COVID Help: $300,000 to Study How Traditional College Grading Perpetuates Systemic Inequalities
A public university is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Biden administration’s fraud infested COVID relief fund to study how traditional grading in college perpetuates systemic inequalities toward nontraditional and rural students. “Common classroom practices, such as grading and the use of grades to assess knowledge and performance, may have unintended consequences on students who invariably derive an awareness of their own academic abilities from the results of those grading structures,” according to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is doling out the money. “In fact, these traditional practices may inadvertently create and promote inequities among different student groups, particularly in large enrollment courses, but these issues have largely been unexplored.”
Beginning early next year, the agency will give North Dakota State University (NDSU) $300,000 to explore the phenomenon. The project is officially titled “Reimagining Grading to Support Nontraditional and Rural Students in High Enrollment, Gateway STEM Courses” and it will be funded by the American Rescue Plan of 2021, the nearly $2 trillion measure passed by Democrats to provide immediate and direct relief to families and workers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis through no fault of their own. When the law passed last spring, the Biden administration promoted it as one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in history that would build a bridge to an equitable economic recovery. The administration justified the measure by asserting that the public health crisis and resulting economic crisis devastated the health and economic wellbeing of millions of Americans, particularly people of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers.
The reality is that a lot of the money—billions and counting—has gone to unrelated causes and the administration’s monstrous taxpayer funded COVID relief program is rife with fraud and corruption. The problem is so bad that the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to “enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.” The special unit has been quite busy prosecuting a multitude of scams, false statements, and money laundering related to pandemic relief. This month House Republicans issued a report documenting 500 days of massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the American Rescue Plan. It includes more than $783 million in stimulus checks for convicted prisoners including the Boston Marathon bomber, $40 million to expand libraries in Delaware, $2 million for a Florida golf course and $16 million for electric vehicle charging stations in Maine and $20 million to modernize the state’s fish hatcheries. The list goes on and on.
The scathing report may seem like the $300,000 for the latest questionable project is a drop in the bucket, but it highlights that cash flow has not been deterred by waste. The NDSU researcher (Tara Slominski) who will conduct the study beginning next year claims in a university article that that traditional grading practices perpetuate systemic inequities for college students. “Her work will directly address this challenge by providing STEM faculty with equitable and practical assessment and grading approaches to better support today’s college students,” the piece states, adding that the work will create more equitable learning environments. Slominski teaches biology at NDSU and has already developed a curriculum to promote success among at-risk students. She claims that “the findings from this work will help faculty across the country and across disciplines create more equitable learning environments that are better suited to support the needs of today’s college students.”
The NSF, which funds more than a quarter of research conducted at American colleges with its $8.5 billion annual budget, explains that Slominski’s postdoctoral research fellowship project seeks to examine the impact of grading practices on self-concept and STEM persistence with a special focus on rural and nontraditional students. “The project has promise to produce new insights about equitable classroom and grading practices for rural and nontraditional students that are compatible with the constraints of high enrollment gateway courses,” the agency writes in the grant announcement. It is not clear how this may provide immediate and direct relief to families and workers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis through no fault of their own as the American Rescue Plan intended.
— Read on www.judicialwatch.org/grading-perpetuates-inequalities/
Category: universities
Kakistocracy: noun, government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power
Kakistocracy: noun, government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.
The old saying goes that even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally. So you might think that during a 50-year political career, the odds would dictate that Joe Biden would, once in a blue moon, make a correct decision — just based on the odds. But you’d be mistaken. Biden has stumbled and bumbled from one disastrous decision to the next. Disastrous, that is, for America. Biden himself has prospered handsomely in spite of his glaring incompetence and corruption.
Biden’s long Senate career was based on being the credit card companies’ man in Washington. While crowing endlessly about the working class being “his people,” Biden sponsored bills allowing bank issuers to charge egregious interest rates and to make it harder for working men to escape the credit trap through bankruptcy.
When Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, he turned the confirmation of Clarence Thomas into a political smear campaign that descended into a degenerate three-ring circus. In his first campaign for president, he failed to garner a single percentage point before having to withdraw when confronted with his past lies and blatant plagiarism. He literally stole a speech detailing a British politician’s life story. He ran again in 2008 but again failed to reach even one percent of the vote.
When Barack Obama took him off the primary trash heap to make him vice president, Biden first made a hash out of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasting hundreds of billions on boondoggles and giveaways to Democrat cronies. Little of the recovery billions was spent on anything useful to America. Biden went on to manage our relations with China and Ukraine, pocketing untold millions for himself and his family by selling out America’s security interests.
