Tag: STEM

US Navy’s STEM ‘Equity’ Program Prioritized Candidates, Internships Based on Race, Docs Show

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Navy Test taking

The U.S. Navy approved more than $750,000 for a project that, while purporting to “equitably” increase the number of students interested in serving in the Navy’s STEM fields, prioritized recruiting underrepresented minority students, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

The University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) proposed a way to encourage students to pursue degrees in fields of science, technology, economics and math (STEM) amid pressures for the U.S. military to out-compete adversaries in technological development, according to the since-approved application obtained by the Functional Government Initiative through a records request and provided to the DCNF. Although the project was framed as providing an opportunity for all students to break into the STEM fields based on the students’ qualifications, the Navy granted a budget extension to include 75 scholarships for underrepresented minority students and gave them first selection for the few on-campus paid research internships created through the program.

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Nearly 200,000 Foreign Workers Classified as ‘Students,’ State Department Reports

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American universities hosted more than 1 million international students in the 2022-23 academic year – but that figure includes students who had already graduated and are essentially foreign workers, according to a State Department report.

In reality, nearly 200,000 foreigners classified as students are actually working, without paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, making them cheaper to hire than Americans.

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University of Connecticut Hosts Second Annual ‘Queer Science Conference’ for High Schoolers to ‘Celebrate Science – and Themselves’

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The University of Connecticut (UConn) celebrated Pride Month by hosting its second annual “Queer Science Conference” June 4th, which is offered “to give queer and trans youth role models in various STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] fields.”

According to an online recap, the one-day event “connected high school students with LGBTQIA+ faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate students at UConn who work in STEM disciplines, offering community and mentorship as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiences and opportunities for hands-on science demonstrations.”

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Teachers, Activists Push School Districts to Drop Calculus in the Name of Equity

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Teachers and activists are pushing for high schools to drop their calculus courses to increase equity as many minority and low-income students don’t have access to the class, according to The 74, a nonprofit news organization covering education.

In the 2017-2018 school year, 76% of schools with “low student of color enrollment” offered calculus while 52% of schools with a high proportion of students of color offered the advanced math course, according to a Learning Policy Institute report. The course, teachers and activists argued, is disproportionately offered to students not of an underrepresented group, giving other students an advantage in the college admissions process, according to The 74.

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University of Pennsylvania Allocates $890,000 for ‘Inclusivity in Teaching and Learning’ STEM plan

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The University of Pennsylvania will spend $890,000 in the next six years with the goal of “increasing inclusivity in teaching and learning” in the STEM fields thanks to a $385,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The funding “will support a rigorous examination of STEM education at the undergraduate level,” according to a university news release.

Penn officials committed an additional $385,000 to the initiative. Penn is just one of 104 schools who received the six-year grants from HHMI under their “Inclusive Excellence 3 initiative,” according to science research foundation’s website.

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16 Michigan Schools Get $205,028 for STEM

The Center Square

Sixteen Michigan schools have been awarded $205,028 to develop Great Lakes-based science, technology, engineering, and math – STEM – programs.

“These grants will support freshwater literacy programs and offer students access to real world STEM experiences,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement. “Our Great Lakes are our greatest asset, and we must empower young Michiganders to learn more about them and continue advancing conservation efforts. Michigan’s economic competitiveness depends on a workforce proficient in STEM and committed to solving our biggest challenges. Investments like these will help prepare our kids to lead our state into the future.”

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Stanford Professor Single-Handedly Debunks California’s Woke Math Standards

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A Stanford University professor slammed California’s proposed Math Framework for being “false” and “misleading.”

Brian Conrad, Stanford University mathematics professor and director of Undergraduate Studies in Math, did a deep dive into the California Math Framework (CMF), which he laid out on his website. The proposal frequently contradicts the findings of academic studies its writers cite, according to Conrad’s analysis.

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Study: Women Less Likely to Pursue STEM Careers in All 80 Countries Surveyed

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Young women were five times less likely than young men to aspire toward STEM careers in 80 different countries, according to research and a report from the Institute for Family Studies published in late January.

Women preferred “people-oriented” careers such as nursing or teaching, while men preferred “things-oriented” careers generally falling into STEM or blue-collar categories, researchers reported.

