Weekend To-Do List
March 24-26
1. Eliminate more college degree requirements
READ/LISTEN: Rachel M. Cohen at Vox wrote about the growing bipartisan consensus around dropping college degree requirements for more positions:
When Biden highlighted those non-college jobs at the State of the Union, it was just three weeks after Pennsylvania’s new Democratic governor Josh Shapiro eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the bulk of jobs in Pennsylvania state’s government, two months after Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox did the same, and nearly one year after Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan set off the trend. Since the president’s State of the Union, Alaska’s Republican governor Mike Dunleavy has also followed suit.
Even President Obama chimed in:
We discussed this topic on the most recent episode of Lost Debate.
2. Texas takeover
READ: Texas officials announced a state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, the ninth-largest school district in the country. Via the Associated Press:
The announcement, made by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s education commissioner, Mike Morath, amounts to one of the largest school takeovers ever in the U.S. . . . In a letter to the Houston Independent School District, Morath said the Texas Education Agency will replace Superintendent Millard House II and the district’s elected board of trustees with a new superintendent and an appointed board of managers made of residents from within the district’s boundaries. Morath said the board has failed to improve student outcomes while conducting "chaotic board meetings marred by infighting" and violating open meetings act and procurement laws. He accused the district of failing to provide proper special education services and of violating state and federal laws with its approach to supporting students with disabilities. He cited the seven-year record of poor academic performance at one of the district’s roughly 50 high schools, Wheatley High, as well as the poor performance of several other campuses.
3. Saving SUNY
READ: Sahalie Donaldson at City & State wrote about John B. King Jr. as he takes over as the new chancellor of the State University of New York — the largest university system in the country. He’s the fifth chancellor since 2016 and inherits a system in need of tough choices:
With the state Legislature set to finalize next year’s budget by the end of the month, King doesn’t have much time to get up to speed. Years of disinvestment and cuts have battered the nation’s largest university system for nearly a decade, and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated sinking enrollment. . . . While a recent bump in applications indicates hope may lie ahead, overall enrollment fell 21% from 2011 to 2021. Like other two-year institutions across the country, SUNY’s 30 community colleges have been hit especially hard, with enrollment dropping 34% from 2012 to 2022.
King previewed his plans a bit:
To combat declining enrollment, King said SUNY leaders need to think more broadly about the needs of nontraditional students. He intends to build tools to help young adults who decided not to go to college find a place in the system. He also stressed the importance of building flexible support systems and reaching out to the nearly 2 million New Yorkers who have some college credit but left school before graduating. "We have to be creative around how we design academic experiences for those students who are coming back," King said.
4. New Mexico adds learning days
READ: Via Kevin Mahnken of the 74:
On Thursday, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 130, which will lift the state’s minimum amount of instructional time for elementary students by the equivalent of 27 days and for middle and high school students by the equivalent of 10 days. Total time in class differs from district to district, but the New Mexico Public Education Department specifies that younger children spend 5.5 hours per day in school, while older pupils spend six hours (lunch time is excluded from both figures). The existing minimums are being revised upward to 1,140 annual hours from the current figure of 990 hours for K–6 students and 1,080 for those enrolled in grades 7–12.
5. Stanford Law School dean defends speech
WATCH/READ: Earlier this month, Stanford Law School students turned heads by how they protested a speech by Judge Kyle Duncan, who was invited to campus by the school’s Federalist Society chapter. Via the Atlantic:
As the event began, roughly 100 student protesters who object to many of Duncan’s views and rulings stood in a line outside the event "to boo those who entered," Lat reported, "with some students calling out individual classmates—e.g., ‘Shame, John Smith’—à la Cersei’s Walk of Atonement on Game of Thrones." Then the protesters disrupted the event so severely that the judge was unable to continue his remarks. For a long time, administrators stood by without intervening. Finally, [Associate Dean] Steinbach asked everyone to quiet down and granted that Stanford’s commitment to free speech would be threatened by shutting down an invited speaker. But she also expressed doubt that holding the event was "worth the pain" and "the division that this causes" and mused that maybe free-speech values should be reconsidered.
You can watch the video here. All I can say is I’m glad I went to law school when I did. In response to this event, Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez has made it compulsory for all students to participate in educational programming on free speech.
