Snowflakes: Better Not Tell them They Can't Read, or they might cry.

Universities admit students who are 'almost illiterate', lecturers warn  

Camilla Turner, Education Editor 

16 February 2017 • 7:09pm 

Universities are admitting students who are “almost illiterate”, lecturers warn as they complain that dropping entry requirements has led to a generation of undergraduates who cannot read, write or speak proper English.

Almost half of academics (48 per cent) do not think that students are adequately prepared for university study, according to a Times Higher Education (THE) survey of over 1,000 academic staff.

Many academics believe that slipping standards are to blame, with one lecturer from a red brick university telling the survey: “Each year, the entry requirements for undergraduate programmes are reduced, meaning we get a high number of students who are almost illiterate.”

Another senior lecturer in nursing at a university in northern England, said: “We can now see a whole generation of registered nurses who cannot read critically or write coherently but who have somehow passed a degree – this is worrying”.

A third (33 per cent) of academic staff felt that international students do not have adequate language skills to study at university.  One lecturer at a London university told the survey that they wondered “how some of our [postgraduate] students got their first degrees, as the quality of their written English is really poor”.  

Plagiarism remains a concern, according to the survey, with 60 per cent of academics saying that they have caught students cheating at least once, and 28 per cent saying that they “regularly suspect” undergraduates of cheating.  

A number of lecturers also felt that the National Student Survey (NSS) gave students “too much power”, with academic rigour suffering becoming a secondary consideration.

“Many universities have shifted their focus towards student satisfaction at the expense of academic quality,” one academic told the survey.  

The Higher Education and Research Bill, championed by Universities Minister Jo Johnson,  includes plans to place student satisfaction at the heart of a new ranking system for universities.  

The bill outlines the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), where universities will be awarded gold, silver or bronze medals on the basis of a range of factors including student satisfaction, teaching excellence and preparation for the world of work. Universities are currently ranked based on quality of research output.  

Education leaders told The Telegraph earlier this year that they fear the bill, which is currently being debated in the House of Lords, will lead to a "fantastically dangerous" culture  where university staff are forced to pander to the demands of students which could undermine quality.

The answer is not to grade them based upon preparing students for work, that would actually dig the hole deeper.  Rather, one cannot grade on what is needed - responsible critical thinking skills. Personal experience - at a university ranked in the top 15 in the world, this is an issue! It was during my time there and that is over 10 years ago.

Creating white groups on campus "alienates minorities" - WIsconsin

Students: Chancellor failed minorities on pro-white agitator

Associated Press
1:51 p.m Friday, Jan. 27, 2017  
 

MADISON, Wis.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor's response to a student trying to set up a pro-white group on campus further alienates minorities as they struggle for a better campus experience, student leaders said Friday.

The student's effort to set up a campus chapter of the American Freedom Party — whose platform includes "prioritizing white supremacy values," according to its Facebook page — has raised questions about how the university should respond and comes as the white nationalist movement as a whole has been emboldened by Donald Trump's presidency.

Student government representatives urged Chancellor Rebecca Blank in a letter to denounce the AFP as racist. They said her statement Thursday saying that expressing objectionable viewpoints isn't illegal was weak.

"Chancellor Blank's statement is a testament to how administrators outwardly show a lack of verbal and systemic support for students of color or minority identities," the letter from Associated Students of Madison Chair Carmen Goséy, ASM Representative Brooke Evans and Student Activity Center Governing Board Chair Katrina Morrison said.

Blank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Adding to the students' concerns is that the man who's recruiting for the AFP chapter, Daniel Dropik, served almost five years in federal prison for racially charged arsons against churches in Milwaukee and Michigan. Dropik, 33, says frustration over the university's efforts to improve the experiences of minority students led him to start a local AFP chapter.

Blank said in her statement that the university is monitoring the group for threats but that expressing hateful viewpoints is legal and within campus policies. She added that she would ask regents to revisit the University of Wisconsin System's policy of not considering criminal records in the admission process.

Goséy, Evans and Morrison wrote that Blank is focusing on admissions policy rather than acknowledging the threat Dropik poses.

Doctoral student Walter Parrish III, who's studying higher education leadership and policy, said Blank's response failed to address minorities' discomfort given Dropik's criminal history. Parrish said Blank's response suggests the university doesn't have a plan in place to protect minority students.

"As a black student on campus, I'm wondering what does this mean? Who is to say something extreme won't happen?" Parrish said.

AFP national chair William Johnson said in a phone interview that Dropik told him Friday morning that the backlash against his recruiting efforts has been overwhelming and that he fears for his safety.

"On college campuses, there is a great deal of pushback whenever someone wants to a start a pro-white group," Johnson said.

Johnson said he knows of at least one college AFP chapter that operates "under the radar," but he wouldn't say where and wouldn't say whether there were more colleges with chapters. He said Trump's presidency makes recruiting efforts easier.

"When people hear you're a nationalist, they used to say, 'Oh, you're like Mussolini?' Now they say, 'Oh, you're like Donald Trump,'" he said.

Trump's disavowal in late November of white supremacists who have cheered his election hasn't quieted concerns about the movement's impact on the White House. His strongest denunciation has not come voluntarily, only when asked, and he occasionally trafficked in retweets of racist social media posts during his campaign.