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University Spent $80,000 on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Training for STEM Faculty

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A recent FOIA request filed by Campus Reform revealed that the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) spent $80,000 on a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training created by the Kardia Group, LLC. The agreement was signed in 2018 and included two series of meetings and workshops for the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 semesters.

The Kardia Group was founded in 2004 and describes themselves as a “leading strategic partner in the transformation of the culture, functionality, and success of the academic endeavor.” Its website lists resources and services ranging from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to “transformational change for groups.”

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Commentary: Ground Zero of Woke

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Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

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Ohio State University Elementary Education Program Courses Include Focus on Race, Oppression, Queer Sexuality: REPORT

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The Early Childhood Education program at Ohio State University includes several courses that focus on racism, oppression, sexuality and privilege.

The OSU Bachelor of Science in Education, Primary Education (P-5) program requires students to take “Equity & Diversity in Education,” “Teaching & Learning of Social Studies Grades PreK-5,” “Language and Word Study for All Learners” and “Diverse Literature and Comprehension” as part of their degree plan.

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Federal Grant Gives College Nearly $500K to Increase ‘Racial/Ethnic and Gender Diversity in STEM’

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Alverno College in Wisconsin recieved a $499,983 grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to increase “racial/ethnic and gender diversity in STEM.”

According to the NSF grant abstract, the money will be used to “directly engage” 400 students at the college who are currently enrolled in STEM courses and focus on connecting women and minority students to their “professional and social communities.”

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Tom Cotton Introduces ‘SECURE CAMPUS Act’ to Stop Chinese Spying at Universities

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Tom Cotton

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced a bill to stop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from conducting espionage on American college campuses.

According to a press release from his office, Sen. Cotton re-introduced the “SECURE CAMPUS Act” on April 22. The bill would “prohibit Chinese nationals from receiving visas to the United States for graduate or post-graduate studies in STEM fields and would ban participants in China’s foreign talent recruitment programs and Chinese nationals from taking part in federally-funded STEM research.”

Sen. Cotton remarked that “Allowing China unfettered access to American research institutions is akin to granting Soviet scientists access to our critical laboratories during the Cold War.”

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Commentary: The Death Spiral of Academia

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Library with several people at library tables, working.

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

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Commentary: The Teacher Pay Gap Is Really About the STEM Salary Premium

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Teacher reading to student.

With classrooms finally reopening and hundreds of billions of federal dollars earmarked for public schools, the issue of teacher pay will soon re-emerge. Before the pandemic, public school teachers were fighting against a widely perceived “teacher salary penalty.” President Biden vowed to “correct this wrong,” promising a dramatic increase in federal education funding to “give teachers a raise.” But what causes these pay differences? New Census Bureau data suggest that most teachers are paid roughly what they’d receive in other jobs. But if public schools wish to attract the best-qualified graduates to teaching, they need to stop paying the physics teacher the same as the gym teacher.

The Economic Policy Institute, a teacher-union-affiliated think tank, reports that public school teachers receive salaries about 20 percent lower than non-teachers with equal levels of experience and education.

But what does it mean for education to be “equal”? College graduates attended different institutions, majored in different fields, and received different GPAs, leading to different salaries later in life. That’s why parents encourage their children to attend more competitive colleges and, increasingly, to favor STEM fields over liberal arts majors.

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Commentary: ‘High-Skilled Immigrants Act’ Is a Sop to Big Tech

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by Rachael Brovard   In a rare moment of bipartisanship last week, Democrats and Republicans joined hands to make a small, but fundamental change to our immigration system. Not to provide critically needed updates or wholesale reforms, but, rather, to toss a sop to the billionaires of Big Tech. Thanks to furious lobbying from Microsoft, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Equifax, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, IBM, Cisco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt of Google’s group FWD.us, among others, the House this week passed H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019. The bill, which was supported by 140 Republicans and 224 Democrats, removes the per-country cap for employment-based immigration visas. In other words, it makes it easier for the tech giants and billionaires of Silicon Valley to hire cheap foreign labor over highly skilled Americans. Current law requires that no country receive more than 7 percent of the employment-based green cards issued each year. This ensures that employment-based visas are limited to a global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors – and prevents one or two countries from dominating the distribution. The practical effect is that individuals from countries with high demand for…

