Why the English Major Is Dying Mark Hamilton

https://fee.org/articles/why-the-english-major-is-dying/

Why the English Major Is Dying

Mark Hamilton 

Imagine you are offered a job to work 60 to 70 hours a week as an English graduate assistant, teaching those who need to be taught and doing some research at a salary of about $15,000 a year. You love to teach and you care about people, so you take the job.

You begin to notice things at this job. You are a challenging teacher, and you are reminded that if you care about people, you “will not stress them out so much.” At first you think there should be penalties for plagiarism, but then you rethink this because “people make mistakes.” And your tests ... you definitely need to rethink that, so your students need a review sheet with every question you're going to ask on the test and no more. You care – a lot more students are skipping your class with that new review sheet given just before the test – but you care.

After five years, you hear about a great job in your department doing the same thing you've been doing, and you apply for this promotion offering $50,000 a year and a great title. You have student loan debt and the federal government had given you loans, so ... 

You are rejected. As a consolation, you are given a certificate recognizing your five years of work (it has three funny letters: PhD; this means: 'Please Hire Directly'). 
You're not alone. In fact, there are innumerable people with such similar certificates. All of them were graduate assistants too, but now, because of the new graduate assistants, they can't find a full-time job either. 

One day, somebody comes up to you with tears in their eyes. "I was your student, and you prepared me for the rest of my life." You squint, trying to remember the face out of so many.

"What do you do?" you ask.

"I'm a bartender."

Welcome to the world of US college academics.

The Reason behind the Madness

In fact, you are the victim of increasing government involvement in higher education. Increasing federal government student loans have not only raised American college and university tuition dramatically beyond the cost of living increases, but they have also greatly decreased the need for academic standards and, consequently, full-time academic employment. Colleges and universities have thus begun to structure their curriculum mainly to keep the student loan money rolling in, often ignoring rigor – hence the lesser need for full-time teachers. 

As Peter Wood, former provost at Boston University, once said,

The regnant phrase was “Don’t leave money sitting on the table.” The metaphoric table in question was the one on which the government had laid out a sumptuous banquet of increases of financial aid. Our job was to figure out how to consume as much of it as possible in tuition increases.

Andrew Gillen, an economist with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, has written,

... as long as financial aid allows students to pay more in tuition, colleges will face irresistible pressure to raise tuition to capture the aid. The implication of this is that there will never be 'enough' aid, because there is never a point at which spending or tuition will stop increasing.

Average tuition at all American colleges and universities has increased about 300% since 1978 in constant 2014-15 dollars for a far less meaningful degree. Student loan debt is at an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, and the percentage of students having to take student loans in 2015 is similarly increased – 70%, much higher than in the 1970s. This is like a man who bought a Porsche in 1978 for $37,000 but whose son can only, at best, buy a Ford Pinto for $111,000 in constant 1978 dollars.

In 1970, five years after LBJ first signed legislation permitting federal government student loans and increasing federal subsidies for American college education (and the most recent year for which I have been able to find statistics), about 78% of faculty were full-time. In 1975, on a steadily downward trajectory, about 71% of faculty at American colleges and universities were employed full-time. Now, after massively increased federal student loan funding began in 1978 with Jimmy Carter's Middle Income Student Assistance Act, only 49% of American faculty are full-time – many of them in poorly paid, second-tier, “Instructor” positions. 

As proof of diminishing academic standards, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses notes that, according to scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, in 2007, 

... freshmen who enter higher education at the 50th percentile would reach a level equivalent to the 57th percentile of an incoming freshman class by the end of their sophomore year. Three semesters of college education thus have a barely noticeable impact on students’ skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing (35).

This has all created what academics like Richard Vedder call the "higher education bubble." 

How This Works in English Departments

The English department has been a major enabler of this trend. Because many colleges and universities are not consequently concerned with how much students learn in their courses, since profits are only directly related to high tuition fees, enrollment, and government subsidies rather than academic rigor, colleges have increasingly diminished their standards in freshman Rhetoric and Composition. This is to justify the increased use of teaching assistants, who are spending most of their time working on graduate degrees, or similarly overworked adjuncts, to teach them.

So there is little need to hire graduate degree holders as full-time employees once they receive their degrees. The Faustian bargain is that full-time faculty members generally support this system, or at least keep quiet about it, in exchange for keeping their own full-time jobs and sometimes reduced teaching loads. And so the number of full-time English faculty members becomes smaller and smaller.

The somewhat predictable result has been declining English major enrollments in the US. It is too discouraging for a student who wants to teach college-level English to see English graduate degree holders find their potential full-time higher education jobs occupied by what they once were: poorly paid teaching assistants who will merely become adjuncts. With such bleak employment options, students increasingly steer away from the English major. In 1970, 7.6 percent of majors were English. By 2015, the number stood at 2.4 percent.