By the time he ran for president again in 2020 he was a spent husk of his former corrupt and incompetent self, delivering asinine performances in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. When the Democrat establishment propped him up to once again stop Bernie Sanders, Biden was set up for the strangest presidential campaign in modern history. While Donald Trump barnstormed the nation with packed, enthusiastic rallies, Biden cowered in his basement, occasionally venturing out to speak with a few dozen voters sitting in circles drawn on the floor.
For his vice presidential pick, he chose — if you can believe it — an even more buffoonish candidate than himself.
Had it not been for Mark Zuckerberg buying and staffing government election offices in swing states, and the media and Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden family’s corruption, Biden would now be enjoying his dotage in Delaware, creeping on unsuspecting children with yarns of Corn Pop and South African arrests.
Instead, the man with one of the most astonishing records of abject failure in Washington was installed in the White House, and he has remained true to form. As one of a hundred senators and then as vice president, there was a limit to how much damage he could do. But as president, the shackles have been removed.
His first agenda item was to throttle our oil and gas sector, offshoring tens of thousands of good paying jobs to Russia and the Middle East — along with our energy independence. He threw open our southern border and encouraged virtually unlimited illegal immigration — during a global pandemic.
He sponsored trillions of dollars in wasteful spending, pushing our national debt to over $31 trillion. Were it not for two Democrat senators who had not yet taken leave of their senses, it would have been even worse. As it is, Biden has sparked the largest one-year increase in inflation in 40 years.
Biden’s “defund the police” rhetoric delivered us soaring violent crime in Democrat-run cities, while he sicced federal law enforcement on parents who object too strenuously to their children being indoctrinated with anti-White racism and LGBTQIA+ ideology.
It can truly be said that as president, Biden’s record of failure remains unblemished.
But now comes what may be the capstone on Biden’s long history of buffoonery and corruption. In Ukraine, we have an armed conflict that threatens to plunge the world into an economic depression and raises the specter of nuclear war. Not only did Biden set the stage for this calamity when, as vice president, he was in charge of Ukraine policy and led Kiev to believe that NATO membership was in Ukraine’s future, but on the eve of the Russian invasion, he refused to admit that it was not. Then Biden all but admitted to Vladimir Putin — on live TV, no less — that NATO would not defend Ukraine if Russia chose to invade.
In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, Biden and his administration have crafted sanctions that seem almost designed to boomerang on America’s and Europe’s fragile post-pandemic economies, while forcing Russia into a deeper alliance with China.
With the U.S. over $31 trillion in debt, Biden seems totally oblivious to the perilous position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the consequences should that privileged position end.
Economists predict that food and gasoline will cost the average U.S. household an additional $3,000 this year, and inflation threatens to push millions of lower-middle income-earners into abject poverty.
And bumbling, corrupt Joe Biden isn’t yet halfway through his first — and please God, last — term.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Jim Daws is a recovering talk radio host at jimdaws.com.
Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, More Than 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Finds
Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, More Than 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Finds
Ailan Evans / @AilanHEvans / February 09, 2022
Twitter, Google, Google+, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are among the platforms arrayed on the screen of an Apple iPhone. Many of them have used their largely unregulated power to censor information they don’t approve of as “misinformation.” (Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images)
Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of more than 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to a new study from the Media Research Center.
The study focused on acts of censorship on major social media platforms and online services, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and TikTok.
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Instances of censorship included Facebook’s decision to flag the British Medical Journal with a “fact check” and “missing context” label, reducing the visibility of a post, for a study delving into data-integrity issues with a Pfizer vaccine clinical trial.
Facebook also deleted the page of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter led by dozens of medical professionals, including Dr. Jay Battacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advocated for less restrictive measures to address the dangers of COVID-19.
“Big Tech set up a system where you can’t disagree with ‘the science’ even though that’s the foundation of the scientific method,” Dan Gainor, MRC vice president of Free Speech America, told the Daily Caller National Foundation. “If doctors and academic journals can’t debate publicly, then it’s not science at all. It’s ‘religion.’”
