RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
February 19 to February 25, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports that cutting gifted and talented programs and honors classes has set back public-schoolers nationwide – prompting educators’ warnings that accelerated new efforts in the name of “equity” will make matters even worse. He writes: -
Even some diversity backers say it’s a bad idea to throw together more and more students with widely differing abilities. -
As a result of such policies, a huge learning gap already exists in cities, suburbs and small towns. For example, 70 percent of pupils in the same grade – fourth -- placed in four or more different math tiers from low to advanced; i.e., from roughly second- to sixth-grade. -
The pandemic widened that spread. Low-income students spent more time in remote instruction and dropped even further behind better-off white peers. -
In a school district outside Dayton, Ohio, struggling fifth graders read first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, while the ace students read at sixth-grade level, devouring doorstoppers including Harry Potter novels. -
“It's like we have gone back to the days of the one-room schoolhouse,” says a classroom specialist.
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To learn, students need challenging instruction calibrated just beyond what they already know – all but impossible when the learning gap is three or more grades in a single classroom. -
But in today’s racially charged education climate, dissenters face a hostile reception. -
Expert: “If you want to be called a racist, go out and say that you're for ability grouping.”
In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski salutes the efforts of Roald Dahl’s publisher to enlist “sensitivity readers” to edit the late children’s author’s prose so that it is less oppressive and more befitting today’s sensibilities. And Murawski goes the revisionists one (or four) better. “The examples below,” Murawski pronoun-ces, “show how easily the dangerous wrongthink of previous generations can be cleansed ... so that we might keep the classics alive by aligning them with the arc of herstory as it bends toward justice.” To wit: -
“Animal Farm” by George Orwell: “The two beings who were assigned horses at birth had just lain down when a brood nontraditional family of minoritized allies who self-identify as ducklings, which had lost their mother egg-laying breeder, filed defiantly marched into the barn, cheeping feebly their personal trauma and wandering from side to side to find some place safe space where they would not be trodden on marginalized.”
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway U.S. ethics officials in recent years have sent a letter warning one-third of the Energy Department’s senior officials – more than 130 in total – that they or their families owned stocks related to the agency’s work, reminding them not to violate federal conflict-of-interest rules. Most held on to the stocks, a Wall Street Journal analysis of officials’ financial disclosures from 2017 through 2021 shows. The letter doesn’t direct the official to sell the stock. It just advises him or her not to work on matters that would “have a direct and predictable effect” on the company, and to “remain alert for any potential conflicts.” In the meantime, the official is allowed to continue owning the stock and is certified as complying with federal conflict-of-interest rules. U.S. law prohibits federal officials from working “personally and substantially” on any matters in which they, their spouses or their dependent children have a significant financial stake. Regulations adopted in 1992 direct U.S. officials to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest. The Department of Energy is not an outlier. In a series of articles published last fall, the Journal reported that across 50 federal agencies, more than 2,600 government officials reported investments that stood to rise or fall with the decisions made by their agencies. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series From the Annals of Why It’s So Hard to Figure Out What’s Going On: Begin with this article, which reports that the dangerous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is part of a larger pattern, as the number of Norfolk Southern hazmat train cars involved in accidents last year was six times higher than a decade earlier. Some 654 of the company's hazardous material-carrying cars were involved in accidents in 2022, compared with 105 in 2012, Federal Railroad Administration figures show. Of those hazmat cars, 14 suffered damage in 2012, compared with 85 last year. Across the decade-long period, the company's cars released hazardous materials 43 times. … The rise in incidents involving Norfolk Southern's hazmat train cars comes amid massive cuts to the company's workforce and an increase in the average length of its trains by 20%. Federal regulators admit that longer trains can 'exacerbate' safety issues, while unions claim cuts to the workforce across the rail industry are linked to a rise in accidents. In a separate article, The Intercept continues this narrative by reporting that some experts believe the train might not have derailed if it had electronically controlled pneumatic, or ECP, brakes – and that “an industry push to kill the [Obama administration’s 2015] ECP mandate” has reduced safety. In a separate editorial, however, the Wall Street Journal challenges those claims: “GAO in 2016 identified myriad problems with the government’s cost-benefit analysis [of the ECP brakes], and the Trump Administration rescinded the rule in 2018. There’s no evidence ECP brakes would have prevented the derailment, and the Obama rule wouldn’t have applied to the Norfolk Southern train because it wasn’t classified as a ‘high hazard flammable unit train.’” The editorial also reports: “Train derailments have fallen by half since 2003 and by more than 80% since 1980 even as deregulation has made railroads more efficient and profitable.” On Thursday, the National Transportation Safety Board said an overheated wheel bearing precipitated the derailment. The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a supposedly climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution so toxic that 25% of people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. This article reports: In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The EPA has refused to disclose information about these waste-based fuels, but documents with blacked out sections obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian showed that the fuels that Chevron plans to make “present serious health risks, including developmental problems in children and cancer and harm to the nervous system, reproductive system, liver, kidney, blood and spleen.” The EPA and Chevron disagree with this assessment. Coronavirus Investigations The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses. This article reports: The 15 trials compared outcomes of wearing of surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness. It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs. The article’s reporter, John Tierney, notes: “This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public-health establishment to forsake ‘the science’ ‒ and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science.” |
