INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT

A few years ago, when the College Board was about to scrap the writing section on the SAT, I suggested that they instead simply send a copy of the essay to colleges and have it replace the corrupt, time-wasting exercise that is the personal statement colleges currently require…Offer students the option to write an essay in a one-hour or two-hour proctored setting. Send the results in some secure fashion to college administrators or employers. 

AEI

AI, Your College Student and the End of Individual Achievement

By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Deseret News
December 30, 2022

What can students do on their own? It’s a question that college admissions officers may increasingly be thinking about in the coming years. Unfortunately, they will have no way to measure this.

The recent news about how artificial intelligence apps can manufacture a high school or college essay from scratch has prompted the obvious observation that it will be much easier to cheat. Those who are inclined to do so won’t have to pay someone else to write it or even worry that the professor will be able to find the same essay online. And you can ensure that the essay will actually sound like you or someone at your level actually wrote it.

But truthfully AI is only the latest nail in the coffin of measuring individual achievement. The campaign against standardized testing is probably the largest part of the problem. Many colleges have made the SAT and ACT optional. Those who defend testing are considered backward, if not racist. And while some schools, like MIT, quickly realized this was not feasible if they were going to maintain high standards, others (where it is easier for students to switch to grade-inflated humanities majors) will stick to their guns. 

These changes have started earlier than college too. Cities have started to do away with testing to get into high schools for high-achieving students. The prestigious Boston Latin School, for example, is now accepting students via standards based on census tracks. Even testing students to see whether they are “gifted” is fraught now.  

But it’s not just testing. Elementary, high schools and colleges’ relentless focus on collaboration means there is little room for students to demonstrate their individual level of achievement. Every class is chock full of group projects, and schools are eager to tell parents that they are preparing children for a world of team building, leadership, cooperation and interpersonal negotiation. English classes feature student-led reading circles. Math classes include group quizzes (no, I’m not kidding). Social studies and science projects are jointly created Google slides presentations. 

But colleges and employers don’t simply want to know how well you work with others (which, when it comes to group projects, could also mean how well you coast while letting others do the work or how well you edit everyone else’s slides without offending them). They want to know: Who is this person applying to my school or for a job with me and how will they perform if I hire them?

Newspapers used to require copy-editing tests that were taken on the spot. Secretarial work required the demonstration of a certain number of words typed per minute. A few years ago, when the College Board was about to scrap the writing section on the SAT, I suggested that they instead simply send a copy of the essay to colleges and have it replace the corrupt, time-wasting exercise that is the personal statement colleges currently require. 

Sure, the SAT writing section might be short and maybe it doesn’t show the full breadth of a student’s ability but at least you know he or she did it alone, without a parent or a coach or the internet. You can read it to find out if a student has a basic grasp of the English language and maybe some familiarity with logic.

The College Board didn’t take up my suggestion. But there’s still a chance for some other company to try. Offer students the option to write an essay in a one-hour or two-hour proctored setting. Send the results in some secure fashion to college administrators or employers. Of course, the company could grade them, but such a score would almost be irrelevant. Different schools and employers want different things out of their applicants. Maybe one school wants to see some creativity and another values clarity above all else. Maybe there is some school out there that cares whether students have mastered the rules of grammar.

Now that there is a push to do away with the LSATs, law schools might also want to consider whether they want a measure of a student’s individual abilities. Surely being able to write a clear brief still has some market value in the legal world. Judges don’t want to see your collaborative Google slides presentation. And most law professors don’t want to be tasked with teaching kids basic writing skills. 

Technology has made it harder to measure individual skills, and it has often made it more difficult to teach those skills too. But that is not a reason to give up on the goal. While no man is an island, simulating the conditions of one can occasionally be useful.

READING IN HIGH SCHOOL?

Schools are switching to curricula that “aim to systematically build students’ knowledge about the world”…

Joanne Jacobs
1-3-2023

Teaching reading in high school

Memphis high schools are teaching reading skills to teenagers who didn’t learn to read well in the early grades, reports Sarah Mervosh in the New York Times. Some need to learn basic phonics, she writes. “Every student—including top performers—is learning to break down new vocabulary words, part by part.”

With his new tools, Roderick studied “I Have a Dream,” the speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—no longer skipping unfamiliar words, but instead circling them to discern their meaning.

Literacy is embedded in English, social studies and science classes

Tennessee’s Reading360 initiative doesn't just train teachers in the science of reading, writes Scott Langford, assistant director of schools in Sumner County, in Curriculum Matters. It gives teachers curriculum tools.

Furthermore, the state is training upper-grade teachers in reading science across all content areas, he writes. Teachers say the training is "incredibly beneficial."

In Sumner County, using a more rigorous curriculum exposed the fact that “so many of our kids were guessing at words,” writes Langford. But improving reading instruction in the early grades isn’t enough. Teachers were seeing reading problems in upper grades, until “our shift to knowledge-building curriculum.”