Here’s an excerpt from Dean Jenny Martinez’s letter, which in many ways describes the values we hold at Lost Debate:
There are many ways to support diversity, equity, and inclusion that are not inconsistent with a commitment to academic freedom. For example, as an educational institution dedicated to training future lawyers, we support diversity, equity, and inclusion by encouraging thoughtful and critical discourse about the law and legal system, by training students to offer substantive critiques of injustice that they encounter, by teaching future lawyers how to marshal evidence that supports their point of view and how to make arguments that convince others. We support diversity, equity, and inclusion when we encourage people in our community to reconsider their own assumptions and potential biases. We support diversity, equity, and inclusion when we encourage students to connect with and see one another as people. We support diversity, equity, and inclusion when we teach each and every one of our students how to be the best possible lawyer they can be, and take those skills of advocacy out into the world.
At the same time, I want to set expectations clearly going forward: our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues, make frequent institutional statements about current news events, or exclude or condemn speakers who hold views on social and political issues with whom some or even many in our community disagree. I believe that focus on these types of actions as the hallmark of an "inclusive" environment can lead to creating and enforcing an institutional orthodoxy that is not only at odds with our core commitment to academic freedom, but also that would create an echo chamber that ill prepares students to go out into and act as effective advocates in a society that disagrees about many important issues. Some students might feel that some points should not be up for argument and therefore that they should not bear the responsibility of arguing them (or even hearing arguments about them), but however appealing that position might be in some other context, it is incompatible with the training that must be delivered in a law school. Law students are entering a profession in which their job is to make arguments on behalf of clients whose very lives may depend on their professional skill. Just as doctors in training must learn to face suffering and death and respond in their professional role, lawyers in training must learn to confront injustice or views they don’t agree with and respond as attorneys.
6. New York State lowers the bar
READ: New York State is lowering the score students need to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling the new lower scores the “new normal.” Via Kathleen Moore of the Albany Times Union:
Last year some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic. . . . Some teachers have been pressing for tests to be "re-normed" so that students can pass at a lower level than in previous years, reflecting their learning loss. . . . Board of Regents member Frances Wills also questioned the tests, saying public confidence in education has declined since state testing for students in third through eighth grades began. "In my perspective, we’re still wrestling with that: public perception of what the standardized test means," she said.
7. The end of college rankings?
READ/LISTEN: Melissa Korn of the Wall Street Journal chronicled the growing trend of elite universities pulling out of the U.S. News and World Report rankings:
Within three months, more than 40 law schools—about 20% of the programs that U.S. News ranks—said they would also end their cooperation and no longer share data with the publication, including 12 of the top 14. A wave of medical schools, led by No. 1 Harvard Medical School, followed. At the undergraduate level, the Rhode Island School of Design (No. 3 among regional universities in the North) and Colorado College (No. 27 in the latest measure of national liberal-arts colleges) withdrew last month. The rebellion, which has thrown into tumult the most famous source of college rankings for generations of would-be students, was decades in the making.
We discussed this trend and its implications on a recent episode of Lost Debate.
8. Harvard exposed
READ/LISTEN: Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in the New Yorker about her effort to expose a racist anti-Asian memo that Harvard and a district judge apparently wanted to keep from the public. Her saga says a lot about the motivations and mindsets of leaders of institutions like Harvard, who’ve been battling accusations of anti-Asian bias. We interviewed Professor Gersen for our Regressives narrative episode on the Affirmative Action cases before the Supreme Court — something I’ve also written about in Persuasion.
9. Optimism bias in education reporting?
READ: Freddie deBoer wrote about a tendency towards hopeful commentary in education commentary:
There’s a bias that runs throughout our educational discourse, coming from our media, academia, and the think tanks and foundations that have such sway in education policy. It’s a bias that exists both because of a natural human desire to see every child succeed and because the structural incentives in the field make rejecting that bias professionally risky. The bias I’m talking about is optimism bias, the insistence that all problems in education are solvable and that we can fix them if only we want to badly enough. At least a half-century of research, spending, policy experimentation, and dogged effort has utterly failed to close the gaps that so vex our political class. But still we hear the same old song about how we could close those gaps tomorrow if we really wanted to, an attitude that has distorted education policy and analysis for decades.
10. How to use ChatGPT
READ: Dylan Matthews of Vox wrote a how-to guide for writers and researchers looking to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically.
This comes as UPenn and OpenAI collaborated on a paper about the implications of AI on the job market. Key finding:
Approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. The influence spans all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure. Notably, the impact is not limited to industries with higher recent productivity growth. We conclude that Generative Pre-trained Transformers exhibit characteristics of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), suggesting that these models could have notable economic, social, and policy implications.
Translation: either build a career in that 20% of careers untouched by AI or learn to use the tools better than anyone else.