway because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender. A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.”

Let’s go through the occupants of Congress, the Senate, state houses and mayors’ offices and speculate which of them secretly (or not so secretly) would like to see similar “justice” in the United States. Do we even have to speculate on the how the leadership of the teachers unions would regard the Denardi case?

Ethics Observations on Negative Commentary On The U.S. That A Critic Is Ethically Estopped From Making…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

…or, “Shut the hell up!”

Ann Althouse today pulled the following quote from “Happy birthday USA. But is America’s revolution unravelling? When the USA turned 200, the nation came together as one. Fifty years on, what are the chances of the same thing happening under Donald Trump? A special series from The Sunday Times Magazine is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the USA”:

“And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar… it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism. The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cozy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles? It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics….”

I’m going to take a bit of time off from having to fend off insults, protests and rationalizations from the alleged legal ethicists who are furious at me for raising this issue to point out why I couldn’t be less interested in a Brit’s critique of the U.S.

Althouse summed up one excellent reason concisely with her sole comment on the article: “That’s the London Times. The view from the losing side.” That losing side has seen its empire collapse, its culture overwhelmed and destroyed by unrestrained immigration, the right of free speech trampled, its women brutalized, and its economy disastrously mismanaged while the country stands as a cautionary tale regarding the false promise of socialism. Its Prime Minister just resigned, the sixth leader of the government since the beginning of 2016: a seventh will arrive before the year ends. Meanwhile, its revered royal family is riddled with scandals and embarrassments, for King Charles’ pedophile brother to the obnoxious expats grifting off of their titles in the U.S.

Where does this rotting country get off criticizing us?

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Public School Indoctrination Update: Here’s Another School That Should Be Plowed Under and the Ground Seeded With Salt

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That this episode could occur anywhere is ominous evidence of just how determined our progressive-infested institutions are determined to indoctrinate rising generations.

Gabby Stout, a junior at Ardrey Kell High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and part of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district, received permission from the school to paint a message on the school’s “spirit rock.” This is a large boulder on school grounds traditionally used by students to paint various opinions and messages. They don’t have to be wise or uncontroversial either: one such message was “Black Lives Matter.”

Stout painted a Bible passage and her support for the recently assassinated Christian conservative leader of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk. For reasons never explained (but you can guess, can’t you?) the school quickly reversed itself. Within hours the school officials ordered her message to be painted over.

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The Late Gordon Wood Explains Why The “U.S. Is A Racist Country” Cant Is Anti-U.S. Propaganda and Historical Nonsense

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Heard outside the Collin County Courthouse today, after Karmelo Anthony was found guilty of murder (because he was) from the rabble-rousing Black Panthers: “We got to tell our kids the truth that this is a racist ass country. We gotta tell them the truth.”

Of course it isn’t the truth, but many unethical people, teachers, politicians, activists and organizations have made great strides toward creating the illusion that the U.S. is racist, and the efforts have accelerated over the past decade. One of the villains was Barack Obama, whom I am convinced will eventually be recognized for the divisive, destructive, corrupt and devious President he was. Another was Black Lives Matter, which is hardly a startling revelation. Of course we had the lazy, fearful, enablers of BLM, all of the companies, non-profits, local governments and pandering institutions that groveled at BLM’s metaphorical feet, with solemn “in these difficult times” ads and open letters, banners, and nauseating virtue-signaling.

Perhaps as despicable as the worst of them— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Al Sharpton, Charles M. Blow, the Democratic National Committee, which declared that the only reason Kamala Harris wasn’t elected President is because U.S. voters are racists—were the New York Times and its fake historian Nikole Hannah-Jones’ dishonest “1619 Project,” which contrived the lie that the main purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve slavery. Naturally the pathetic Pulitzer Prize people rewarded the Times and its reporter for their libel.

Even though that false framing was debunked forcefully and repeatedly by real historians, U.S. schools have been teaching the “1619 Project” anyway. Gordon Wood died this week. He was a Professor of History emeritus at Brown University and author of the acclaimed book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” as well as “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815.” Wood was recognized as one of the most eminent authorities on this nation’s founding, and in 2019, in his courtly, understated way, gave a lively interview explaining just how full of garbage the Times’ anti-American propaganda was. Revealing that Hannah-Jones’ “racist America” trope was hooey was politically incorrect in 2019, so Wood had to go all the way to the World Socialist Web Site to have his analysis published. (The Times, if it weren’t such a biased disgrace, would have interviewed him.)

Here is the whole interview. It doesn’t matter who the interviewer was, but the “A” signifies Prof. Wood’s replies. The result is long but fascinating; I learned a lot, and perhaps you will too.

As we know, however, Facts Don’t Matter…

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I Played My Lawyer Card Today, and I Shouldn’t Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.

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Oh Great: Another Car Has Been Added To The Karmelo Anthony Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms first mentioned the Karmelo Anthony case a year ago in the context of how completely screwed up woke Minnesota has become. Anthony, a teen who allegedly stabbed an unarmed white student to death at a school track meet, is the beneficiary of a GoFundMe effort that raised a large sum of money. Many conservative pundits wrote that this was a black backlash against a racist white woman who had attracted large donations to support her when a black man posted a video on social media that caught her in the act of calling him a “nigger.” I wrote in part,

“Anthony, who is black, is accused of stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, who was white, to death during a rain delay at their high school track meet. Anthony has not faced trial yet and claims that he in innocent by reason of self-defense. The online fundraising campaign on his behalf has raised over a half-million dollars. The clear difference between that and [the racist white woman’s] ill-gotten booty: Anthony hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet, and raising money for his defense is not, as some are claiming, the same as rewarding him for murdering a white kid. The accused teen’s family is the object of this fundraising campaign, and it is not inherently endorsing a black kid murdering a white kid to show sympathy for his family with a contribution.”

This ethics train wreck is still running. Anthony’s trial is finally getting started, and, naturally, the usual race-hustlers and victim-mongers are already claiming that the young man is another victim of racism by evil whites. Protesters were out in front of the courthouse chanting “Self-defense is not a crime!” They have no idea whether Karmelo has a legitimate self-defense case, but he’s black, so that’s all they need to know that he’s being framed by the racist justice system.

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