The Solution

The solution is to end all federal and state government involvement in higher education. Any tuition cost would then be due to the immense skills and abilities an alumni degree-holder has (something likely to increase donations to universities in the long run), not from how much governments happen to be offering in student loan aid or subsidies that year.

Imagine the conversation: a student comes to you with tears in their eyes, saying, "I was your student, and you prepared me for the rest of my life. And no student debt."

You find the student has a full-time job teaching English at a college in another part of the country, making $50,000 a year with full autonomy.

You walk away smiling.

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https://illinoisfamily.org/education/new-trier-high-school-needs-accounting-diversity-logic-lessons/

New Trier High School Needs Accounting, Diversity, and Logic Lessons

Much virtual ink has been spilled, money wasted, and fallacious arguments spewed by supporters of the bias inarguably present in the sessions offered on New Trier’s All-School Seminar Day titled “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights,” which takes place tomorrow Feb. 28.

A closer look at the money spent and diversity ideology promoted—often through fallacious logic—may lead parents to do two things: 1. Keep their children home on “progressive” dogma day. 2. Pursue changes in future seminars with the doggedness and passion (if not the fallacious reasoning) of “progressives.”

Pacific Educational Group lines its pockets with taxpayer money to subsidize Leftist definition of “diversity

On Feb. 19, the North Cook News reported that New Trier has paid almost $90,000 to notorious snake oil salesman Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group. Here’s a little anecdote about another affluent school district on Chicago’s North Shore that was similarly beguiled by the oily diversity scammer Singleton: District 113 which encompasses Deerfield and Highland Park high schools and which is where I first encountered the ethically-challenged Glenn Singleton. This is my former place of employment and the school from which all four of my children graduated.

Between spring 2007 and spring 2008, District 113, using both federal and district money, spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $83,000 to hire the San Francisco-based Glenn Singleton and representatives from his Pacific Educational Group to come  seven times to teach District 113 employees about their “whiteness.” This figure included Singleton’s fees, travel expenses, per diem, and costs of hiring substitute teachers for all the teachers who were absent from class to attend the all-day indoctrination seminars. The $83,000 included $10,000 for substitute teachers and $20,000 to feed everyone at the Highland Park Country Club where the meetings took place.

I asked then-superintendent George Fornero why we were hiring Singleton and was told it was due to Highland Park High School’s failure to make “adequate yearly progress” under the No Child Left Behind Act. The district had received federal money to help the Hispanic students perform better on standardized tests, and Fornero used it to hire Singleton. Both Singleton and his facilitators explicitly stated that neither he nor his book on which his consultations were based (Courageous Conversations) provide any solutions.

Every time Singleton or his representative came, every administrator, every department chair, two teachers from every department, and area (e.g., multi-media, custodial pool, technology, secretarial pool) from both high schools attended all-day meetings during which they discussed their “whiteness.” This meant that all the participating employees missed seven days of work or classes.

I asked the school board and administration how even in theory does having secretaries, custodians, and teachers miss school to talk about their “whiteness” at the Highland Park Country Club help minority students improve their test scores.

They offered no answer.

At the all-staff, all-faculty meeting to introduce District 113 to his “social justice” theories, Singleton made some surprising statements. He explained that many experts believe the causes for the underperformance of minority students are poverty, language issues, mobility, and lack of family support. He then made the startling claim that none of those factors is the cause. The causes, he claimed, are “institutional racism” and “whiteness.”

He went on to classify audience members into three categories according to their potential responses to his theories: The first group were those who would agree with him immediately. The second group were those who would be on the fence and need to be convinced. And the third group were “those who are gifted at subverting reform.” In other words, those who dare to suggest that limited English skills likely affect test scores are “gifted at subverting reform.” Singleton cunningly attempted to prevent dissent by pre-labeling pejoratively those who disagree with his theories.

Toward the end of the year, Singleton visited classrooms to evaluate the continued need for his services. He also visited the writing center where I had worked for eight years. After school, he met with the administration which included all department chairs to “debrief.” The next day, one department chair told me and two others confirmed that Singleton had called for me to be fired citing as justification the following quotes I had on my wall:

“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” (The Supreme Court of the United States, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Despite incessant repetition of the word ‘diversity’ in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas” (Thomas Sowell, African American, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution).

“One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by ‘diversity educators’” (Alan Kors, Professor of Intellectual History at University of Pennsylvania).

“‘[D]iversity’ — nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses – [is] the . . . belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation” (George Will, syndicated columnist).

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling” (Thomas Sowell).

Singleton also boasted in the meeting that he had gotten employees in other school districts fired. Two weeks later, I was demoted.

