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"an act of this magnitude" unfolding "in view of all Mexicans, the international community and the media" has caught so much attention

Authorities say the students were abducted by police on order of a local mayor, then turned over to a gang that's believed to have killed them and burned their bodies before throwing some remains in a river.

It's not the first time the President, who represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party that once ruled Mexico for more than 70 years, has faced allegations of government corruption and accusations the government is too slow to fight crime.

rgenc

New video of missing Mexican students "These are the people that are screwing over the country," they chanted. Protesters clashed with police at Acapulco's airport on Monday, crippling the airport for hours and forcing the cancellation of several flights. Mexico's President has also said he's outraged about the students' case, but he's condemned the protest violence. And some have expressed skepticism that protesters are truly concerned about what happened to the students, accusing them of exploiting the situation for political reasons. Protesters condemn what they call inaction by the government. "There is a national e

On Friday, protesters marching in Mexico City carried posters saying, "Enough, I'm tired." Others held signs saying, "It was the state."

Mexican news website Aristegui Noticias over the weekend alleged that Mexico's President and his wife have been living in a lavish $7 million mansion owned by a contractor that's won lucrative government projects.

"People in Mexico are taking to the streets yesterday, today and just about every day for the last month, demanding not only clearing up this particular crime

He said he had just spoken with the missing students' parents, and told them what he later told reporters -- that officials believe the students' remains were thrown in the river, but they don't yet have DNA proof.

In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters.

It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.

Stand Your Ground laws protect citizens from prosecution in cases where they feel threatened in public, and fire their weapons.

It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom.

Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views.

In short, they argued that guns in the classroom pose an intolerable threat to free speech.

Will guns encourage speech and invite people to discussion and debate in the classroom?

Gun owners have shot and killed unarmed citizens—and sought Stand Your Ground protections—in cases in which they misjudged or overestimated the threats before them.

In 2014, a Montana man invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage.

One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory.

Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires.

It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.

The data, however, tell a few other stories that suggest the nation's schools have a long way to go to emerge from the shadow of this pandemic.While 42% of students attended schools that offered fully in-person learning, just 33% of students chose to return full time. The fact is, many families in communities hit hard by COVID-19 remain reluctant to send their children back to school, even if those schools have reopened.

What's more, the reopening has been inequitable. Students of color are much more likely to be learning remotely than white Students — both because many families of color say they feel less comfortable sending their children back to school at this moment but also because, according to the data, city schools that serve large and diverse student groups are less likely to be open than largely white, rural districts.

As a result, nearly half of white fourth-graders were back in school full time — that's compared with 15% of Asian, 28% of Black and 33% of Hispanic fourth-graders.

the leaders of this microcosm are doubling down on one of the oldest theories of politics: that ideas have the power to shape the direction of the country.

At least at Princeton, students and their mentors are betting that romantic ideals such as collegiality and intellectual rigor have not totally lost their relevance in the Trump era

The campus is largely apolitical or vaguely liberal, students told me, but George has carved out a mini-kingdom for right-leaning academics and students, who have gone on to hold all sorts of influential positions.

The students and professors who move in Princeton’s conservative worlds have a diverse range of political views: They are pro-Trump and anti-Trump, stalwart supporters of the Republican Party and politically homeless wanderers with conservative leanings. I talked with students who like some of what Trump is doing, but for the most part, they were hesitant to go full MAGA.

they seem to share a vision of how politics should be done, prizing respectful debate, principled arguments, and guidance from thinkers such as John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s an ethos focused, above all, on civility and erudition.

issues such as impeachment have gone all but unmentioned among his friends and peers. “We are just debating the way we see the world and how it should be,” Rajasekar said. Conversations about politics at restaurants and bars are always cordial and respectful, he added. “We place a high premium on that kind of collegiality.”

students at Princeton who lean to the right have helped build a robust suite of conservative groups, most prominently the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, an expansive academic center overseen by the prominent scholar Robert P. George.

“We have a motto for students in the Madison Program—it’s on some of the swag we hand out,” he said. “It’s ‘Think deeply, think critically, and think for yourself.’

