RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 18 to August 24, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports that vocational education is not a dingy shop class for underachievers anymore. It’s being reimagined in public education, with sophisticated high school “career and technical education” programs that bypass the high cost of college to train students for professions ranging from aviation to health care to engineering. - Career and technical education, or CTE for short, has boosted student engagement, graduation rates, employment outcomes and income, according to several studies.
- CTE programs in numerous states have waitlists while many traditional high schools struggle to fill seats.
- Despite the demand, advocates say, programs are struggling to expand because the traditional school system continues to underfund CTE.
- In many wealthier districts, school leaders still consider career training as a less worthy Plan B for students who can’t handle the rigors of college.
- But the soaring cost of college is helping drive the demand for career education. It’s part of an ongoing sea change in education, which has seen a decade-long decline in college enrollment, particularly in the liberal arts.
- At the same time, an increasing number of students who do want to go to college use CTE to explore pathways in the biosciences and engineering and make smarter choices of universities and majors.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books $8.5B to Intel Didn’t Stop Mass Layoffs, RCI
Empty NY Heartbreak Hotels for Migrants, RCI
Ohio State Fair Costs Many Butter Cows, RCI
Grateful Dead Bogarts Stash for Museum, RCI
Baltimore Not in Rental-Car Driver's Seat, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway GOP's Parting Gift to Biden: 291-Page Impeachment Report, RealClearPolitics
House, Senate Investigate TSA Surveillance of Tulsi Gabbard, Racket
Tim Walz Claim That He Reenlisted Week of 9/11 Is False, Federalist
Walz Praised Chinese Communism to Students, Washington Free Beacon
Sen. Casey's Stake in Chinese Communist Oil Firm, Washington Free Beacon
JD Vance's 'Jobs for Hillbillies' Employed Migrants Instead, Daily Beast
Dems in Tight Races Skipping Harris's Convention, Just the News
Biden-Harris Official Calls for 'Queering Nuclear Weapons.', Fox News
Are Donors to Leftist PAC ActBlue Even Real?, Daily Signal
Video: O'Keefe Confronts ActBlue at DNC re: Phantom Donors, James O'Keefe, X Other Noteworthy Articles and Series California’s green energy policies are playing the role of Robin Hood – only in reverse, this article reports: In 2023, Golden State bureaucrats belatedly disclosed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 would cumulatively reduce the incomes of families making less than $100,000 per year by $5.3 billion, while enriching higher-income households by the same amount. … [A 16-page government report] detail[ed] the myriad ways the state’s climate policy hurts the disadvantaged, including through high energy costs, limited access to clean technology, and poorer residents subsidizing wealthier “green” households. This article reports that “California’s willingness to harm its most vulnerable citizens in its doomed emissions-cut crusade is symptomatic of the West’s climate-policy failures. The transition to a service-sector economy in places like California, Britain, and Germany has concentrated wealth in households and enterprises least affected by electricity, motor-fuel, and natural-gas costs.” In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports that: [A]n evaluation of more than 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries found that only 63 actually worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Subsidies and regulations – policy types often favored by governments—rarely worked to reduce emissions, the study found, unless they were combined with price-based strategies aimed at changing consumer and corporate behavior. In a separate article, Wired reports that South Africa’s power companies are under assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives in pursuit of the increasingly valuable material that carries the current: copper. The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper – and lots of it. Outwardly, the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), a vast development project near the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, resembles a midsize Chinese city. Founded by a Chinese businessman named Zhao Wei in a remote area, the skyscrapers, shopping areas, casino and artificial lake that fill the landscape seem as though they were dropped by magic onto the Laotian side of the Mekong river. Behind the glassy facades, this article reports, more is going on: The GTSEZ operates as a self-governed enclave, and for the better part of a decade investigators have warned that it’s a hub for criminal activity of every description—a legal no-man’s land. At first, according to the US Department of the Treasury and other agencies that have examined the zone, one of its main businesses was drug trafficking, particularly of methamphetamines. … More recently, the GTSEZ has