After spending thousands of dollars on Singleton’s doctrinaire and racist theories, Fornero, perhaps unintentionally, acknowledged precisely what District 113 got for their time and money in a 2009 letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

Dear Honorable Duncan,

. . .

As was the case in the spring of 2008, our non-English speaking students were once again asked to demonstrate their academic abilities by taking the ACT and the WorkKey assessments in English. And once again, despite taking the test seriously and despite working for hours longer than other students to complete it, when these students receive their results next fall, they will all fail [emphasis added].

One would think that an admission like that would be the nail in the coffin of divisive, intellectually vacuous, ideologically-driven expenditures. But the public should never underestimate the fervor of true proselytes driven by political motives. They will continue to abuse their access to public money until community members publicly and vigorously oppose them.

Fallacious arguments of seminar defenders

Getting to the gist of the concerns of critics of Tuesday’s seminar is made challenging by the pervasive use  of fallacious arguments by “progressives” to obscure the critics’ arguments. Here’s a quick look at some of the fallacies New Trier “progressives” use:

1.)  Traitorous critic fallacy (an ad hominem fallacy):  Criticizing or dismissing an opponent’s argument by attributing it to some unfavored group rather than responding to the substance of the argument.

The use of this fallacy was on full and unabashed display by New Trier father Paul Traynor when he appeared recently on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight  ( a must watch segment for a lesson in fallacious reasoning) and dismissed the arguments of New Trier parents by suggesting these parents are somehow connected to Breitbart and IFI.  Traynor twice claimed IFI is a “hate group registered with the Southern Poverty Law Center” clearly suggesting that IFI is, in reality, a hate group. In addition, Traynor complained that “IFI—this hate group—has gone after me personally.”  What did IFI do to warrant his fear? I critiqued his public comments that he voluntarily provided to the Chicago Tribune. Instead of responding to the substance of the seminar critics’ arguments, Traynor attacked two organizations that have written about the controversy.

2.)  Abusive fallacy (ad hominem): Verbally abusing one’s opponents rather than responding to their arguments.

For example, seminar supporters have repeatedly called seminar critics “racists.” In addition, on Chicago Tonight, Traynor criticized the suggestion that Colonel Allan West or Sheriff David Clarke could be  invited to represent conservative ideas and criticized Dennis Prager as a member of the “alt right.” (Apparently, Traynor views invited “queer Latinx” speaker Monica Trinidad as a moderate—Trinidad who once “tweeted a picture of mounted police officers with the comment ‘Get them animals off those horses.’”)

3.)  Straw man fallacy:  Refuting an argument never made by one’s opponents.

So, when seminar supporters say things like “Racism exists,” “New Trier kids are sheltered,” “Colson Whitehead and Andrew Aydin [two of the invited speakers—both liberal Democrats] have won national book awards,” “Students may express dissenting views,” “New Trier is a great school,” “The seminar was carefully constructed,” or “Parents were included,” they are not responding to the central argument made by critics who justifiably see the seminar sessions as biased. All of these claims made by seminar supporters are true (well, most of them) but irrelevant to the arguments of seminar critics.

4.)  Appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum, appeal to common belief, bandwagon fallacy): Expressing the idea that because a belief is popular or widely held it must be true.

Both seminar supporters and superintendent Linda Yonke employed this fallacy saying that most community members support the seminar as currently constituted. Whether or not such a claim is true is irrelevant.

Maybe, just maybe New Trier community members can wade through the flurry of fallacies to get seminar supporters to answer the only relevant question: Do you believe the sessions are relatively balanced between conservative and “progressive” views on race-related topics. If so, can you point to the resources used and speakers invited that represent conservative perspectives.

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Grammar

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/can-grammar-be-racist-university-washington-thinks-so

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/college-illiteracy-growing

College Illiteracy is Growing

For a number of years, it was assumed that public education was swimming along, efficiently educating children of all ages. More recently, the products coming out of public schools have caused a troubling concern to leap into the minds of adults: are schools dumbing down the content they teach to students?

That concern seems to have now made its way into the minds of university professors, as evidenced in a recent study conducted by the Times Higher Education. The study examined over a thousand higher education professors and administrators in several English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, and predominantly the U.K.

Judging from the comments of these professors, the students they are seeing come through their classrooms are ill-prepared, unwilling to study, and in need of kid-glove treatment. Some of the choice comments from these professors include:

• “Each year, the entry requirements for undergraduate programmes are reduced, meaning we get a high number of students who are almost illiterate.”
• “We were told [by managers that] we are not allowed to ‘draw attention to’ those students who turn up to seminars having done no preparation whatsoever because it might deter them from attending future seminars (which they also wouldn’t have been prepared for)….”
• “Students study to pass exams, no longer to study a discipline.”
• “Few students will read the material on the reading list, [relying] instead solely on lecture handouts or PowerPoint slides….”

