Tag: outcomes

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Virginia’s Largest School System Pays $455,000 for ‘Equal Outcomes’ Consultant

Virginia’s Largest School System Pays 5,000 for ‘Equal Outcomes’ Consultant

by Hans Spader

College students fluctuate widely in intelligence and willingness to get the job done tough. Why would everyone assume “equal results for each university student, devoid of exception”? But which is what academic consultants paid for by Virginia’s greatest university district expect. The consultants were being employed by Fairfax County General public Educational institutions, which have 180,000 college students.

Their goal is to “produce equivalent results for each scholar, without exception,” reports The College or university Fix:

Virginia’s Fairfax County Community Schools reportedly paid out just about 50 percent a million bucks to a business whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ tutorial overall performance outcome in equivalent outcomes. Paperwork attained by Asra Nomani show the district compensated $455,000 to Oakland, California’s Overall performance Point to “analyze student information to determine trends and suggestions in assist of the development of strategic plans,” among the (lots of) other matters. It also “facilitated” college board “work classes/retreats” which allegedly had been “focused on the enhancement of the [district] strategic approach.”

The September 20, 2022 retreat was led by enterprise CEO Mutiu Fagbayi. … A PowerPoint for the retreat titled “Equity-centered Strategic Planning” is, like several diversity/fairness/inclusion (DEI) documents, comprehensive of flowery, yet vacuous, educational lingo. It involves the common comparison between equality (“resources and supports are dispersed evenly, irrespective of personal requires or assets”) and fairness (“incorporates the notion of want distribution of sources and supports is purposefully unequal”)….Then there is that “Equity Imperative” which is “equitable accessibility to resources and prospects that warranty honest, just, and affirming experiences and deliver equivalent outcomes for each individual student, with out exception” (emphasis included).

When regarded anathema in instruction and in other places, expecting equal outcomes has become far more and additional popular as a facet of anti-racism instruction. For example, previous 12 months Harvard featured the head of the UK’s “leading independent race equality consider tank,” who advocates for equal outcomes.

Outcomes equality is also a tenet of anti-racism expert Ibram Kendi’s philosophy. In 2019 he advised an assembly at George Washington University that “racists feel unequal societies [and] racial disparities stem from unequal peoples,” while “antiracists believe that that the racial teams are equivalent.” As such, any variances amongst teams come from racist guidelines. “It’s that uncomplicated,” mentioned Kendi.

In 2020, Fairfax County Colleges paid Kendi $20,000 for a just one-hour presentation on “anti-racism” to university staff members. At the time, they had been also paying out bus motorists to drive completely empty faculty buses.

Kendi is improper to declare that unequal racial results are all due to racism. Lots of certainly are not. For case in point, Latinos stay 3 years longer than whites, on ordinary, even however doctors don’t discriminate in their favor. Asians make additional revenue than whites, on average, even although Japanese and Chinese- People in america applied to face significant discrimination. And while blacks make less money than whites, on common, immigrants from some African countries like Ghana and Nigeria normally make additional revenue than whites do.

Unequal racial outcomes exist everywhere in culture and the earth, ordinarily for explanations unrelated to racism, as the black economist Thomas Sowell chronicles in his e book Discrimination and Disparities.

The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s ebook How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination from whites is the only way to realize equality: “The only cure to earlier discrimination is current discrimination. The only solution to existing discrimination is long run discrimination,” writes Kendi in that e-book. Kendi is a major “critical race theorist.”

The consultants hired by Fairfax are so lazy they don’t even use “demographic information” from the Fairfax faculties in their presentation to district staff members — they reuse knowledge from yet another school district, claimed The School Correct. “The Fairfax County district equivalent results revelation arrives on the heels of a report that officials from one particular of its educational institutions had withheld Countrywide Merit Scholarship awards from college students — mainly because they believe that in ‘recogniz[ing] pupils for who they are as people today, not emphasis[ing] on their achievements.’ They also did not want to ‘hurt’ the thoughts of college students who did not make any awards.”

A class complete of failing students whose trainer doesn’t train something would have “equal outcomes for every single university student,” as the consultants employed by Fairfax advocate. But that wouldn’t be fascinating.

Hans Bader is an attorney residing in Northern Virginia. This column was to start with published on Liberty Unyielding and is republished with authorization

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Will more school money improve academic outcomes?

Will more school money improve academic outcomes?