His bottom line: Foundational skills are the easy (and important!) win; knowledge-building is harder.

Schools spend a lot of time teaching comprehension skills and strategies, such as finding the main idea, but not nearly enough teaching knowledge, writes Natalie Wexler. For example, “kindergartners who got a literacy curriculum grounded in science topics had better reading comprehension” than similar students taught general comprehension skills, according to recent research.

2022 was a big year in reading instruction, as states and districts climbed on the "science of reading" bandwagon, writes Sarah Schwartz in Education Week. This part of her summary struck me: The “science of reading” isn’t just about building a foundation. It includes “evidence-based strategies for teaching vocabulary, comprehension, text structure, and other skills and knowledge that students need to become skilled readers.”

Schools are switching to curricula that “aim to systematically build students’ knowledge about the world, diving deeply into topics like the solar system or the civil rights movement by introducing them to lots of different texts on those topics,” she writes. It seems to work.

AMERICAN HEROES

The people who are warring on the reputations of our great founders and heroes are in fact trying to deliberately dismantle this country: hero by hero.

New York Post

 
We must rescue America’s heroes from those who tear them down.

Douglas Murray
December 22, 2022

[Murray’s latest podcast “Uncancelled History” focuses on American historical figures who have been at the forefront of scrutiny in recent years.]

When I first moved to the United States I did what any new arrival should do. I read about the country. And the first book I chose was Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Published 25 years ago, it has a memorable opening line: “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures.”
 

Just one thing that struck this then new arrival was that 25 years later it would be almost impossible for a book about this great country to begin with such a positive line.

Even in the period I have been here I have seen the whole story of this country turned on its head. A country that used to feel good about itself is being taught to feel bad about itself. A country which has done such a power of good in the world has been told to consider itself a great force of evil in the world. Almost everything in the American story has been turned on its head. With a quite deliberate intent.
For instance, we hear much about the propaganda of the “1619 Project.” Yet such initiatives cannot even be described as pseudo-history. They are mere propaganda exercises. An attempt to turn the story of America into a story of original sin, slavery and much more.

What is worst is that they have done this to our nation’s heroes. Every single one of them.

So earlier this year I decided to try to make my own small effort at hitting back. I do not have the resources of the New York Times at my disposal, but I got a team of the best young technicians and researchers and put together a list of the American figures who have been most maligned in recent years. I am sorry to say the initial list was very long. It would have been easier to create a list of American heroes who had not been lied about in recent years.

But in the end we decided to focus on the absolutely central figures. The Founding Fathers, Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and more. Throughout the course of this year I have been sitting down with some of America’s— and the world’s—leading historians to fill in the gap of ignorance that has been deliberately inserted into American society.

We called it “Uncancelled History” and you can listen to it on all podcast channels and watch each hour-long episode for free on YouTube among other places. I hope it will be a great learning resource. I am very proud of the results.

For instance speaking to the great Jefferson scholar Jean Yarborough, she told me things about Jefferson that I doubt one in a million Americans know. For instance we have been told for 30 years that Jefferson took sexual advantage of his inherited slave, Sally Hemings. The evidence was said to be conclusive.

Not so, says Yarborough, who sat on the commission that looked into the DNA evidence in the 1990s. As she showed, one of the most base claims against Jefferson would be chucked out if it had ever come into a court of law. The reputation of this most extraordinary man has been completely unfairly maligned. And even Monticello— which is meant to preserve the great man’s legacy—has gone along with such calumnies.

Historian after historian came up with similar nuggets of truth. But what struck me most was something that came up when I asked each historian why this is happening now. Why would anyone want to attack all of our heroes? Why would they want to wage war on these of all people? The answer was given by the Lincoln scholar I spoke with, Andrew Fergusson. Loving Lincoln, he said, is a way of loving America. And so hating on Lincoln is a way of hating on America.

There is a great truth in there. That the people who are warring on the reputations of our great founders and heroes are in fact trying to deliberately dismantle this country: hero by hero. These critics want to say that there is nothing good about us, that we never were good and that the whole thing was rotten from the start. If you want to push that agenda you can push it fastest by trying to pull down all the idols of the country.

Well it is time that Americans pushed back against this. It is something I am trying to arm people to do, in my own small way. I think this country is an extraordinary place. If I didn’t then (like millions of others) I would never have made my way here. But America is amazing not by accident, but by design. It is time we understood that design, and paid due reverence to the designers themselves. Because we have not just something—but everything—to be thankful to them for.

LORD HOWE

Pitt meant that the actual command of the army should be in the hands of Brigadier Lord Howe, and he was in fact its real chief; "the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the British army," says Wolfe. And he elsewhere speaks of him as "that great man." Abercromby testifies to the universal respect and love with which officers and men regarded him, and Pitt calls him "a character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue.”