When asked if their students were well-prepared academically for university course work, almost half of professors disagreed:

Meanwhile, a majority of professors agreed that today’s students are “intellectually less able” to function in a university than they were in the past:

It has long been the goal of today’s schools to ensure that students are “college and career ready.” Judging from the observations of college professors, that goal is not being realized.

One could cast blame in many directions to attempt to explain why students are not intellectually prepared for college. But is it possible that the main reason stems from the fact that schools are simply not set up to train students to think for themselves?

Former New York teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, once said:

“Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”

Until we remove this mentality from the education system, then how can we expect students to be intellectually ready to do the studying, reading, and thinking that higher education demands?

Image Credit: Gregg O'Connell bit.ly/1ryPA8o

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Richard Woods: "As a conservative, I do have concerns about creating a bureaucracy within an existing bureaucracy,” he said.

http://www.myajc.com/news/local-education/debate-begins-new-proposal-turn-around-failing-schools/J5S4GR6gfjvwZecYuCf7uN/

Debate begins on new proposal to turn around failing schools

Posted: 6:44 p.m. Thursday, February 16, 2017

As Georgia lawmakers considered a new proposal Thursday for turning around chronically failing schools, critics called it a reincarnation of Amendment 1, which voters turned down in November. Amendment 1 would have let the state take over such schools and place them in a statewide Opportunity School District.

Chairman of the House Transportation Committee Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville, presented the new proposal, House Bill 338, to the Georgia House Education Committee. It provides resources to failing schools to “help them stand on (their) own two feet,” he said.

“My intent here is to help children in struggling schools. It’s not a political intent. It’s not an intent for the state to come in and take over K-12 education,” said Tanner.

HB 338 would create a “chief turnaround officer” to oversee schools that are “unacceptable” and “low-performing” for more than two years. That person, appointed by the governor, would have at least 15 years of K-12 experience, at least 3 years of experience as the principal of a public school and experience turning around failing schools.

Tanner believes that expertise and leadership would have a big impact. He said “just sending a check to (failing) districts is not going to get the job done.”

Louis Elrod, Better Georgia’s political director and campaign manager for the 2016 anti-school takeover campaign, said, “Legislators should ask their constituents what they thought of Amendment 1 before they vote on HB 338.” He said in a statement that the bill is “the same as the one defeated by voters with only minor window dressing.” Amendment 1 was rejected by 60 percent of voters on Election Day.

The Georgia Federation of Teachers released a statement calling HB 338 “the new OSD” and “more of the same governance and money grab spun another way.”

Tanner said the bill’s approach is not to take over schools but to give schools incentives to cooperate. “OSD was a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to have the power to come in and physically take over your school system, and you had no say in that,” he said. “This legislation in front of you today is all about the school agreeing to do it.”

State Rep. Mike Glanton, D-Jonesboro, worked on Amendment 1 and served on Gov. Deal’s Education Reform Commission and believes HB 338 accounts for concerns raised about OSD. “I think this is an attempt, number one, to maintain local control,” he said.

Tanner said the most severe interventions under HB338 would not be on under-performing schools, but on uncooperative schools. He does not expect a school performing in the 30th percentile to completely turn around in two years, but he does expect it to cooperate with the turnaround officer to implement changes within two years. He also noted that no districts currently qualify for the harshest intervention, suspending board members.

“This is all about trying to make a partnership to work together. It’s not about punitive action.”

State School Superintendent Richard Woods offered the committee a number of amendments, many of which would shift authority over the turnaround officer from the State Board of Education to the Department of Education, which he leads. He expressed reservations over how well the new turnaround setup would work with the DOE but was grateful that the bill would increase the department’s capacity.

“As a conservative, I do have concerns about creating a bureaucracy within an existing bureaucracy,” he said. “One thing I’ve found out is that typically bureaucracies have a way of growing.”

The bill is in a very early stage of the legislative process and may be changed by the committee before being passed on to the House.

“I think we’ll have a little better understanding once the bill goes through the vetting process and we hear what people are for and against in the bill,” Glanton said. “Debate starts today.”

