Category: Education

House Panel Opens Probe into Ivy League Schools Following Anti-Semitism Hearing

Just the News

The House Education and Workforce Committee is opening an investigation into Harvard University, MIT, University of Pennsylvania and other schools, following a recent congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. 

House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik R-N.Y., called the testimony of the universities’ presidents “morally bankrupt.” Democrats and Republicans have condemned the universities’ presidents’ responses to questions about how their respective schools combat hate speech and antisemitism on campus. 

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Rick Santorum Says 2024 GOP Presidential Campaigns Are Seeking His Advice Ahead of Iowa Caucus

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Former Republican presidential candidate and Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said 2024 GOP campaigns have reached out to him ahead of the Jan. 15 Iowa caucus, Politico reported Thursday.

Santorum narrowly won Iowa in 2012 after polling in the low-single digits for much of his campaign, inching out ahead of the eventual GOP nominee, Mitt Romney. The former candidate told Politico that at least two Republican presidential campaigns have sought his advice in recent weeks as candidates are running out of time to take down former President Donald Trump, who is currently leading the field by nearly 50 points nationally.

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Commentary: If Your Kids Aren’t Happy at School, Find Them Another One

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

“I hated going to school when I was a kid,” said Elon Musk in a 2015 interview. “It was torture.”

When deciding how his own children would be educated, Musk rejected traditional schooling and created his own project-based microschool, Ad Astra, in 2014, on his SpaceX campus. “The kids really love going to school,” said Musk about Ad Astra in that same interview, adding that “they actually think vacations are too long as they want to go back to school.” In 2020, Ad Astra evolved into the fully online school, Astra Nova, and its popular math enrichment spin-off, Synthesis.

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Commentary: Charter Schools Rise to the Challenge

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Due to pandemic-related issues, declining birthrates, inferior education, radical curricula, etc., government-run schools are bleeding students. Whereas traditional public schools (TPS) had 50.8 million students enrolled in 2019, the number had shrunk to 49.4 million one year later. The federal government now projects that public school enrollment will fall even further – to 47.3 million – by 2030, an almost 7% drop in 11 years.

Where are the kids going? The U.S. Census Bureau reports that families are moving to private schools and setting up home schools at a great rate. But what can parents do if they can’t home-school or afford a private school and there are no educational freedom laws on the books? Their option then would be charter schools, which are independently operated public schools of choice that aren’t shackled by the litany of rules and regs that TPS are encumbered with and, importantly, are rarely unionized.

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Math Scores Around the U.S. Plunge as Students Suffer from Learning Loss

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

U.S. students are lagging behind other industrialized students in math in a global assessment released Tuesday, according to Axios.

Students in the U.S. saw a 13-point fall in their 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) score compared to their 2018 results, according to Axios. The score was “among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics” and comes as U.S. students are suffering learning loss following the pandemic.

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Commentary: Teaching Your Child to Read Is the Gateway to All Learning

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Father Reading to Son

When my husband and I decided we were going to homeschool, we puzzled over what might be his contribution. Our division of labor as a married couple included me as a stay-at-home mom and him as the primary breadwinner. Nevertheless, we wanted to find a way for him to be involved in the educational aspects of raising our children, despite his being gone all day at work. After giving it some thought, my husband decided on reading to our children at night as part of their bedtime ritual.

As soon as our first born could sit still enough to listen to a story, he began reading to her. As we added more children to the household, the bedtime ritual, already well established with our first, continued with each subsequent child. My husband sat and read his way through all of the books that had captured us as children, while our own children snuggled into their beds, listening attentively.

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Democrats Versus Muslims: Liberal States Back School District’s Ban on Opt-Outs for LGBTQ Lessons

Just the News

A wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., doesn’t inherently object to shielding even older students from sexually mature material. It just doesn’t want to give the choice to parents.

Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pulled a novel that celebrates a promiscuous gay teen sex columnist from high school libraries even as the district was arguing in court that parents cannot opt out their pre-kindergarten children from LGBTQ “storybooks” that portray sex workers, kink, drag, elementary-age romance and gender-identity transitions.

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Seattle Middle School Students Send Pro-LGBTQ Cards to Conservative Moms Group as Part of Class Assignment

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Seattle middle school students sent a group of conservative moms pro-LGBTQ nastygrams as part of a recent assignment.

The parental rights group Moms for Liberty posted pictures of the hate mail they received from the Jane Addams Middle School class on Saturday.