George, a long-respected figure in the conservative political world, has been a vocal critic of Trump since before the 2016 election. As a result, unlike in prior Republican administrations, he has largely remained on the sidelines of polic

he’s committed to his vision of what the conservative movement, and American politics, can look like. “I have a kind of faith in the power of clear, coherent, deep thinking to produce good citizens and good people,” he said.

Idealism is dead at Princeton,” Christian Schmidt, a senior who has been involved in nearly every conservative organization on campus, told me over apple cider at a local coffee shop. “The primary emotion, I think, on Princeton’s campus is apathy. Or apathy fused with resignation

Other students said they don’t see a clear place for themselves in conservative politics, no matter how engaged they might be in the world of conservative ideas.

Most of the people I spoke with described feeling welcome to share their ideas on Princeton’s campus—a number of students and faculty specifically mentioned that the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has made a point of creating space for diverse viewpoints

At least at Princeton, there seems to be hope. “We have gotten over these moments, these eruptions of no confidence,” said Allen Guelzo, a historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, during the conversation with George and other professors. “And I think we will get over this as well.”

In this cloistered bastion, the work of grooming conservative elites will continue. “If I were the last man on Earth to believe this stuff,” George said, “I would still believe I’ve got the best product to sell.”

Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.

The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct.

Biden’s Department of Education has interpreted Title VI to apply when students “experience discrimination, including harassment,” on the basis of their “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

these statements — even if fairly rooted in the text of Title VI — are not a solution

Executive orders and administrative regulations are more ephemeral than federal statutes. The next president (or one elected in 2036 or 2052) may choose to interpret Title VI differently. Biden’s interpretation is broader than Trump’s, for example. Courts will also have their own say, and they are now less deferential to presidential interpretations of the law than they’ve been in decades.

The definitions don’t just implicate the First Amendment, they also breed confusion around the very concept of harassment itself. Hearing unpleasant or even hateful thoughts or ideas isn’t “harassment.”

The best parts of the Antisemitism Awareness Act explicitly incorporate discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” into federal statutory law, elevating the legal protections well beyond the executive orders and guidance letters of previous administrations.

If the law had stopped there — or even if it had gone further and explicitly stated that discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived Jewish identity is by definition discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, then it would be a vital addition to federal law.

But the law did not stop there. It goes on to require schools to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when determining whether there has been a violation of Title VI

This is a serious mistake. The alliance’s definition includes examples of antisemitism that encompass a broad range of statements that are protected by the First Amendment.

Both the Trump and the Biden administrations attempted to solve the problem by interpreting Title VI to apply to antisemitism, at least in some circumstances. The Trump administration issued an executive order stating that “discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color or national origin.”

That’s an inescapable part of life in a free, pluralistic nation

Harassment is something else entirely.

In a 1999 case, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court defined student-on-student harassment under Title IX (the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education) as conduct “so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victims are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

Harassment doesn’t depend so much on the content or viewpoint of the objectionable speech as where, when and how it happens.

If students chant, “Globalize the intifada,” at a lawful public protest, then that’s protected

If they shout down Jewish students in class using the same phrase, or chant it outside the dorm rooms of Jewish students at 3 a.m., then they’re engaging in harassment. Jewish students can’t study or sleep on an equal basis with other students.

In both of those circumstances, the actual content of the words is less important than the timing and the targets. A person can commit an act of antisemitic harassment if he targets Jewish students with words that have nothing to do with ancestry or ethnicity

For example, if someone stands outside a Jewish student’s room night after night yelling, “Michael Jordan is the GOAT” relentlessly so that the student can’t sleep or targets her Jewish roommate with constant interruption and distraction then she’s engaging in antisemitic harassment not because of the content or viewpoint of the words, but rather because of the identity of the target and the time and manner of the speech.

I’d like to humbly offer a better way. Strip the problematic incorporation of the alliance’s antisemitism definition and examples from the bill entirely. Instead, simply amend Title VI itself to make it explicit that discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” is prohibited by the statute and that antisemitic discrimination meets that definition.

by revising Title VI to clearly prohibit discrimination against Jews without any further amplification or definition, antisemitic harassment will fit neatly into existing case law that has longed harmonized free speech principles and nondiscrimination law

Elaine Swafford was hired as CGLA’s executive director in 2012 and given less than a year to transform the then-failing school, which had launched several years earlier as the state’s first single-gender public charter school and then tanked.