House Bill 338

The bill empowers the state to make drastic changes in the lowest performing schools. It would:

• Create the position of Chief Turnaround Officer to oversee schools that are “unacceptable” and “low-performing” for more than two years
• Empower the Director of School Turnaround to track school performance and make changes in schools that fail to improve
• Provide the state with interventions ranging from replacing school staff to taking over schools and handing them over to other school districts or private nonprofits
• Give the governor power to suspend school board members in school districts where at least half the schools receive unacceptable ratings for at least five years

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Poverty in rural Georgia-Think well outside of I-285

http://camden.allongeorgia.com/column-poverty-in-rural-georgia-think-well-outside-of-i-285/

Column: Poverty in rural Georgia-Think well outside of I-285

February 20, 2017

The mainstream media (MSM) has been successful at defining the narrative on poverty and what it looks like in America. Much of their narrative centers on the inner cities; however, there is a broader sense of how this looks nationwide. As much of the MSM, along with their left-leaning counterparts in academia, would like to own the definition of poverty’s portrayal, it does not discriminate, and it does not play victim to one group of people. The MSM’s narrative in Georgia often pits this misconception to the public frequently. The rural areas of the country are profoundly affected by poverty and have suffered more so under this anemic economic recovery in the last eight years. Narrowing this understanding to Georgia, the lens with which the MSM views poverty is mischaracterized as ‘redneck’ with a plethora of ‘privilege’ with opportunities abounding. I do not see many of these people feeling the Bern nor did I see any Hillary signs in their yards. Nowhere is this mischaracterization found more so than in rural Georgia, particularly in the southern part of the state.

Slide from the 2015 presentation of expansion of broadband to the rural areas of Georgia: Georgia Technology Authority

I grew up in rural southern Georgia where most of the jobs were agricultural. We did not have a county-911 system put in place until the mid to late 1990s.  I remember vividly of the people I use to attend elementary school in this rural community. Many families lived miles away from grocery stores and hospital access – sometimes it would take a 30-minutes drive to get to the nearest hospital. I will never forget a family that lived on Highway 82. Our bus driver, Ms. Mary Woods, would pick up all the children who lived on that rural route before stopping at the Smith’s (not actual name of the family) and finalizing our journey before getting to the school house. The Smith family was white, and definitely not privileged, contrarily defined by today’s media and social justice narrative.  From the Smith’s driveway, one could make out, what we in the south call a shotgun house. One could see right through the front door and through the inside of the entire house. Also, the home did not have windows to protect the family from the elements.

Poverty in Rural GA: It knows no bounds: Photo by shutter stock

Upon arrival at the Smith home, everyone had firsthand exposure to their poverty which gave some of us an education each day – talk about a hidden curriculum for second graders in rural Georgia. There were five Smith children – two older girls, and three boys. The boys were closer to my age. As the children would enter the bus, we could smell them as they did not take a bath regularly and the boys often had wild hog or opossum blood on their clothing. One of the boys, Keith, was in my grade and I would always ask him why he had blood on him. Keith, always smiling, told me that they had to go hog hunting each morning to make sure they had food to eat at home. Over the school years, I got to know Keith and the other children and noticed their truancy from school. I finally asked why, Georgy-Ray, Keith’s brother, was always tardy. Keith informed me that Georgy-Ray was not allowed to go to school until he successfully killed a wild hog that morning.

As a child growing up in rural South Georgia, this lifestyle was not uncommon. The people who lived in these conditions found ways to survive and make the best of each day and never wanted you to feel sorry for them. Their plight is prideful but antiquated to fit their own success within the rural culture. Access to services, even in the late 20th century, were not apparent in the rural areas as seen in the urban areas.

Recently, I had to help a family in Brantley County, GA. The grandfather needed some health insurance assistance. I drove up to the home, and it was a typical rural scene in South Georgia of families in poverty. The grandfather was in a wheelchair, and in my best judgment, would be a candidate for nursing home care. The home was not ideal, and the grandfather lived in the travel trailer welded to the main portion of the home. The conditions were not set up for wheelchairs except for the ramp leading up to the main house. The grandfather had to be lifted by his son out of the travel trailer to place him in the wheelchair. As we entered the home, I noticed many adults and children. The adults were in their 20s to 40s and apparently healthy enough to work. The children were school aged, but instead, were at home. The home smelt symptomatic of poverty, and there was only one phone, which was a landline – sometimes it did not work. There were no cells phones, computers, internet access, much less lights in the home. They used flashlights for lighting. These scenes are still prevalent today even in some cases where dirt floors are covered only in small rugs leading to common areas within the home.  These people do not have the same conditions as urban housing, where federal standards must be met, but nonetheless, can still be poor. I helped the grandfather and was sometimes assisted by the children in the home, as they knew more about the public assistance procedures than I did in some cases.

The mainstream media cannot define the perception of poverty (MSM) and nor should it. The MSM’s misrepresentation of America was rejected in the past presidential election cycle because they choose to not report on issues facing all Americans. Our education system is a critical springboard to making sure poverty does not have to be an option in rural Georgia. Glossing over the facts about poverty and economic opportunity centralized within the I-285 doughnut  is not Georgia at all, and this unilateral economic plan will not help correct the issue. The answer boils down to leadership in this state. To all the candidates who want to be the next Governor of Georgia, you should submit a plan that encourages more economic development allowing more opportunities for able-bodied people who choose to live freely in rural Georgia.