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Catholic All-Girls College Will Admit Men Who Identify as Trans Women

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, will begin allowing men who identify as women to enroll at the college in the fall of 2024, an email obtained by The Daily Signal shows.

President Katie Conboy told faculty in an email sent Tuesday afternoon that “Saint Mary’s will consider undergraduate applicants whose sex assigned at birth is female or who consistently live and identify as women.” That news was first reported by the Notre Dame student newspaper, The Observer.

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Faithful Catholic Colleges See ‘Unprecedented’ Enrollment Numbers, Financial Support

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Catholic University of America

As most collegiate institutions grapple with disappointing enrollment, a slew of faithful Catholic colleges are reporting surprising enrollment numbers and financial support.

Their success is heralded by the Newman Guide, a list of higher education options consulted by Catholic parents throughout the world, as evidence of the positive impact that authentic Catholic education has upon society. The Newman Guide recognizes colleges that are determined to provide a thoroughly faithful Catholic education (and removes colleges from the list when they fall short).

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End Sought to Litigation of Wisconsin School Choice, School Voucher

The Center Square
Teacher and Students

Litigation of school choice and school vouchers in Wisconsin Supreme Court should end, the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce said on Wednesday.

The state’s largest business group filed an amicus brief with the court. It asks justices to reject the lawsuit that seeks to end school choice and school vouchers.

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Moms for Liberty Revenue Grows by 500 Percent in One Year

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Tina Descovich/ Moms for Liberty

The parental rights group Moms for Liberty’s revenue has grown by more than 500% in its second year, according to the Form 990 it filed with the IRS.

According to the Form 990, exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, Moms for Liberty brought in $2.14 million in total revenue in 2022, while it brought in $370,029 in total revenue the year before. A significant majority of that money (92.3%) came from donations—contributions and grants. Expenses for 2021 totaled a mere $163,647, while in 2022 they rose to $1.7 million.

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Students Across the U.S. Are Absent Much More than Before the Pandemic

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Teacher Classroom

Nearly 70% of students attended schools that experienced chronic absenteeism during the 2021-2022 academic year, according to data compiled by Attendance Works and Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Before the pandemic, 25% of students attended a school with high levels of chronic absenteeism, but during the 2021-2022 academic year at the percentage rose to 66%, according to the report from Attendance Works, a nonprofit focusing on absenteeism, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which focuses on high school graduation. Nearly 14.7 million students, or 29.7%, were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year.

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Wisconsin Representative Says Universities Should Be Graded Publicly on Antisemitism

Just the News
Rep Grothman College

Congressman Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., says that universities should be graded in regard to antisemitism on a scale for the public to see. 

“On the antisemitic thing, groups ought to come out and rank the universities: A, B, C, D and E,” Grothman said on the Thursday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “Say if you have a Jewish child. Would you want them to go to this university?  What university would want to be labeled an F for Jewish children?”

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Commentary: Let the Donor Revolution Begin

RealClearWire

The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.

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Education Reformers Question Wisconsin Schools’ Expectations

The Center Square

Despite test scores that show nearly 60% of students in Wisconsin schools cannot read or do math at grade level, more than 90% of school districts in the state meet the state’s expectations.

The Department of Public Instruction recently released its school and school district report cards.

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Biden Admin Unveils New Tools to Counter Antisemitism, Islamophobia in Schools

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The Biden administration announced new resources on Tuesday to counter antisemitism and Islamophobia at schools across the U.S. following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, according to a White House press release.

College students signed letters blaming Israel for the Hamas terrorist attacks and multiple student groups led pro-Palestinian protests with imagery associated with violence against Israel. The White House released a series of guides and resources to “help protect students, engage school and university leaders, and foster safe and supportive learning environments.”

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Commentary: The General Education Act Renews Liberal Education in America

RealClearWire

On Nov. 16, the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in North Carolina, and the National Association of Scholars in New York City (I serve on the board) will host online, Recentering our Universities, to release to the public The General Education Act. The GEA is a detailed model bill directing the establishment of Schools of General Education at public universities. Written by EPPC’s Stanley Kurtz, the Martin Center’s Jenna Robinson, and NAS’s David Randall, the model legislation sets forth guiding principles, basic courses, institutional structure, funding exigencies, and a timetable for implementation of centers of true liberal education.

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Speaker Vos Vows No Movement on University of Wisconsin Raises Without Changes to DEI Spending

The Center Square

The top Republican in the Wisconsin Assembly says he is encouraged by the University of Wisconsin’s plan to focus on in-demand degrees, but it’s not enough to move him off his block of the university’s pay raises.