High as this praise is, it seems to have been deserved. The young nobleman, who was then in his thirty-fourth year, had the qualities of a leader of men. The army felt him, from general to drummer-boy. He was its soul; and while breathing into it his own energy and ardor, and bracing it by stringent discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service and gave it new shapes to suit the time and place. During the past year he had studied the art of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in their scouting-parties, sharing all their hardships and making himself one of them. Perhaps the reforms that he introduced were fruits of this rough self-imposed schooling. He made officers and men throw off all useless incumbrances, cut their hair close, wear leggings to protect them from briers, brown the barrels of their muskets, and carry in their knapsacks thirty pounds of meal, which they cooked for themselves; so that, according to an admiring Frenchman, they could live a month without their supply-trains.

"You would laugh to see the droll figure we all make," writes an officer. "Regulars as well as provincials have cut their coats so as scarcely to reach their waists. No officer or private is allowed to carry more than one blanket and a bearskin. A small portmanteau is allowed each officer. No women follow the camp to wash our linen. Lord Howe has already shown an example by going to the brook and washing his own.” Here, as in all things, he shared the lot of the soldier, and required his officers to share it. A story is told of him that before the army embarked he invited some of them to dinner in his tent, where they found no seats but logs, and no carpet but bear-skins. A servant presently placed on the ground a large dish of pork and peas, on which his lordship took from his pocket a sheath containing a knife and fork and began to cut the meat.

The guests looked on in some embarrassment; upon which he said: "Is it possible, gentlemen, that you have come on this campaign without providing yourselves with what is necessary?" And he gave each of them a sheath, with a knife and fork, like his own. Yet this Lycurgus of the camp, as a contemporary calls him, is described as a man of social accomplishments rare even in his rank. He made himself greatly beloved by the provincial officers, with many of whom he was on terms of intimacy, and he did what he could to break down the barriers between the colonial soldiers and the British regulars. When he was at Albany, sharing with other high officers the kindly hospitalities of Mrs. Schuyler, he so won the heart of that excellent matron that she loved him like a son; and, though not given to such effusion, embraced him with tears on the morning when he left her to lead his division to the lake. 

In Westminster Abbey may be seen the tablet on which Massachusetts pays grateful tribute to his virtues, and commemorates "the affection her officers and soldiers bore to his command."

Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe. [1884] Library of Alexandria. Kindle Edition.

WRITING MATTERS

This inability to write at what was once considered a fifth-grade level is now the norm among students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, races and ethnicities. It is also the predictable result of the overemphasis on self-expression at the expense of excellence that has been driving the decline of American K-12 and higher education for decades.

Before I met them, many of my college students had been exposed mostly to writing assignments that focused on emotional self-expression, not rational argumentation. Partly as a result, most of them were not only poor writers but also underdeveloped thinkers.

The Hill
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Make American education rigorous again
by Elizabeth Grace Matthew, Opinion Contributor—12/08/22

ACT test scores made public in a report Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022, reveal a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.  

Now that school choice is being touted not only by Republicans but also by Democrats, after public school students’ test scores took a nosedive as a result of school districts’ COVID-19 policies, it is a good moment to reintroduce rigor to American education writ large.  

I have been a college-level writing instructor at several universities, ranging from an elite ivy league institution to middling state schools, for more than a decade. Most of my students have been bright, hard-working and ambitious. But most of them could not reliably construct grammatical sentences.

This inability to write at what was once considered a fifth-grade level is now the norm among students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, races and ethnicities. It is also the predictable result of the overemphasis on self-expression at the expense of excellence that has been driving the decline of American K-12 and higher education for decades.

Educational “experts” who purport to know what is best for children have long presided over increasing illiteracy and innumeracy, and a widening achievement gap. These so-called experts, beginning with those in the academy, are impervious to ever-mounting evidence that the more we do what they prescribe the worse things get.

To fix the manifold problems in American education and in the broader culture that schools and universities are producing, we will need to recover two related ideas that are anathema to today’s educational establishment: First, that mastery of a subject or skill is recognizable and worthy of praise; second, that the discipline of mastery (which should be common) is not the opposite of creativity (which is rare), but a prerequisite for it.

Educational experts have come up with a lot of sophisticated-sounding reasons for what amounts to dumbing education down. Rote learning, memorization and homework are all out of vogue. Supposedly, these ancient instructional tools perpetuate classism and racism. It turns out, however, that the achievement gap between students of different classes and races increases, not decreases, as educational standards decline.

Most of my students did not know basic grammar and punctuation because they were never drilled and tested on these concepts. If they did not absorb these patterns by osmosis (that is, if they were not both inclined toward lots of reading and sufficiently privileged to have access to books) then they did not absorb them at all.

