Arizona’s Graduating Class Average ACT Scores Declined in 2022, Missing College-Readiness Benchmarks

The national average American College Testing (ACT) score for 2022 high school graduates fell to 19. 8 out of 36 in 2022, the lowest average score recorded in over 30 years, and Arizona did not escape this decline either. Arizona’s average score was 18.4 in 2022, over a point worse than last year, and ACT CEO Janet Godwin called the downward movement alarming.

“The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” said ACT CEO Janet Godwin.

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Commentary: Four Signs Parents Won’t Be Sending Their Kids Back to Public School This Fall

Student working on school work at home.

As disruptive as the 2020/2021 academic year was, it led to many positive educational changes that will be transformative and long-lasting. Most notably, parents have been re-empowered to take back the reins of their children’s education from government bureaucrats and teachers unions. Frustrated by school closures and district “Zoom schooling,” families fled public schools in droves over the past year, and there are several signs that these families won’t be returning this fall.

According to an analysis by Chalkbeat and the Associated Press, public school enrollment fell by an average of 2.6 percent across 41 states last fall, with states such as Michigan, Maine, Vermont, and Mississippi dropping by more than 4 percent. These enrollment declines far exceeded any anticipated demographic changes that might typically alter public school enrollment.

How many of these students will be back in a public school classroom next year? Not as many as public school officials hoped.

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Commentary: Reorienting the Purpose and Practice of Academic Assessment

Person filling in exam answers

Our K-12 schools are organized more like a swim meet than a swim lesson. The emphasis is on student placement results rather than on ensuring all students learn. Students move on to the next lesson, concept, or skill regardless of whether mastery was achieved at the previous level.

Donald P. Nielsen explains this analogy in Every School: One Citizen’s Guide to Transforming Education:

In a swimming meet, the purpose is to determine who is the fastest swimmer. In public schools we spend a lot of time grading students on what they have learned and then ranking them, rather than ensuring that every child has learned. What we need, however, is a public school system that is organized like a swimming lesson. In a swimming lesson, the instructor’s goal is different. The goal is to make sure all students, even the slowest, learn how to swim. Swimming meets can be a result of swimming lessons, and grading can be a result of learning, but ranking students by ability should not be the primary goal of teachers or of the system as a whole.

In swimming, as in any other athletic or artistic endeavor, classes are grouped based upon the current achievement level of the students, not based on age. A swimming coach would never consider putting advanced swimmers and beginning swimmers in the same class, even if they were of the same age. Similarly, a music teacher would not put an advanced piano player in a class with beginners…. Age is not a relevant factor in either swimming or piano lessons, but it is the overriding factor in our schools. No other major learning activity is strictly age-based. Our schools shouldn’t be either.

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University of North Carolina Revokes Tenure Offer for ‘1619’ Founder Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones

The University of North Carolina, after briefly considering the possibility of offering a full-time tenured position to Nikole Hannah-Jones, has ultimately reneged and turned down the offer due to mounting pressure, the New York Post reports.

Jones, the founder of the controversial “1619 Project” and an alumnus of the university, is now reportedly being considered for a mere five-year contract where she would instead serve as a “professor of practice.” The decision was ultimately made by UNC’s board of trustees, even though the left-wing faculty of the university overwhelmingly supported hiring her full-time.

Susan King, dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, called the decision “disappointing” and “chilling,” before baselessly claiming that Jones “represents the best of our alumni and the best of our business.”

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Academics Systemically Hostile Toward Conservatives, Study Finds

A study revealed that a sizable portion of professors discriminates against conservatives.

The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology published a report entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” which found that a “significant portion of academics” discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants, and publications.

The study evaluated data in the United States, Britain, and Canada to determine the extent of anti-conservative bias in academia.

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Commentary: How Twitter Is Corrupting the History Profession

About a week ago I began scrutinizing how the New York Times’ 1619 Project relied upon the work of the controversial “New History of Capitalism” genre of historical scholarship to advance a sweeping indictment of free markets over the historical evils of slavery. The problems with this literature are many, and prominent among them is its use of shoddy statistical work by Cornell University historian Ed Baptist to grossly exaggerate the historical effect of slave-produced cotton on American economic development. Baptist’s unusual rehabilitation of the old Confederacy-linked “King Cotton” thesis is unsupported by evidence and widely rejected by economic historians. His book The Half Has Never Been Told has nonetheless acquired a vocal following among historians and journalists, including providing the basis of a feature article in the Times series on slavery.

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Commentary: Is Diversity an Enemy of Excellence?

by John Staddon   The National Science Foundation (NSF) was created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science….” Following a 2012 recommendation, NSF now has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I). NSF was just following the crowd, for almost every academic and research institution now has a D&I program. No one wants to exclude people or not be diverse. So, what’s wrong with D&I? Could D&I perhaps interfere with “the progress of science”? John Rosenberg, in a much-commented Martin Center piece, describes a number of problems, such as the injection of “diversity” into curricula and the creation of “professors of diversity.” Two recent Chronicle of Higher Education articles illustrate another serious problem: corruption of the educational process itself. The first piece, Against Diversity Statements, by Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, is a gentle critique. The second article, In Defense of Diversity Statements, by Professor Charlotte Canning and Associate Professor Richard Reddick, is a reaction to Flier’s mild objection (which Canning and Reddick stigmatize as “scaremongering”). Diversity statements are an accelerating trend, urging not just sympathy with diversity and inclusion, but active involvement. College faculty are asked or required to include in their hiring, promotion,…

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Parents Sue Over De Blasio’s Plan to Diversify NYC’s Elite Schools

by Neetu Chandak   Asian-American parents and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against New York City officials Thursday over a plan that would increase admissions for black and Hispanic students to elite schools in the city. Black and Hispanic students make up 68 percent of the city’s population with 9 percent receiving offers to attend specialized high schools. Asian-American students, however, make up 62 percent of the population at the city’s elite high schools, The Washington Post reported Thursday. The plan promoted by Mayor Bill de Blasio would set aside 20 percent of seats at each of the elite high schools for students coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds, according to WaPo. Gaining admission into the specialized high schools is determined by a single test known as the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), a Department of Education (DOE) spokesperson told The Daily Caller News Foundation. De Blasio announced the Discovery Program’s expansion in June, which offers free tutoring to those who missed the cutoff for admissions and a second chance at being accepted, The Wall Street Journal reported. “It unlawfully restricts equal access of tens of thousands of poor Asian-American children living outside high-poverty school districts to Specialized High…

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Commentary: What the Hoax Papers Tell Us About the Decline of Academic Standards

by Phillip W. Magness   By now, most followers of the higher education press have heard of the “grievance studies” or Sokal Squared hoax. In this incident, a team of three researchers successfully published several hoax papers on intentionally absurd subjects in ostensibly serious scholarly journals. Their purpose was to demonstrate the susceptibility of these venues to low-quality, ideologically charged “research” that advances left-wing identity politics. The hoax articles lampooned the academic fashion ability of its chosen subject areas. Samples of the published papers included an article on “rape culture” among dogs in urban dog parks, a piece espousing a theoretical framework for the acceptance of obese bodybuilders, a nonsensical string of computer-generated “therapeutic” political poetry, and even a passage of Mein Kampf repackaged as critical gender theory. No doubt the hoaxers used the academy’s political inclinations advantageously, and indeed their critics have accused them of an unfair “put down” that targeted scholars of gender and racial discrimination—two worthy areas of academic study that champion historically disadvantaged persons and communities. Allow me to suggest that both their supporters and critics have largely missed the mark by focusing on the political objectives of the perpetrators. While identity politics have dominated the…

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