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http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/31219/

New college entrance exam disavows Common Core, targets classical education

A new college entrance exam focusing on classical liberal arts education serves as an alternative to the ACT and SAT while linking students with a number of conservative Christian universities.

The Classic Learning Test (CLT) debuted in June with a few factors contributing to its creation, CEO Jeremy Tate said in a phone interview. One component, Tate said, was the SAT’s alignment with the Common Core last year.

A former college counselor, Tate said parents at his high school were upset with the standardized test’s movement toward the controversial standards. His discussions with admissions workers at small liberal arts colleges also signaled there was a need for a new test.

Adding to the mix was Tate’s personal thoughts on the two major college entrance exams.

“Tests teach, they don’t just evaluate,” he said. “And I thought what was being taught on the SAT and ACT didn’t necessarily correspond to a Christian or Catholic worldview and in some ways, it seemed to undermine that.”

MORE: Common Core advocates push for its use in college admissions

The exam’s parent company, Classic Learning Initiatives, was co-founded by Tate and David Wagner in fall 2015. They created a two-hour online test that prospective college students can take at a local testing center.

Scheduled on five dates per year, the test includes 120 questions and uses a 120-point scoring system. The test’s three sections – verbal reasoning, grammar/writing and quantitative reasoning – include 40 questions each. With an emphasis on classical education, the reading and writing sections include selections on religion and philosophy as well as historical founding documents.

Tate said the SAT and ACT’s promotion of globalization has eroded loyalty to any particular cultural or intellectual tradition. The CLT counters that.

“We believe as citizens to the West, our students would be good to have the kind of literature that my grandpa and great-grandpa grew up on, and that was kind of common knowledge. I think we’re losing that,” he said.

While the test seeks to show students’ readiness for college, Tate also hopes the test’s standards will encourage classical literature to be brought back into high school classrooms.

‘It’s just a better test’

So far, the CLT has partnered with 37 colleges and universities. They include Christian and conservative institutions like Grove City College, Liberty University and Patrick Henry College.

The test’s number one selling point, according to Tate, is that “it’s just a better test.” Having formerly prepped students for the SAT, Tate said the “value-neutral” approach of that test left students telling him it was “so painfully boring.”

MORE: Common Core is pushing morality discussions out of the classroom

“Instead of putting kids in front of meaningless informational texts, we want to put them in front of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western thought,” Tate said.

But the test also fills a void, linking students to small liberal arts universities. It’s a niche the exam is glad to fill. There aren’t plans to expand to large public universities.

Those schools already have plenty of students, Tate said, and there’s a reason. He said the ACT and SAT’s push of science, technology, engineering and math education has served as a powerful matchmaker for major universities, which has had a significant effect on traditional liberal arts universities.

“We’re seeing that a lot of these colleges I’ve been talking to, some of them are having enrollment problems … because we had a generation of students who think there’s no value in a liberal arts education,” Tate said.

The CLT hopes to have the opposite effect, by matching students to liberal arts schools. It’s that type of education that some of America’s best employers are looking for, Tate said.

“We want to be telling students there’s great value to a traditional liberal arts college. There’s great value to St. John’s [College] in Annapolis, [Maryland]. There’s great value to [The] King’s College in New York,” he said.

MORE: Students are wising up to mandated standardized tests

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http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/16/yes-donald-trump-can-repeal-common-core-heres/#.WKasWfLDDQm.facebook

Yes, Donald Trump Can Repeal Common Core. Here’s How

Let’s read Donald Trump’s reiterated promise to repeal Common Core, not in the ruling class’s legalistic hyperliteralism, but on Trump terms, and on the American public’s terms.

Joy Pullmann

Directly after the Senate narrowly confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary last week, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway spoke with Jake Tapper on CNN.

DeVos “will get on with the business of executing on the president’s vision for education,” Conway said. “He’s made very clear all throughout the campaign and as president he wants to repeal Common Core, he doesn’t think that federal standards are better than local and parental control…And that children should not be restricted in terms of education opportunities just by their ZIP code, just by where they live. We’ve got to look at homeschooling, and charter schools, and school choice and other alternatives for certain students.”

Tapper immediately moved on to foreign affairs, but Conway’s statement is singular for clearly reiterating a campaign promise many grassroots Common Core opponents worried President Trump would forget. It was also followed by the usual round of denunciations in the education and other press about how it’s obviously impossible for President Trump to do anything about Common Core because the federal mechanisms that pushed it on states have expired.