Math proficiency was in the single digits. Few students had solid prospects for the future.

. Last year, the school achieved a 93 percent graduation rate and nearly every graduate went on to college.

Over the last decade, new research has increasingly suggested that strong school leaders are a crucial component of success, and even that turning around failing schools is virtually impossible without a strong leader at the helm.

On an adjoining wall, hundreds of magnets bearing individual names track each girl’s proficiency in a range of subjects, from below basic to advanced.

When she took over, half of the school’s teachers turned over after she informed the staff they would need to reapply for their jobs.

Swafford’s way of thinking is based on the idea that if she can’t deliver the well-rounded education both in and out of the classroom that middle-class kids get, her students will never catch up to their more affluent peers

Each student at CGLA is assigned an adult mentor and Swafford recently hired a college-access counselor to help students work through the federal financial-aid application and to stay connected with recent graduates

After she recently discovered that 85 of the school’s 350 students don’t have internet access at home, Swafford set about securing a hotspot for each wifi-less child.

The school receives some extra funding from the government because it serves such a high number of low-income students, but it’s not nearly enough to pay for all of the programs the school offers, so Swafford has gotten very good at raising money

Twenty-nine percent of the school’s budget is from fundraising, she told me, which helps fill a $4,500-per-student gap in funding.

Teachers are expected to believe that every child is capable of success and then help them achieve it by doing whatever it takes, regardless of any obstacles

The school recently implemented “grit” grading, and, Swafford acknowledged unapologetically, “everybody’s not happy about it.”

“grit” grading

whites don't want to see themselves as prejudiced, independent of how other people see them," Harber says. "What happens, I believe, is their focus gets distracted from what are the needs of the students to what are ways that I can restore my self image."

Perhaps the best way to mitigate racial concerns in the classroom, Harber says, is for teachers to straightforwardly tell students they are tough graders who will give marks solely based on performance. It's a simple solution, but it has been shown to work. A 1999 study from Stanford University found that teachers who invoked these high standards gained greater trust from minority students. "In fact, the motivation of black students provided with criticism in this wise manner improved so dramatically that it slightly surpassed that of their white peers,"

it is important to create circumstances and environments where both teachers and students feel they are being taken at face value -- that their attention can be jointly focused on what it takes to learn and rather than being self-protective. Correcting environments, rather than trying to correct people, would be the take-home point."

the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.

More than a quarter of the admissions directors said they had felt pressure from senior-level administrators to admit certain applicants, and almost a quarter got pressure from trustees or development officers.

Mr. Thacker said his own research had found students becoming more cynical about higher education. “students say, ‘They’re cheating us, so we can cheat them,’ ” he said. “The cheat they see is that colleges are out for themselves, not for them as students. Our research, with 2,500 students, found that of all the sources of information students get about higher education, they thought the least trustworthy sources are the colleges

Admissions directors at many public universities said in the survey that recruiting more out-of-state and international students, who pay higher tuition, was their top strategy.

Higher-education leaders at many private universities have been reminding their students of these options; in a letter to the Harvard community after Trump’s announcement on ending the program, for example, President Drew Faust wrote that “the University will maintain its existing financial aid policies, which provide funding to students without reference to immigration status.”

The consensus among scholars is that community colleges would witness the most conspicuous change if DACA is indeed repealed. It is estimated that the majority of undocumented college students attend community colleges, and many if not most of them rely on their work permits to pay for tuition.

Ms. DeVos had almost no experience in public education and was clearly disinterested in the department’s mission. Mr. Cardona worked his way up from teacher to principal to education commissioner of Connecticut.

Given these realities, the new education secretary — whoever he or she turns out to be — should resist calls to put off annual student testing.

The Education Department should also recognize that this pandemic will not be the last one. That means developing a list of best practices and strategic schools plans that can be swiftly rolled out when another medical crisis occurs with a different infectious agent.

the new education commissioner needs to revoke a series of department communiqués that had the effect of letting school districts off the hook for discriminatory disciplinary practices and other potential violations of civil rights law.

