Newmark's Door

Remarkable argument for why minorities have had increasing difficulty gaining admittance to New York City's selective high schools. 

This, unfortunately, hits very close to home for me: "North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against 'whiteness in educational spaces.'"

The conclusion for policy is as dopey as I'd expect, but I give the author props for correctly identifying yet another of the Left's big problems.

Dominic Green presents one hellacious put down of Ms. Hannah-Jones. Here's now it begins:

Congratulations to Nikole Hannah-Jones for parlaying the intellectual imposture of the 1619 Project into a job for life. Hannah-Jones has been hired by Howard University as a professor in Race & Journalism. Both of these fields are rife with dubious standards and historic embarrassments, so she should fit right in.

Regarding K-12 education this is so very, very true.

And for a laugh see this post arguing that the head of the American Federation of Teachers accidentally endorsed school choice.

Martin Center review of Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning.

Princeton Univ. Press offers this summary:

Visiting schools across the United States as well as in China and Singapore, Bain, working with his longtime collaborator, Marsha Marshall Bain, uncovers super courses throughout the humanities and sciences. At the University of Virginia, undergrads contemplate the big questions that drove Tolstoy—by working with juveniles at a maximum-security correctional facility. Harvard physics students learn about the universe not through lectures but from their peers in a class where even reading is a social event. And students at a Dallas high school use dance to develop growth mindsets—and many of them go on to top colleges, including Juilliard. Bain defines these as super courses because they all use powerful researched-based elements to build a “natural critical learning environment” that fosters intrinsic motivation, self-directed learning, and self-reflective reasoning.

Color me skeptical.

Interesting exposition by Paul Graham of one reason why high school and college English is taught so badly. Excerpt:

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

Link courtesy of reader JK.

Two more of Graham's essays on writing are quite worthwhile: "Write Simply" and "Writing, Briefly".

Six-minute video on the crying need for more charter schools in NYC.

Related: "Black parents’ righteous fury at NYC public school failure" and "‘It’s frightening’: Troubled NYC school told mom to pull her smart son out". 

Despite the critics the number of charters in NC have, in the last ten years--after Republicans raised the cap on the number of charters--doubled to 200.

In case you missed it, in the early part of the time allotted for public comment, the school board in Loudoun Co., VA suddenly declared the meeting closed and asked police to forcibly remove commenters who wouldn't leave. Note to the school board: you want more Republican voters? This is how you get more Republican voters.

See also "Crazy scenes from Loudoun County school board meeting . . ."

Background on the yelling and screaming about schools in Loudoun County: "Parents Explain How Loudoun County Became Ground Zero in the Culture Wars".

Related: "Bucks County Pennsylvania Resident and Taxpayer Confronts The School Board".