Cue the Chorus of Naysayers

Michael Cohen, whose organization, Achieve, helped create and impose Common Core on the nation, told USA Today that “most schools’ standards, testing and accountability systems will be unaffected by the change in administration. And Trump’s vow to end so-called Common Core testing may well ring hollow, since states must decide whether to keep or drop the tests. ‘Whether (DeVos) likes the Common Core or doesn’t like the Common Core — and I’ve heard both — it doesn’t matter,’ he said.”

What a convenient narrative for him: Aw, guys, you can’t do anything about Common Core. Check and mate! Yet I’m not sure why anyone listens to these people since under Cohen’s leadership Achieve completely botched its management of one of the federally funded national Common Core tests it netted through philanthrocronyism. We’re talking folks who got $170 million from taxpayers to produce tests the states involved have dropped like a hot rock, reducing them to selling bits of the tests in a shame-faced fire sale to stave off dissolution. What a fine track record of credible expertise! Only in Washington.

The Los Angeles Times’ Joy Resmovitz also insisted Trump can’t fulfill his promise: “While it’s true that the Obama administration did promote participation, the Common Core is not a federal initiative — so it’s not something Trump can repeal. In fact, language in a new federal education law explicitly bars the Education secretary from influencing standards. Even if Trump does pressure states to drop Common Core —perhaps by tweeting — schools in California probably wouldn’t change course.”

Even leading Republicans have reinforced Cohen’s insistence that DeVos can’t fulfill Trump’s repeated campaign pledge because, as Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander insists every time he gets the chance, Congress already “repealed the federal Common Core mandate.” That guy oughta be a lawyer, the way he carefully parses words to give an impression that is opposite the full reality.

We’re Sick of Your Weaponized Language

Lawmakers, media, and bureaucrat types benefit themselves at the public’s expense by speaking very precisely yet falsely like this, in what Robert Mariani has called “autistic literalism” and my colleague Mollie Hemingway calls “hyperliteralism.” In discussing press freakouts over and constant misreading of President Trump, Mollie quotes Brad Todd: “voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously.”

So, let’s read Donald Trump’s promise to repeal Common Core, not in the ruling class’s legalistic hyperliteralism that attempts to definitionally neuter their opponents, but on Donald Trump terms, on the American public’s terms: seriously, but not literally. Common Core is not merely one federal mandate. It embodies the culmination of the federal education system itself. It is marbled throughout state and federal education policy in myriad programs, mandates, funding streams, and, most of all, the ineffective progressive-education “thoughtworld” it entrenches in its testing and curriculum dictates.

As I detail in full footnoted glory in my book out soon, Common Core’s own founding documents specifically invite federal involvement. Its success as a national program is directly attributable to federal involvement in education, period. Common Core’s creators and funders worked hand-in-glove with the Obama administration, right down to transferring personnel and regular alignment phone calls, to impose it upon the nation and link it to every major federal and state education policy (data collection, teacher preparation and certification, school rating systems, curriculum, testing). The new law replacing No Child Left Behind codifies the federal government as the ultimate review board for state testing and curriculum policies, a Clinton-era policy that made Common Core possible.

So, as usual, the conventional political wisdom is wrong. President Trump can indeed fulfill his promise to repeal Common Core. The mechanisms that led to its creation and force-fed it to states remain intact, and need to be dismantled. At the heart of those mechanisms lies the U.S. Department of Education itself.

The Common Core Death Star

If we take President Trump’s promise as a broad statement of intent that Americans should not have to continue suffering under the prolonged and bipartisan mismanagement of the nation’s schools force-fed through the U.S. Department of Education, we already know that to genuinely repeal Common Core requires drastically reducing, if not eliminating, federal involvement in education. Without the U.S. Department of Education, there would be no Common Core.

That sounds like a dramatic statement, but even Common Core supporters (like Barack Obama!) have said as much. Common Core is a train; USDOE is the railroad. Indeed, if you trace the history of American education, as I have, you find that departments of education are the prime movers of every Common Core-like push to yoke schools to curriculum fads and ideologies that experience proves ineffective every single time.

The reason is a basic function of political science: concentrating power increases the incentives for special-interest capture. In other words, the more they can get out of controlling a certain agency (i.e., the more power it has), the more special interests will work to do it. A corollary is the political problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits: The few who benefit from niche political power will work doggedly to attain it, while the public at large has many other interests and are not immediately aware of the personal effects of a growing power monopoly in a particular sector until it has metastasized, perhaps beyond repair.