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University of North Dakota Hit with Civil Rights Complaints Alleging Tuition Programs Illegally Discriminate Based on Race

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Two North Dakota higher education institutions were hit this week with civil rights complaints over tuition reduction programs open only to specific racial groups.

The Equal Protection Project (EPP) filed civil rights complaints against the University of North Dakota (UND) and UND School of Law for tuition reduction programs that are “only available to non-white applicants,” according to complaints obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. UND’s website cites the authority of North Dakota State Board of Higher Education (SBHE) policy that encourages institutions to use tuition waivers to “promote enrollment of a culturally diverse student body.”

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Poll: Americans Say Schools Should Focus on Math, Reading, and Writing

The Center Square

A large majority of voters say that public schools should focus on the basics – math, reading, writing, science and social studies – to improve the quality of public education in the country.

That’s according to the latest The Center Square’s Voters’ Voice poll conducted in late October in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights. The poll of 2,605 likely voters includes 1,035 Republicans, 1,074 Democrats, and 496 true Independents, and is among the most comprehensive in the country.

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Commentary: As Education Decentralizes, Those Who Like Control Are Nervous

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

As more parents gain the opportunity to abandon a compulsory schooling assignment for other options, including homeschooling and microschooling, it’s no surprise that those who favor top-down control of education feel anxious about this bottom-up education transformation. This nervousness is occurring on both ends of the political spectrum.

On the political left, The Washington Post did some pearl-clutching last week around the possibility that “no government official will ever check on what, or how well, [homeschoolers] are being taught.” On the political right, the Fordham Institute expressed similar concerns about hybrid homeschoolers and microschoolers: “To ensure that those children receive the education they deserve, it will require policymakers to craft smart laws to govern these new institutions….”

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Poll: Voters Satisfied with Local Schools but Not Public Schools in General

The Center Square

A new poll shows a large disparity between how voters think of their local public school system and the nation’s school system as a whole, signaling frustration with larger education issues as opposed to more area-specific ones.

Respondents’ approval of their local schools held constant in the most recent The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, which was conducted by Noble Predictive Insights.

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Commentary: If Public Education Were a Business, It Would Be Bankrupt

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

There has been, for some time now, optimism about a post-Covid recovery for American public school students, but sadly, there is no good news to be had.

Looking through a long lens, government-run education has been an enterprise rife with failure. The National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report in 1983 titled “A Nation at Risk,” which used dire language, asserting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

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Trump Proposes Free Online College, Says Ones Now Turning Students into ‘Communists and Terrorists’

Just the News

Former President Trump is making a reelection pledge that if he elected he would create a federally funded online university that awards free degrees, in response to those now in the U.S. that are “turning our students into communists and terrorists.”

Trump makes the pledge in a campaign video obtained by Politico.

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State Republicans Push Free Speech Punishments for University of Wisconsin Schools

The Center Square

Republicans at the Wisconsin Capitol say students need free speech protections on University of Wisconsin campuses.

The Assembly Committee on Colleges and University held a public hearing on a pair of plans Republicans say will not only make sure the Universities of Wisconsin are respecting the First Amendment but will also open the campus to more students.

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Undergrad Enrollment Increases for First Time Since Pandemic, Number of Freshmen Decline

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Undergraduate enrollment numbers increased during the fall semester for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic while the number of freshmen enrolling in colleges and universities declined, according to the National Student Research Clearinghouse Center (NSRCC).

Undergraduate enrollment at colleges and universities increased 2.1% compared to 2022 and 1.2% compared to 2021, with community colleges accounting for nearly 59% of the increase, according to the NSRCC. Freshmen enrollment declined by 3.6%, with bachelor programs seeing a 6.9% and 4.7% decline, respectively, at public and private four-year nonprofit institutions.

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Elite Universities That Defended Free Speech for Hamas Supporters Have Long Record of Canceling Conservatives

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) released statements defending students’ pro-Hamas speech after campus protests, but in the past have muzzled conservatives for speech and online statements.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay and UPenn President Elizabeth Magill both said their respective universities support “free expression” in statements made after pro-Palestinian rallies at the colleges following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. In the past, however, conservative speakers and professors at the universities have frequently been shouted down, and some have been canceled for online statements.