The DeVos administration sold out to predatory for-profit colleges and their various abettors within a nanosecond of taking office.

new education secretary can begin rule-making processes where necessary and inform the courts that it will no longer defend against lawsuits filed by state attorneys general and others who have dogged the DeVos department in court for buddying up to the for-profit industry and attacking student borrowers who deserve to have their student loans forgiven because they were defrauded by career education programs.

a lawsuit filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia charging that Ms. DeVos unlawfully rescinded an Obama-era rule that allowed students who had been defrauded by career colleges to have their federal loans forgiven.

Ms. DeVos disregarded a scathing indictment by her department’s career staff, reinstating an accrediting body that had been stripped of its authority for exercising lax oversight.

Although many students learn about the historical struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum.

integration is still one of the most effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.”

Based on civil rights data released by the United States Department of Education, the nonprofit news organization ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. In this activity, which might begin a deeper study of school segregation, you can look up your own school district, or individual public or charter school, to see how it compares with its counterparts.

Only a tiny number of black students were offered admission to the highly selective public high schools in New York City in 2019, raising the pressure on officials to confront the decades-old challenge of integrating New York’s elite public schools.

School districts that predominantly serve students of color received $23 billion less in funding than mostly white school districts in the United States in 2016, despite serving the same number of students, a new report found.

Segregation still persists in public schools more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Now it’s possible for students to purchase answers for assignments from a “tutoring” service such as Chegg—a practice that the kids call “chegging.”

when the AI chatbots were unleashed last fall, all these cheating methods of the past seemed obsolete. “We now believe [ChatGPT is] having an impact on our new-customer growth rate,” Chegg’s CEO admitted on an earnings call this month. The company has since lost roughly $1 billion in market value.

By 2018, Turnitin was already taking more than $100 million in yearly revenue to help professors sniff out impropriety. Its software, embedded in the courseware that students use to turn in work, compares their submissions with a database of existing material (including other student papers that Turnitin has previously consumed), and flags material that might have been copied. The company, which has claimed to serve 15,000 educational institutions across the world, was acquired for $1.75 billion in 2019. Last month, it rolled out an AI-detection add-in (with no way for teachers to opt out). AI-chatbot countermeasures, like the chatbots themselves, are taking over.

as the first chatbot spring comes to a close, Turnitin’s new software is delivering a deluge of positive identifications: This paper was “18% AI”; that one, “100% AI.” But what do any of those numbers really mean? Surprisingly—outrageously—it’s very hard to say for sure.

according to the company, that designation does indeed suggest that 100 percent of an essay—as in, every one of its sentences—was computer generated, and, further, that this judgment has been made with 98 percent certainty.

A Turnitin spokesperson acknowledged via email that “text created by another tool that uses algorithms or other computer-enabled systems,” including grammar checkers and automated translators, could lead to a false positive, and that some “genuine” writing can be similar to AI-generated writing. “Some people simply write very predictably,” she told me

Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because Turnitin disclaims drawing any conclusions about misconduct from its results. “This is only a number intended to help the educator determine if additional review or a discussion with the student is warranted,” the spokesperson said. “Teaching is a human endeavor.”

In other words, the student in my program whose work was flagged for being “100% AI” might have used a little AI, or a lot of AI, or maybe something in between. As for any deeper questions—exactly how he used AI, and whether he was wrong to do so—teachers like me are, as ever, on our own.

Rethinking assignments in light of AI might be warranted, just like it was in light of online learning. But doing so will also be exhausting for both faculty and students. Nobody will be able to keep up, and yet everyone will have no choice but to do so

Somewhere in the cracks between all these tectonic shifts and their urgent responses, perhaps teachers will still find a way to teach, and students to learn.

Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.

Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.

The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)

Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.

Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.

In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea

Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.

For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.

Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.

Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.

So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.

The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.

Nonviolence.

Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force

Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.

Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.

The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.