What do monopolies do? Hike costs and slash quality. Because they are protected from competition, an ideological monopoly is free to inflict bad ideas on the people it affects. Not at all surprisingly, then, researchers on Left and Right have found that government and university departments of education generally prevent rather than foster education. The education industry is full of highly credentialed people who despite years of research and blue-ribbon panels demonstrating the efficacy of time-proven teaching methods and curricula (for example), continually insist on doing, if not the opposite, then at least as much of the opposite as they can get away with.

This has been going on since, well, since the U.S. Department of Education became a thing. In fact, the history of American education shows that the department has from its inception trafficked in terrible ideas and sought to expand its own power at the expense of Americans, in myriad ways from taxing our time through stupid regulations to requiring us to pay for these stupid regulations and through making us and our kids dumber because monopoly education breeds ignorance, and ignorance is an existential crisis for a constitutional republic. If you doubt that, you haven’t been paying attention.

How About a Few Midrange Missiles, First?

Okay. So to truly nuke Common Core would indeed require nuking the federal agency that fostered and inflicted it upon the nation. On the campaign trail, Trump didn’t hesitate to say USDOE should get deep-sixed, and cited Common Core as a reason why.

Of course that requires an act of Congress, and like many other big ideas from Trump, the smart set says it’s pure folly, and Republicans listen to those self-credentialed charlatans. Well, maybe after a few more months of administrative state sabotage they will be a little more amenable. When that happens, some legislative assistant should get this book recently out from Vicki Alger, which she spent years researching, and use its template for eliminating the department.

In the meantime, something will have to happen with that hunk of junk. A few ideas.

• DeVos needs to dispense with the Jeb Bush set beginning to populate her department in the early new hires and hire some smart people (yes, lawyer up) who get these realities of federal education policy and are not charmed by the managerial progressive Republican’s dreams of running the administrative state more efficiently.
• Pre-empt the inevitable sabotage attempts within her department by a) doing a department audit b) hiring smart c) announcing that all emails from all department employees will be placed, sans personal information, in a publicly accessible database (h/t Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute) d) use the Office of Budget and Management review of her department as a guidebook for beginning to clean house and expose waste, fraud, and abuse before her employees do it in ways that make her look bad.
• Do the opposite of what people like Achieve’s Cohen tell the press they want to see happen. For example, he notes that this spring states will be coming to USDOE to have it approve their testing regimes in minute detail. The technical details of these reviews are one of the unseen linchpins pinning states into Common Core. DeVos can and should use that process to stop USDOE from putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Common Core-style education. Stop using tests to data-mine kids’ curriculum knowledge, and stop rating tests more highly for more closely conforming to Common Core. Etc. Unsucker the tentacles.
• As Jane Robbins says, “make it clear to states that the feds won’t penalize them in any way if they replace Common Core with good standards.”
• Keep the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) from being re-aligned with Common Core, and forbid its governing board from incorporating intrusive questions about mindsets and school climate, which is illegal but being considered.
• Use the upcoming re-up of the Higher Education Act to end all federal involvement with teacher preparation in any respect. The research shows we don’t know a hill of beans about what makes a good teacher, and that teacher credentialing is a big waste of time that merely reinforces progressive-style education (e.g., Common Core). So no agency has the knowledge to pretend otherwise, least of all the federal government. That should be entirely remanded to the states. It appears Chairman Alexander agrees, so good.
• During the Higher Education Act reauthorization, get the feds out of college accreditation entirely. The process does not prevent students from getting an increasingly poor “higher” education, as the continued spiral up of costs and down of outcomes shows. Accreditation should be left entirely to the private sector.
• Scrub federal teacher professional development, curriculum, and other grants and end all funding to programs that support Common Core. Redirect it while it still exists to the few legitimate, research-based organizations such as Core Knowledge.
• Pull all federal funding from Common Core creating and sustaining institutions such as to the two national, federally funded Common Core tests (SBAC and PARCC), Achieve, the American Institutes for Research, College Board, National Governors Association, Chief Council of State School Officers, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers.

I’ve got seven more ideas here. These are all rear-guard measures that can only ameliorate the effects of Common Core, not repeal it or prevent the next iteration of nationalized education from consuming the last vestiges of self-government in education. The real hydra is the U.S. Department of Education, which has outposts in every state called state departments of education (their biggest job in most states is handling compliance with federal regulations). Eight congressmen have introduced a bill to do that. Get it some hearings.

If Trump and DeVos take down that hydra, they will indeed fulfill a major and worthy campaign promise, with the added ego boost of doing something even President Reagan couldn’t. Warning from history: It was sabotage from within the department that strangled Reagan’s same promise. His key mistake? Appointing for education secretary a man who had testified in favor of creating the department a few years before but during the presidential vetting process promised Reagan he supported eliminating it.

Joy Pullmann is managing editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," out from Encounter Books February 28. Pre-order on Amazon.

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