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Memo Reveals How Teachers Union Worked on Bill to Keep Sexually Explicit Books in Schools

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Democratic lawmakers privately negotiated with the nation’s largest teachers union to craft a bill intended to combat bans of sexually explicit books in schools, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Right To Read Act was reintroduced by Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed in April 2023, and is intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers. The bill also authorized $500 million in funding for school libraries and provides liability protections to school librarians and educators providing sexually explicit books to students.

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Ticket Site Eventbrite Blocks Riley Gaines Event but Gives Thumbs Up to Pro-Hamas Event

M.D. Kittle

Ticket sales giant Eventbrite won’t allow Riley Gaines to promote her upcoming speech, but it was all in on a pro-Hamas event hosted by an LGBTQ community center.

That is until public pressure caught up with the big tech platform.

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Commentary: Teaching Children to Self-Entertain

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Teaching children to self-entertain is key to traditional parenting. While I totally understand the desire to occasionally use technology and screens as “babysitters,” shouldn’t parents aim to instill more sustainable and healthier alternatives? In comes teaching children to self-entertain!

Essentially, self-entertainment means kids keeping themselves appropriately occupied while a parent’s attention is elsewhere. As much as this benefits children when they are small, it also plants the seed for healthy, independent adulthood. Children who know how to self-entertain won’t need to depend on television, video games, social media, or other technology to keep busy in their free time. They will already know how to pursue worthier and healthier activities.

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Oregon Suspends Basic Skills Graduation Requirement in the Name of Equity

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In the state of Oregon, high school students will no longer need to display basic comprehension of reading, math, or writing in order to graduate, with state officials claiming that such a change is necessary to guarantee higher graduation rates for minority students.

As reported by Fox News, the pause on such basic graduation requirements had first been implemented during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic. But last week, the Oregon State Board of Education voted unanimously to extend the requirement suspension at least until the end of the 2027-2028 school year.

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Commentary: 25 Traditionalist Books to Read with Your Children

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

One of the best things parents can do for their children is read with them. Even reading a few minutes a day makes a world of difference.

Literacy is not only the key skill required by almost all education formats but also one of the most influential factors in any learning endeavor. Even children too young to read independently garner an incredible amount from listening to books read aloud. They significantly increase their language skills, attention span, memory, visual awareness, and emotional response and regulation. And, of course, reading together offers children time to cuddle up with parents for quality bonding time.

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Alan Dershowitz Commentary: Harvard Must Condemn Pro-Hamas Students

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Outside of Harvard Law School

There’s an ongoing debate on university campuses about whether and how to respond to students who support, defend or even praise what Hamas terrorists deliberately did to innocent Israeli children, the elderly and other civilians.

On the one hand, there are free-speech and academic-freedom considerations.

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Commentary: The Reason the Department of Education Is Afraid of Innovation in Higher Ed

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Online learning has revolutionized higher education, but a recent move by the federal Department of Education is threatening to tear down systems that are helping millions of students learn.

An extremely wide diversity of students choose to take online courses or to get entire online degrees. Colleges that offer them need to be nimble as the economy changes, yet traditional colleges are slow to change, and they often lack the expertise and funding to develop and manage online courses independently.

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Campus Speech Codes Used Against Students Who Dismiss Hamas Terrorism as Israel’s Fault

Just the News

A mile and a half from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, a free speech battle is raging over the worst terrorist attack on Israeli soil.

New York University is under fire from critics of Israel and civil libertarians for its response to pro-Palestine student activism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli civilians and Israel’s resulting Gaza offensive.

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Wisconsin State Lawmakers Block Raises for University Workers in Fight Against Diversity Spending

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature withheld pay raises for employees of the University of Wisconsin System (UW) over  its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) funding, according to the Associated Press.

Wisconsin Republicans voted in June to cut the UW System’s budget by $32 million, which is the estimated amount it spends on DEI over a 2-year period. Wisconsin Republicans denied the raises Tuesday in a bid to pressure the system to cut the spending, according to the AP.

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As Colleges Belatedly Condemn Hamas Terrorism, Campus Attacks on Pro-Life Activists Ignored

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Elite universities that rushed to condemn the killing of George Floyd and Jan. 6 Capitol riot saw no need to denounce Hamas for terrorism against Israeli women, children and partiers – until wealthy donors called them out and even demanded the firing of top brass.

Another oft-marginalized group on campus doesn’t have titans of hedge funds, private equity firms and the “Law & Order” franchise to plead their case, however.

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Jewish Groups: Students for Justice in Palestine Is Terror-Affiliated Organization Protected by U.S. Universities

M.D. Kittle

In the aftermath of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, Arizona State University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) declared “Palestinian freedom fighters are not terrorists!”