Big Tech also scrubbed podcast host Joe Rogan’s interviews with scientists Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, the latter of whom was instrumental in pioneering mRNA technology. Twitter banned Malone from its platform permanently in late December over the virologist’s tweets questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We tallied 32 different doctors who were censored, including mRNA vaccine innovator Dr. Robert Malone,” Gainor said. “Censoring views of credentialed experts doesn’t ensure confidence in vaccines. It undermines faith in government COVID-19 strategies.“
In addition to medical doctors, the study examined instances in which members of Congress were censored by tech platforms.
These included an incident last August in which YouTube suspended Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for posting a video arguing that “cloth masks” are not effective against the coronavirus, a view later echoed by many prominent medical commentators. Twitter also flagged a tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., in which he wrote “studies show those with natural immunity from a prior infection are much less likely to contract and spread COVID than those who only have vaccine-induced immunity.”
The study also examined Big Tech censorship of prominent media personalities, such as Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Dan Bongino.
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Colleges may face lawsuits over COVID-19 vaccine requirement
Colleges may face lawsuits over COVID-19 vaccine requirement
- By Christian M. Wade Statehouse reporter
- May 13, 2021
BOSTON — More colleges are telling students to get a COVID-19 vaccination before coming back to campus this fall, but legal experts say the mandates could spur legal challenges.
A stream of private and public colleges have said vaccinations will be mandatory. They include Northeastern University and Boston University, as well as all state universities in Massachusetts.
In most cases, students will be expected to arrive on campus fully vaccinated, unless they have a medical, disability or religious exemption.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said more than 300 higher learning institutions have decided to require COVID-19 vaccinations and the number “continues to grow.”
“They want to make sure that the students, faculty and staff are protected in situations where there is a residential environment and the risk is greater,” she said.
Legal experts say the mandates could leave colleges open to lawsuits — even if they may ultimately be unsuccessful.
That’s because all three COVID-19 vaccines in use — produced by Pfizer, Cambridge-based Moderna and Johnson and Johnson — are only authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration.
Pfizer and Moderna are seeking full approval from the FDA, but the process is expected to take several months.
Joel Rosen, an Andover attorney who specializes in health care law, said mandating vaccines that aren’t fully FDA approved is “a bit of a gray area.”
“It does increase the likelihood that someone could successfully challenge a decision by a college to require a vaccine that is only approved for emergency use,” he said.
Still, Rosen said he doubts such a challenge would succeed.
He pointed out that public schools and colleges have for years required incoming students to be vaccinated against measles and other infectious diseases.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance in December that federal law doesn’t prevent private employers from requiring vaccines or proof of vaccination from employees.
“It’s hard to see how a college would be different from an employer in enacting a neutral rule which is logically calculated to preserve the health of students,” Rosen said.
To be sure, there are no federal or state mandates for COVID-19 vaccines in schools or colleges, public or private.
Gov. Charlie Baker has said he opposes vaccine “passports” and other mandates and won’t require the state’s workforce to get vaccinated.
Baker, a Republican, has also pushed back on questions about whether he will require students to get vaccinated, with 12-15 year-olds becoming eligible on Thursday.
Last month, Massachusetts’ 15 community colleges said they don’t plan to mandate vaccinations, citing concerns about the potential impact on minorities and other students with “disproportionate access” to vaccines and the fact most don’t have on-campus housing.
Lane Glenn, president of Northern Essex Community College, said he believes mandates won’t be necessary because most college students will be vaccinated by the fall.
“We are expecting 80 to 90% of our students to be vaccinated,” he said. “So by the time September rolls around, I suspect this will be much less of an issue.”
Glenn also suggests there is a profit motive behind the decision of large private universities to require vaccines for on-campus students.
The cost of room and board can range from $12,000 to $15,000 a year. Many private colleges took big financial hits last year after shutting down their campuses and moving to remote learning.
“The money involved in dormitories and cafeterias is too huge to pass up,” he said.
Pasquerella said the mandates face pushback in states such as Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law banning businesses, schools and local governments from requiring proof of vaccination.
The University of California’s sprawling 23 campus system also plans to require students to get vaccinated in the fall, but not until the FDA has given final authorization.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in more than 40 states have filed proposals seeking to ban or curtail vaccine mandates, according to the National Conference State Legislatures.
Rosen said he expects legal challenges from conservative groups, anti-vaccine groups or others “who believe the vaccines are somehow dangerous.”
“This country is so divided,” he said. “Unfortunately, something that should be a medical decision has become a political decision. But the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Christian M. Wade covers the Massachusetts Statehouse for North of Boston Media Group’s newspapers and websites. Email him at cwade@cnhinews.com
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