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Taxpayers Spend $700,000 on University of Tennessee Knoxville Program with No History of Success

Chris Butler
Knoxville

The feds are handing out more than $700,000 of taxpayer money to the University of Tennessee Knoxville so school officials can find more ways to get women involved with STEM. There’s just one problem, said Toni Airaksinen, in a column this week for PJ Media. Previous attempts have had “zero record of success,” Airaksinen said. According to Live Science, STEM incorporates the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics all into one curriculum. Officials at UT-Knoxville did not respond to The Tennessee Star’s questions about this matter before close of business Friday. Writing for Campusreform.org one year ago, Airaksinen profiled a Georgetown University economics professor, Adriana Kugler, who found STEM recruitment efforts that target women backfire. The problem, the article went on to say, is how the media portrays the situation. “The trouble begins when the media and recruitment efforts capitalize on that preponderance of men, since it sends an additional message to women that they don’t fit into those fields, and that they don’t belong there,” Kugler told Campus Reform. “With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field, that they won’t fit into the field. That’s what we find. It’s very…

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‘Social Justice Math’ Misses the Point of Learning Math

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Rethinking Mathematics

by Abigail Herbst   It’s a common occurrence: a math teacher stands at the front of the classroom, struggling to keep the student’s attention. One student is on the phone. Another stares straight ahead into the distance. And the kid in the back row is asleep. Again. However, as the teacher moves to the next topic, one student blurts: “Why do we have to learn this? When are we ever going to use this?” And there it is. The perennial question: why do we learn math? When I was in high school, teachers responded to this question by pointing out that we need math when we go grocery shopping, when we’re building, and in certain careers. In short, we learn math because it is useful. Professor Eric Gutstein and his colleagues are trying a new approach—they’re trying to make math more “relevant” by infusing cultural issues into math. Mr. Gutstein and colleagues compiled articles from educators nationwide to put together a book titled, Rethinking Mathematics: Social Justice by the Numbers. It gives teachers tips for mixing social justice issues into math classes. Looking at the chapter titles gives you an idea how they plan to do this. Mr. Gutstein wrote a chapter…

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Identity Politics Is Now Undermining Science

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JPL Scientists

by Michael Liccione   The prestige of science in our culture is well-earned. That scientists discover truths (or at least serviceable approximations to truths) is undeniable. The evidence for that is how successfully scientific findings have been applied for centuries as technology, which has improved life greatly for countless people. Sound science depends on methodologies that are as objective as possible, in the sense of being designed to minimize various forms of bias. Through objective methodologies we can discover what is really the case, versus what we want or expect to be the case. It’s how science corrects its errors over time and makes progress. But scientific progress is now threatened by a new form of ideology. This time around it’s not religious ideology, but political. It’s not news that identity politics and two of its intellectual pillars—the push for “diversity” and the theory of “intersectionality”—have strongly influenced the practice of the social sciences. A good deal of the peer-reviewed literature in sociology, political science, and even psychology is now produced from that perspective, and amounts to political advocacy. This decline in the objectivity of the social sciences is seen by many as a virtue, because the bias is seen as favoring the right sorts…

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Memphis Parents Upset About High School STEM Program

Wendy Wilson

  Some parents in Memphis are upset about East High School becoming a STEM school, with at least one parent saying the plan is racist. “I feel like it’s just like Jim Crow,” parent Jacquelyn Webb told WREG News Channel 3. “They legally separating our students because they want the cream of the crop.” However, Shelby County Schools spokeswoman Natalia Powers said more than half of the 90 students already accepted into the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math program at East High School are African-American and there are also some Hispanics. Parents attended a meeting Friday evening at the Lester Community Center to voice their concerns about students being separated, with some in the area now having to be bused to Douglass High School or Melrose High School. The only new students being enrolled at East High School this year are those accepted into the new STEM program, now being offered to ninth-graders. The program will expand to other grade levels in coming years until the entire school is STEM only. Some parents said they were caught off guard by the change and complained about just now learning about it. Powers, however, said the district has been communicating with families since…

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