My Italian American grandmother, by contrast, who attended Philadelphia public schools in the 1930s and had parents who spoke broken English and no books in her home, could reliably capitalize and punctuate basic sentences. This would put her in the top 10 percent of the hundreds of students I taught over the years, at least half of whom had college-educated parents. My grandmother was not smarter than most of these kids, nor was she of a higher socioeconomic class.

But she had attended school when educational discourse innocently and rightly assumed that objective standards were just as applicable to and achievable for racially diverse, socio-economically disadvantaged and English-as-a-second-language students as anyone else. When my grandmother was a kid, it had not yet occurred to anyone to pretend that such standards have no merit just because it is harder to help kids without as many resources to meet them.

If acknowledging that excellence exists and can be measured is the first step toward making American education rigorous again, recognizing that mastery precedes (not inhibits) creativity is the second.

Great emphasis on fostering children’s creativity has suffused educational discourse since the 1970s, when the late Maria Montessori’s idea that “play is the work of childhood” took root. That is fine for very young children. But fostering creativity at the expense of mastery beyond the age of 9 or 10, when children should begin to engage higher-order thinking, is counter-productive.

Before I met them, many of my college students had been exposed mostly to writing assignments that focused on emotional self-expression, not rational argumentation. Partly as a result, most of them were not only poor writers but also underdeveloped thinkers.

For those few among us who are true creatives, rigorous instruction in syntax, grammar and punctuation feed the craft, not detract from it. This is as true in other areas as it is in writing. As any top-tier jazz musician can explain, to break rules productively, you must first know the rules and how to follow them.

This seems like common sense. Yet, for decades now, educational elites have been making things worse for everyone (most acutely for poor and minority students) while insisting that they are making them better.

We could have spent the past 50 years expanding access to traditionally rigorous educational standards to truly include everyone. Instead, we spent them deferring to people who tore those standards apart, replaced them with counter-productive nonsense and asked us to pretend that their naked emperor was dressed in silks.

Any return to rigor begins with acknowledging that education is about steady soldiers finding the most effective ways to help students meet enduring and objective standards—not whiny revolutionaries insisting that such standards do not exist.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.

WORK—FAMILY

Lisa Belkin, a New York Times reporter covering the work-family beat, wrote of how once during a business trip she sang a lullaby to her two young boys from a telephone bank at the Atlanta airport; the women making calls on both sides of her wept.

Kay S. Hymowitz, Liberation’s Children
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003, 169

RED TERROR

There was virtually no control over the application of Red Terror by sailors, from both the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets. Assembled into anti-profiteer detachments, they based themselves at railway stations and seized any articles at random. There was no appeal. One man whose goods had been impounded described the head of one these groups: ‘a sailor with high cheekbones, a Mauser on his belt, and a pewter earring in one ear. He was eating salt fish with a wooden spoon, like porridge, and he was not at all eager to talk.’ Their favorite task was spotting disguised burzhui and taking revenge. A group searching a train seized General Abaleshev, who could hardly pass himself off as a worker. He was forced to open his suitcase. Right at the top were his shoulder boards with Tsarist insignia. They shot him beside the track.

Indiscriminate class revenge was the mission of many sailors. In mid-January Bolsheviks from the Black Sea Fleet took part in the confused fighting in Odessa against junker cadets, officers and Ukrainian nationalists. There were estimated to be 11,000 unemployed officers in Odessa alone. ‘An arrested officer has just been led past,’ Yelena Lakier noted in her diary. ‘He was tall and very young. Poor man. Are they taking him to the Almaz, a cruiser anchored in the port? They take officers there, torture them and then dump the bodies in the sea.’ The next day, when their apartment was searched by sailors, one of them poked around under beds and cupboards with a sword. He boasted to Yelena Lakier ‘I took this sword from an officer on the Chumnaya Hill, then I finished him off.’ ‘Didn’t you feel sorry for killing him? He was a fellow Russian.’ ‘Who should feel sorry for killing a counter-revolutionary? We “bathed” a lot of them from the Almaz.’

Echoes of the atrocities in the south soon reached Moscow. A friend of the writer Ivan Bunin who had just returned from Simferopol in the Crimea reported that ‘indescribable horror’ was taking place there. ‘Soldiers and workers are “walking up to their knees in blood.” An old colonel was roasted alive in the furnace of a locomotive.’ On 14 January, Bolshevik sailors from the Black Sea Fleet killed some 300 victims at Evpatoria by throwing them in the sea from the steamship Romania, having first broken their arms and legs. ‘The most senior officer, who had been wounded, was picked up and thrown headfirst into the ship’s furnace. On the transport Truevor, the officers were brought up from the hold one by one, and their bodies were mutilated while they were still alive before being thrown overboard.’

Antony Beevor, Russia (137-138). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.