Cambridge Students’ Union recently published a guide titled ‘How to spot Terf ideology’. It suggests that sex is neither natural nor binary, but rather a social construct and a ‘colonial fiction created to oppress trans people’

The guide goes on to claim, falsely, that ‘Terfs spend a lot of time working with the far-right.’  The Union’s Women’s Officer proudly announces in her manifesto that ‘Terfs aren’t welcome here’.

It is not uncommon for students to comb through a classmate’s social media and bully them in private messages. This can progress to more threatening behaviour. 

A gender-critical student at Cambridge was traumatised after her peers discovered an online article in which she expressed her views on sex. It cited her sexual assault as a reason for her reservations about allowing males into women’s spaces. For holding these views, she was publicly shamed and harassed. In the first year of what should have been a rewarding university experience, she became a pariah within her college

Helen Joyce, author of the best-selling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, was recently invited to speak at Gonville and Caius College by Professor Arif Ahmed. This event sparked a furore. In an email to Caius students, the college’s Master and another academic described Joyce’s views as ‘hateful’ and wrote that: ‘Individuals should be able to speak freely within the law…However, on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral’. Ahmed was blocked from using the college’s intranet to publicise the event.

Hundreds of students vehemently protested Joyce’s speech. Yet, in their report of the event, the student newspaper, Varsity muddled up what Joyce actually stood for. The paper suggested Joyce believes that ‘gender is not a social construct and is immutably linked to sex’, the very opposite of her thesis.

At one of this country’s most prestigious universities, women who hold perfectly reasonable views are terrorised into silence. Gender-critical students and academics are ostracised. A university that prides itself on academic rigour is letting down its students.

new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly.

the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand

It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decade

schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality

the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool

The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period

the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents.

much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers.

improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

We must listen with care, which requires patience, focus, eye contact and managing moments of ennui productively — perhaps by double-checking one’s notes instead of a friend’s latest Instagram. Multitasking and the mediation of screens kill empathy.

Likewise, we must communicate — in writing or in speech — with clarity and precision

The student who speaks in class learns to convey his or her points effectively because everyone else is listening.

education requires constant interaction in which professor and students are fully present for an exchange.

To restore the focus-training function of the classroom, I stopped allowing laptops in class early in my teaching career. Since then research has confirmed the wisdom of my choice.

Focus is crucial, and we do best when monotasking: Even disruptions of a few seconds can derail one’s train of thought

Students process information better when they take notes — they don’t just transcribe, as they do with laptops, but they think and record those thoughts. Laptops or tablets can undermine exam performance by 18 percent.

For all these reasons, starting with smaller classes, I banned laptops, and it improved the students’ engagement. With constant eye contact, I could see and feel when they understood me, and when they did not.

You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. My students need to learn how to be lawyers and professionals. To succeed they must internalize an ethos of caution, care and respect. To instill these values and skills in my students, I have no choice but to limit laptop use in the classroom.

Posse is subversive is that it shows that academic chops do not completely determine college success. It demonstrates other important factors: whether a student has social support, a sense of belonging and a network that can offer advice. People from a dominant culture take these things for granted, but minority students have to build them. Posse helps. Every Posse member I talked to said having the group is crucial.

There’s one other provocative issue raised by Posse’s results: the damage wreaked by stereotype threat.  The objects of a stereotype can find their performance greatly affected by simply being reminded that the stereotype exists. Researchers, for example, gave a math test (pdf) to a group of Asian female students. Before the test, the women filled out one of three types of questionnaires. One asked about their gender, one about their ethnicity, and one asked about neither. Those who were reminded they were Asian did the best on the math test. Those reminded they were female did the worst.

why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?

Since they can’t take on poverty itself, education policy makers should try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-class students enjoy as a matter of course.

Other countries already pursue such strategies. In Finland, with its famously high-performing schools, schools provide food and free health care for students. Developmental needs are addressed early. Counseling services are abundant.

But in the United States over the past decade, it became fashionable among supporters of the “no excuses” approach to school improvement to accuse anyone raising the poverty issue of letting schools off the hook — or what Mr. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Such accusations may afford the illusion of a moral high ground, but they stand in the way of serious efforts to improve education and, for that matter, go a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked.