Blue Book Diaries

Stories, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week.

Giving a commencement address at Boston University during the WGA strike, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was met with a loud chant of “Pay your writers.”

In New York, Hunter College fired an adjunct professor who was filmed threatening a New York Post writer with a machete after berating pro-life students.

Five years ago, when West Virginia University closed its shrinking campus in the small town of Montgomery, it shattered a community—and deepened local distrust of higher education.

In Las Vegas, a private school founded in 1984 by the current mayor recalled its yearbooks after learning that a student’s quotation came from a prominent neo-Nazi.

In North Carolina, Amy Bailiff walked across the stage to claim her doctorate 24 hours after giving birth.

In Maryland, a 20-year-old man has been terrorizing neighbors at a school bus stop with “an AR-15-style rifle” in what he says is a protest against a new law banning him from taking it into various other crowded public places. The police said his behavior is legal.

In Miami, a mother who persuaded her school district to restrict student access to Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem, which she had not read, on the grounds that it includes “hate messages,” apologized for posting antisemitic memes on Facebook, including references to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

In Newark, Justin walked at commencement to receive his diploma along with the rest of Seton Hall University’s graduating class. This excited some comment because Justin is a dog.

Stories, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week.

Serbia’s education minister resigned as the government struggled to contain the fallout from two back-to-back mass shootings—one of them at a school—in Europe’s most heavily armed society.

Has American mathematics instruction been led astray by inquiry-based learning? Some researchers believe so, proposing a “science of math” akin to the phonics-oriented “science of reading.”

A report from the Jewish Education Project showed that enrollment in Hebrew (supplemental) schools fell by 45% in the United States between 2006 and 2020.

In Tucson, Carol Kay—who came to the United States from Cambodia in 1981, when she was 15 years old, knowing no English—prepared to graduate from the University of Arizona alongside her sons, Harry and Anthony Chhieu. She wants to become a teacher.

Stories, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week.

At an exhibition in Seoul, a university art student ate Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, which is a banana.

A car accident derailed her college plans, but Janice Hall returned to finish her degree—at the age of 81. “Of course, there’s still challenges from the stroke,” she said. This fall, she’s going to start on her master’s degree.

About 100 miles away, another Indiana school, Taylor University, fired its writing center director—allegedly because she rejected the provost’s attempt to dictate how she taught a writing course with a racial justice theme. Students and faculty seem upset.

In suburban Portland, a pair of high schoolers named Sam and (naturally) Sherman organized a World War II tank to attend prom in. Sherman “even” got a date to go with him. They were escorted by Darth Vader on a unicycle, playing flaming bagpipes, much like Patton’s Third Army.

In Oklahoma, the state governor vetoed a bill—which passed the legislature with nearly unanimous support—that would have guaranteed the right of Native students to wear Indigenous regalia at graduation ceremonies.

Around the United States, legislatures held by the Republican Party are trying to make it harder for high school and college students to vote.

The U.S. Department of Education reported a decline in American eighth graders’ test scores in U.S. history and (for the first time) civics between 2018 and 2022.

Across Europe, students have occupied 22 schools and universities in the latest wave of climate protests.

The U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, released an advisory document called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” including a “national strategy to advance social connection.” It noted that young adults have some of America’s highest rates of loneliness, and these rates increased every year from 1976 to at least 2019.

A study published last month found that American elementary and middle school math teachers who believe gender equality has been achieved were more likely to give lower grades to work attributed to girls.

The Supreme Court’s influence scandals now have an education angle: ProPublica has reported that the billionaire Harlan Crow paid the private-school tuition of Justice Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew.

Back from an unannounced hiatus: Stories and essays, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week. A 🕛 symbol indicates a metered paywall.

Rolling Stone and the Pulitzer Center produced Brandi Morin’s and Annie Marie Musselman’s feature story 🕛 on the brutal legacy of America’s residential school system for Native American children.

Jill Barshay discussed the limitations of a research study that seems to demonstrate the importance of content knowledge in developing children’s reading skills.

The American Library Association counted 2,571 book titles that were challenged in 2022—40 percent more than in 2021, thanks to organized attempts to purge whole lists of books.

But this April, voters in Illinois and Wisconsin have turned out against book-banning in school board races.

The Seattle Public Library joined the Brooklyn Public Library in its “Books Unbanned” program, offering e-lending library cards to patrons between the ages of 13 and 26 across the United States.

In Oklahoma, five years after a failed teacher walkout, conservative state legislators may be coming around to the teachers’ point of view. But some educators are wary.

The University of Chicago, one of 17 elite institutions being sued for violating U.S. antitrust law in their financial aid practices, is reportedly the first school to settle.

The effects haven’t been uniform. But on balance, it really does look like social media, especially in the age of the smartphone, are bad for young people’s mental health.

In Minneapolis, hackers appear to have stolen 200,000 files from a public school system with 30,000 students, releasing extremely sensitive student and employee records, including reports of sexual abuse.

Schools in Wisconsin use an application called the Dropout Early Warning System to identify students at risk of failing to finish high school. It may be stigmatizing Black and Hispanic teenagers without improving graduation rates.

In Hammond, Indiana—and communities like it across the United States—rail companies like Norfolk Southern park their trains across intersections, forcing children to crawl over and under trains to get to school. The federal government received 28,000 complaints last year.

Marking its 40th anniversary, James Harvey, a staffer of the commission that produced the Reagan administration’s “Nation at Risk” report in 1983, described how the political leaders of the commission doctored the professionals’ findings to portray America’s public schools as failures. Frederick Hess pointed out some paradoxes in the report’s legacy.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the 2021 findings of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Although risky sexual behavior, drug use, and experiences of bullying at school have continued to decrease, most other measures of teen wellbeing have worsened.

Cedarville University’s idea of addressing sexual harassment apparently involves shaming women for “encouraging” their boyfriends to violate their boundaries.