In their letter, the student government leaders also took Blank to task for not strongly denouncing a man who wore a costume of former President Barack Obama with a noose around his neck to a football game in November. University officials made the man remove the noose but allowed him to stay at the game.

Blank said the noose was unacceptable but that the university must resist the urge to censor political dissent.

The students want Blank to participate in a cultural competency program so she can create policies that directly address racism on campus. A group of students are planning a march to protest Dropik's group Tuesday.

Nixonian Politics

Nixon was accused of a great many crimes.  Yet he resigned to spare the country embarrassment and worse, a period of instability at a time when the Cold War was blazing.

There are and have been many academics who teach the lessons of Nixon and do so with a dripping condescension and loathing for those who supported Nixon.


Hillary Clinton, when the history is finally written about her ... will make Nixon look like a boy-scout.  Her personal attacks, her enemies folder, her private investigations and smear teams, her bribing and meddling in criminal matters, her violations of national security, emails and servers ... she has already exceeded whatever crimes Nixon committed by volumes.

And yet, those academics still sing her praises and glory.  Like they were in church.

P.S - they will hang on to the glory of what could have been, even while privately admitting how flawed she was.  Her time is over, and thankfully we do not have anyone like her on the horizon.

Our nation has been spared that suffering.

Education and Segregation (and Trump support)

I wonder why Trump is even with Clinton in Pennsylvania and Ohio ...

Why does Trump resonate with voters.  If Obama was indeed 'helping' the poor ... why is it the poor / economically segregated in these states - why are they supporting Trump.

When resources are geared toward Black and Illegal, and poor whites have a harder time accessing resources ... why not support anyone who offers help.  These groups have been ignored by the Democrats and used by Republicans.

US's most economically segregated schools aren't whereyou might expect

Researchers comparing poverty rates in adjacent school districts expected to find the largest disparities in the South, but only one Southern state made the top 10 list.

By Rowena Lindsay, Staff August 23, 2016 

School systems in Detroit and its neighbor, Grosse Pointe, Mich., are the most economically disparate adjacent school districts in the country, according to a new report from EdBuild, an educational funding reform nonprofit. 

Looking at every school district in the country, compared with the other districts it borders, "Fault Lines: America's Most Segregating School District Borders," shows that while 49.2 percent of Detroit's school-age residents live in poverty, only 6.5 percent of their peers in neighboring Grosse Pointe live below the poverty line.

The problem goes beyond segregation itself: given American schools' reliance on local property taxes for funding, such disparate incomes are reflected in disparate opportunities for children in nearby districts. 

"The schools in these districts face tremendous impediments to teaching and learning, and yet because of district borders, low-income students are further deprived of the benefits from the financial and cultural capital of better-off peers that they would encounter in an integrated school," the report says. 

"Fault Lines" illustrates "how school finance systems have led to school segregation along class lines within communities around the country, and how judicial and legislative actions have actually served to strengthen these borders that divide our children and our communities," EdBuild's founder and chief executive, Rebecca Sibilia, told The Detroit News in an email.

The research team looked at all 33,500 borders throughout the country, comparing the poverty rates of school-aged children in neighboring districts. They expected to find the greatest disparity between schools in the South, Ms. Sibelia told NPR, only to find that just one Southern city made it into the 'Top 10' worst-segregated borders: Birmingham, Ala.

In Southern states, Sibelia said, county lines often double as school district lines, creating "less opportunity for intentional segregation." Instead, the researchers found the greatest disparity tended to occur in the country’s manufacturing centers: Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In the study, the term "segregation" is referring to class separation, not race. The two often overlap, however, creating what some allege is a legal way to essentially continue racial segregation in schools, decades after the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education declared it unconstitutional.

Detroit’s population is 82.7 percent African-American, according to 2010 census data, while the five towns in the Grosse Pointe district range just under 2 percent to about 13 percent African-American – with one notable outlier, Harper Woods, at about 45 percent.

In 1974, the Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley blocked proposals to bus students between districts in hope of achieving more racially integrated schools, ruling that the districts were not responsible for the segregation unless it could be proven to be intentional.

"The court said that the school district as a concept is basically untouchable," Ben Justice, an education historian at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education, told NPR. "To argue that where people live, particularly by the 1960s, was not the result of racist government policy was simply a lie. Public policy and private industry conspired to create neighborhoods where people could or could not live."

Grosse Pointe Superintendent Gary Niehaus told The Detroit News that the district is working to promote diversity after a video of a racist incident at one of the district's schools went viral.

"Our student body asked for town hall meetings after the second incident and from those conversations, we engaged the University of Michigan and we sent five students from both Grosse Pointe North and South to a summer leadership camp on diversity," Mr. Niehaus told The Detroit News. "It's a year-long program."

This approach may address the racial and classist climate within individual schools, however, it does not address the systemic problem of inequality in school districting and funding.

"We have five decades of research at this point that show that it's a huge advantage for low-income students to attend mixed-income schools and that middle-class students in those schools have high academic performance throughout and their scores aren't harmed," Halley Potter, a fellow at The Century Foundation and co-author of a report on the subject, told The Christian Science Monitor in June.