In summary

California schools are getting a big infusion of financing, but it’s uncertain whether more money will translate into better academic outcomes.


California’s K-12 schools and their nearly 6 million students received a multi-billion-dollar additional infusion of cash in the budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators enacted last week, raising per-pupil spending to a record-high level.

In all, the budget will provide schools with an average of about $24,000 a year for each student, doubling what it was just a few years ago, with a formula that provides extra allocations to school districts with high numbers of poor and English-learner students.

Those extra funds are being distributed via the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), a plan adopted a decade ago to close what is called the “achievement gap” between those children — roughly 60{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of the state’s K-12 students — and the more privileged 40{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}.

Spending $24,000 per student appears to propel California into the upper ranks of the states, although making such comparisons is tricky. Different organizations use different numbers, some adjust numbers for the cost of living, and the data are always a few years out of date.

The main problem with such comparisons, however, is they assume that spending money equates to educational outcomes when, in fact, they don’t. If one takes any list of what states spend on schools and compares it to results of the federal government’s academic testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there is absolutely no correlation between spending and achievement.

Some states that spend heavily, such as New Jersey, also excel in NAEP’s measures of reading and mathematics competence, but others, such as neighboring New York, are mediocre at best. Likewise, states that are below average or even at the bottom, of spending lists are often in the academic upper tier, such as Iowa, Utah and Colorado. But some low-spending states also rank poorly in testing, such as Mississippi.

Washington, D.C. schools have the highest per-pupil spending in the nation but are dead last in academics.

California, until recently, was mediocre in spending and mediocre in NAEP tests. The state’s big increases in spending could bring better academic results, but only if the money is laser-focused on uplifting children who have been left behind, rather than subtly diverted into other purposes, as various independent studies have indicated, including a scathing 2019 report from the state auditor’s office.

After delving into the finances of three representative school districts, auditors castigated the state Department of Education for sloppy oversight of LCFF funds. They also criticized school districts for issuing indecipherable and inaccurate reports on how funds were being spent, and county offices of education for not fulfilling their designated roles as LCFF monitors.

“We are particularly concerned that the state does not explicitly require districts to spend their supplemental and concentration (LCFF) funds on the intended student groups or to track their spending of those funds,” the report declared. “Without a means of tracking how districts use funds, state and local policymakers and other local stakeholders lack adequate information to assess the impact of those funds on the outcomes of intended student groups.”

Moreover, a CalMatters investigation into how the state’s schools spent $33.5 billion in one-time state and federal funds to help their students cope with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that much of it was diverted into programs, equipment and other purposes that had little or nothing to do with countering the devastating impacts of at-home schooling.

So will the extra money that Newsom and the Legislature are pumping into the schools really make an academic difference? The record to date is not encouraging.

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Physical fitness is a powerful predictor of health outcomes — ScienceDaily

Physical fitness is a powerful predictor of health outcomes — ScienceDaily

In the largest study performed to date to understand the relationship between habitual physical activity and physical fitness, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that higher amount of time spent performing exercise (moderate-vigorous physical activity) and low-moderate level activity (steps) and less time spent sedentary, translated to greater physical fitness.

“By establishing the relationship between different forms of habitual physical activity and detailed fitness measures, we hope that our study will provide important information that can ultimately be used to improve physical fitness and overall health across the life course,” explained corresponding author Matthew Nayor, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at BUSM.

He and his team studied approximately 2,000 participants from the community-based Framingham Heart Study who underwent comprehensive cardiopulmonary exercise tests (CPET) for the “gold standard” measurement of physical fitness. Physical fitness measurements were associated with physical activity data obtained through accelerometers (device that measures frequency and intensity of human movement) that were worn for one week around the time of CPET and approximately eight years earlier.

They found dedicated exercise (moderate-vigorous physical activity) was the most efficient at improving fitness. Specifically, exercise was three times more efficient than walking alone and more than 14 times more efficient than reducing the time spent sedentary. Additionally, they found that the greater time spent exercising and higher steps/day could partially offset the negative effects of being sedentary in terms of physical fitness.

According to the researchers, while the study was focused on the relationship of physical activity and fitness specifically (rather than any health-related outcomes), fitness has a powerful influence on health and is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and premature death. “Therefore, improved understanding of methods to improve fitness would be expected to have broad implications for improved health,” said Nayor, a cardiologist at Boston Medical Center.

These findings appear online in the European Heart Journal.

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Materials provided by Boston University School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.