diversified into hosting “scam centers,” where teams of operators, many of them victims of human trafficking, persuade online marks to move their savings into fraudulent crypto-trading schemes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other agencies have identified the GTSEZ as a nexus of money laundering as well, connecting criminal groups from Taiwan to Myanmar that use crypto, underground casinos and shadow banking to move ill-gotten gains. This article reports that even as the GTSEZ grows in plain sight, law enforcement agencies can do practically nothing to police it. Sanctions imposed in 2018 by the U.S. Treasury Department have had little impact. Any move by the U.S. or another country to initiate a prosecution would be complicated by the apparent disinterest of Laos’ leaders, whose government has a 20 percent stake in the Zone. Ohio’s elections chief has referred for possible prosecution 597 apparent noncitizens who either registered to vote or cast a ballot in a recent election. Quote: Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said that of those cases, 138 were found to have cast ballots and 459 registered but did not vote. … The total compares to 148 noncitizen cases referred in 2022, 117 in 2021 and 354 in 2019. More than 8 million people are registered to vote in Ohio. This article reports that the identification of noncitizens on the voter rolls was discovered after LaRose launched an audit of the state’s voter registration database that resulted in the removal of 154,995 registrations that he said had been confirmed to be abandoned and inactive for at least four consecutive years. Civil rights organizations decried the effort as voter suppression. In a separate article, RealClearInvestigations has reported that noncitizen voting is becoming a battle line in partisan politics. Already more than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats – including Washington D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities – allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its Elections Commission. The Department of Homeland Security does not know the location of nearly 300,000 unaccompanied children who came to the country illegally and were sent to live with adult sponsors, the department’s inspector general said in an alert flagging the “urgent issue” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Though ICE is tasked with keeping tabs on unaccompanied children and serving them with a “notice to appear” as part of their immigration case, this article reports that the agency largely failed to do so. ICE failed to locate around 291,000 children handed over to HHS, some two-thirds of transfers: There is reason to believe that many of the no-shows are missing or dead, or have been kidnapped or trafficked. After ICE turns children over to HHS, the latter agency relies on contractors to place the minors in care of adult illegal immigrant “sponsors,” many of whom claim to be relatives. The Biden administration has loosened the vetting and restrictions on these sponsors in an attempt to deal with the massive number of children crossing the border. Whistleblowers from DHS, HHS, and holding camp and transportation contractors say that children are often trafficked across the border, placed with sponsors who are part of that trafficking network, and forced to work in sex or labor slavery to pay off a debt to the cartel. Documents show that HHS sent children to live with known gang members, and turned minors over to adults at airports even when their IDs suggested they were not the vetted sponsor. ChatGPT debuted less than two years ago, but it and similar programs have already upended the academy as professors struggle to determine whether they are grading students or computers. As suspicion of rampant cheating roils the classroom, this article reports that an endless AI-cheating-and-detection arms race is playing out: OpenAI is experimenting with a method to hide a digital watermark in its output, which could be spotted later on and used to show that a given text was created by AI. But watermarks can be tampered with, and any detector built to look for them can check only for those created by a specific AI system. That might explain why OpenAI hasn’t chosen to release its watermarking feature—doing so would just push its customers to watermark-free services. Other approaches have been tried. Researchers at Georgia Tech devised a system that compares how students used to answer specific essay questions before ChatGPT was invented with how they do so now. A company called PowerNotes integrates OpenAI services into an AI-changes-tracked version of Google Docs, which can allow an instructor to see all of ChatGPT’s additions to a given document. But methods like these are either unproved in real-world settings or limited in their ability to prevent cheating. This article notes that ChatGPT did not invent cheating. “If college professors seem obsessed with student fraud, that’s because it’s widespread. This was true even before ChatGPT arrived: Historically, studies estimate that more than half of all high-school and college students have cheated in some way.” |