The message was a theme in the group’s anti-Israel “Day of Resistance” in solidarity with Palestine — and, by extension, Hamas.

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Lawmakers Call University of Wisconsin Regional Campus Decisions Unfortunate, Unsurprising

The Center Square

Few at the Wisconsin capital is happy about the University of Wisconsin’s decision to end in-person classes at two regional campuses, though they are not shocked.

University president Jay Rothman announced the university will end face-to-face classes at UW-Milwaukee Washington County and UW Oshkosh Fond du Lac.

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ACT Test Scores Fall to 30-Year-Low

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

A new report shows that the average high school student’s ACT college admissions test scores have fallen to their lowest point in 30 years, reflecting an ongoing decline in the quality of education in the United States after the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.

As Fox News reports, the average scores for the American College Testing (ACT) exams have fallen for the last six years in a row, with the decline becoming noticeably faster in the years during and after COVID. The average score in 2023 was 19.5 out of 36, which comes out to a percentage of 54%. In 2022, the average score was 19.8.

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Commentary: Thales College Restores True Education to the University

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

I am delighted to say that I will be joining the new Thales College, as a professor of humanities. What that means, I shall try to describe by way of contrast.

Let us suppose I am at almost any other American or Canadian college. I am considering Caravaggio’s painting of Mary Magdalen. Right there, I’m skating on thin ice. That isn’t just because the painting has a religious theme. It’s because I can depend upon almost nothing, among even the brightest college students, when it comes to knowledge of the history of art, or of the Renaissance in particular; no understanding of why such a painting was impossible to be executed two centuries before, or of why no one would have conceived the desire to paint such a figure, alone as she is, in a moment of intense introspection, careless of the baubles of her trade that lie scattered about her on the floor — baubles that yet have considerable dramatic power, because Caravaggio supposes that we know, as she does not, what they signify, and what momentous events are in store for her.

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American Colleges Are Partnered with Palestinian University That Praised Hamas as ‘Righteous Martyrs’

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Several American colleges are partnered with Al-Quds Open University, a Palestinian university that called the Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel “righteous martyrs,” according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of university web pages.

Al-Quds Open University declared Sunday, Oct. 8 as a day to “mourn the souls of the righteous martyrs and to denounce the occupation’s continuing crimes against our people in the West Bank and Gaza,” following Hamas’ invasion of Israel. Al-Quds Open University ended its announcement by stating “glory and eternity to our martyrs.”

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Commentary: As Families Take to Charter Schools, Cities and Their Teacher Unions Throw Up Obstacles

RealClearWire

A vote by the Los Angeles board of education vote last month to ban charter schools from sharing space at 300 district campuses is the latest big-city attack against alternatives to struggling traditional public schools.

With the strong support of United Teachers Los Angeles, school board members say the ban will protect black and Latino students from the disruption and harm that occurs when charters are placed in buildings used by other public schools. But charter advocates reject the board’s reasoning. Far from hurting disadvantaged students, charters in LA and other cities have established an outstanding track record in accelerating their academic performance compared with traditional schools, according to researchers.

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Wisconsin Public School Students Struggle with Reading, Math

The Center Square

Nearly 60% of students in Wisconsin’s Public Schools continue to be unable to read, write or do math at grade level.

The State’s Department of Public Instruction released the latest standardized test scores Tuesday, and they show 39.2% of public school students are proficient or better in reading, while 41.1% are proficient or better in math.

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Greater Pandemic Learning Losses Reported in School Districts with DEI Officers

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

On Wednesday, a new report was released showing that school districts with chief diversity officers (CDOs) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officers saw greater losses in learning capabilities during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic than schools that do not have such positions.

According to Fox News, the report from The Heritage Foundation reveals that 48% of all school districts with 15,000 students or more had a CDO or DEI officer on campus. Despite such positions ostensibly being created in order to increase the performance of minority students, schools with these employees saw bigger losses in academic performance among black and Hispanic students than schools without them.

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Oklahoma Approves Contract for America’s First Religious Charter School

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved a contract Monday for the country’s first religious charter school, according to The Washington Post.

The charter for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was approved by the board in June, but a lawsuit was filed in July in an attempt to block the state from allowing religious groups to use taxpayer funding for schools. The board, however, went ahead with approving a contract this week in a 3 to 2 vote, putting the school one step closer to opening enrollment for the fall of 2024, according to the Post.

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