Free Republic

Years after Common Core made its debut in many state education systems, the disastrous long-term results of the program are finally being seen. The students’ reading assessment paints a grim picture of educational readiness, with tested fourth and eighth graders failing to best the previous test’s results. This year’s results were only marginally better than those from 1992. The mathematics scores show the most damning results — an upward trend until the year 2015, when the momentum seemed to grind to a halt. Although there were double-digit gains since the ’90s, fourth graders only managed to score a single point...

FULL TITLE: Exclusive–Hilarie Gamm: Amazon, Google Reap 15 Percent Discount to Hire Foreigners over American Graduates The federal government is helping giant multinational corporations such as Amazon and Google to reap a 15 percent discount every time foreign workers are hired over American college graduates, says Hilarie Gamm, author of Billions Lost: The American Tech Crisis and The Road Map to Change and co-founder of the American Workers Coalition. During an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Gamm explained how the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program provides a tax incentive, and thus a subsidy paid for by U.S. taxpayers, for corporations to...

Male academics, who comprise less than 10 percent of North American archaeologists, write the vast majority of the field's high impact, peer-reviewed literature. That's according to a new study in American Antiquity by Washington State University archaeologists Tiffany Fulkerson and Shannon Tushingham. The two scientists set out to determine how a rapidly evolving demographic and professional landscape is influencing the production and dissemination of knowledge in American archaeology. They found that women, who now make up half of all archaeologists in North America, and professionals working outside of a university setting, who account for 90 percent of the total workforce,...

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor who argues for a “movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” will be leading a confab at Minnesota’s Carleton College this October. Carleton’s convocation series, described as “a shared campus experience that brings students, faculty, and staff together for […] a lecture or presentation from specialists in a variety of disciplines,” have “a rich history” dating back to the early 1940s The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction […] Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced,...

Two-thirds of employees report regrets about their advanced degrees, as Americans question the high cost of higher education. Student loan debt has ballooned to nearly $1.6 trillion nationwide in 2019, topping the list of regrets for employees. Science, technology, engineering or math majors, who are more likely to enjoy higher salaries, were least likely to report regrets, while those in the humanities were most likely. A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of employees report having regrets when it comes to their advanced degrees, according to a PayScale...

STEM shooting suspect appears in court; affidavit remains sealed. School Shooting Suspect Alec McKinney Charged As Adult: 48 Counts, 1st Degree Murder.

One of the suspects in the deadly Colorado school shooting is a bully who joked about shootings and threatened other students for years, a former friend said. Kevin Cole used to go to STEM School Highlands Ranch, where one student was killed and eight others injured Tuesday in a shooting. Two suspects are in custody and will appear in court next week to hear the charges against them. One of those alleged shooters was Devon Erickson, 18, who was once a friend of Cole's. "They couldn't believe that he would actually do it, but they weren't entirely surprised that he...

Boy, the MSM has been uncharacteristically quiet about the most recent school shooting haven’t they? I suppose it may have something to do with how the perps obtained the guns – stolen from parents who had purchased them legally. More likely it has more to do with the fact that at least one of the two villain shooters is a member of the newest protected fringe identity group: Girls-to-Men. Or is that boys-to-Womyn? It’s so hard to tell which way the kids are going these days. In any event I’m willing to bet the shooters cover at least 2 letters...

The father of one of the alleged STEM School Highlands Ranch shooters in Colorado is a serial felon and illegal immigrant from Mexico, DailyMail.com can reveal. Jose Evis Quintana, the father of alleged 16-year-old killer Alec McKinney was once jailed for 15 months for domestic violence against Alec's mother and 'menacing with a weapon'.

Kendrick Castillo – only days from graduation – acted fast inside of his British literature class at a suburban Denver school Tuesday afternoon. And he paid with his life. When a gunman burst through the door at STEM School Highland Ranch, barking at students to stay in place and not move, Castillo, 18, rushed the shooter. It was a quick-thinking move that fellow students said gave them a chance to bolt for safety or take cover under desks. "Kendrick lunged at (the gunman), and he shot Kendrick, giving all of us enough time to get underneath our desks, to get...

... Based on the data we found and on previous literature in this field, gender differences in representation and productivity can be interpreted in terms of two main causal factors: Gender differences in interests; Higher male variability (HMV). Needless to say, “for every complex natural phenomenon there is a simple, elegant, compelling, wrong explanation” (Thomas Gold) and when dealing with complex systems any simple explanation can easily be inadequate, including explanations that attribute gender disparities exclusively to sexual discrimination. But I believe the data can be explained without invoking sexual discrimination and by focusing instead on the two factors above....

February 20, 2019 America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security By Arthur Herman On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it stayed for three weeks before its batteries died. Then it continued silently in a decaying orbit for another two months before burning up in the atmosphere. Its radio signal pulses were easily...

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis. The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM. Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington...

... Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit...

In 2018, an unprecedented number of individuals across the country with science and technical backgrounds made a run for Congress. Many of them were energized by the perceived anti-science rhetoric of President Donald Trump and his administration concerning the environment and health, and by a desire to bring more evidence-based decision making into politics. Although a handful of candidates have advanced to next month’s midterm election, many didn’t make it through the primaries. Of nearly 50 individuals with a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) background—all of them Democrats—who sought a House seat this year and were tracked by Science,...

With Labor Day on the horizon, many Americans are worried that automation will soon monopolize the job market. And who could blame them considering that recent Labor Days have been haunted by headlines about human workers becoming obsolete? Here is just a small sample:“Robots Could Steal 40% of U.S. Jobs by 2030.”“Artificial Intelligence Will Take Your Job.”“Jeff Bezos believes people shouldn’t do jobs software can do.”“Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even richer.”So, is this dystopian nightmare inevitable? Will the vast majority of Americans in the workforce be replaced by robots and cold, mechanical automata?Wrong...

Melinda Gates says she will preference women and non-whites over men and white people, specifically for these immutable characteristics that have nothing inherently to do with business success. Melinda Gates has decided to enter the venture capital world by sending her money to people based at least partly on their sex and skin color, she said in a recent Fortune interview. Disparate Outcomes Can Signal Broader Possibilities In the Fortune interview, Gates says “I think real change can occur when the VC community starts to demand that the people it invests in have diversity, the right values, and the right...

Four Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades. After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we...

A Canadian high school switched to “Africentric Math” to attract black students to go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math(STEM) fields, according to Canadian Broadcasting’s(CBC) Wednesday report. Nova Scotia’s Auburn Drive High School math teachers are skipping their previous eurocentric approach to teaching mathematics so black students will gain more interest in the subject, the CBC reported. Teachers are adopting an Afrocentric lens to teach mathematics, based on incorporating African history and culture to make math classes resonate with their students. Auburn High School is working with the Imphop’s Legacy Academy, a program encouraging black students to get interested in...