Endgame Solution: updates, January-February 2025

There were lots of developments around the Instant University, but the negative ones outweigh the poisitive

In our post from 06/23/22, we described the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE) vision of an “Instant University”:

• University admissions will switch to a lottery system.

• An intersectional six-dimensional hyper-matrix will be the basis of the system, where lottery tickets will be assigned in proportion to the share of the cell in the Massachusetts population at large.

• To ensure equitable outcomes over the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the students, admission will be immediately followed by graduation.

• A 6-years’ worth of tuition will be charged over a microsecond-long transition period in between.

Our 03/24/23 issue featured the origins of this idea. a further update in was presented here in March 2023.

But life goes on. Here are fresh updates from the front lines of The War on Competence.

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Towards the goal

• California is banning homework. Obviously, they never admit that this is what they’re doing, but in September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the “Healthy Homework Act” (AB 2999) that aims to “promote evidence-based homework practices to support pupil learning and well-being, and to ensure consistency and clarity in assigning of homework (translation: A gentle phase-out of homework altogether.) Newsom’s children, as well as their rich spoiled friends, don’t need to worry about it anyway now that their competition (read: these annoying hard working Asian kids) are being “red-lined” and no-SAT-ed out of existence. Even Nature admits it, albeit in a very lopsided manner: they opt for the term “geographic disparities” to denote the Asian-frei zone and completely ignore the effect of the abolished SAT exams.

• Massachusetts: “π” is just a baked dish. thanks to the abolished MCAS (K-12 math and reading competency exam), you can now get a high-school diploma even if you think that “π” is a baked pastry. Or, in the words of the Massachusetts Teachers Association: “Our schools will stop punishing students who simply do not do well on standardized tests, for whatever reason.” As a reminder, the head of the MTA also said that “The focus on income, on college and career readiness speaks to a system … tied to the capitalist class and its needs for profit. We, on the other hand, have as a core belief that the purpose of schools must be to nurture thinking, caring, active and committed adults, parents, community members, activists, citizens…“. You get the point. In the end, who cares: Google Gemini, in its infinite wisdom, will render competence obsolete. Here is what we got when we asked it about “empirical vs rational”: “Empirical examples include observations like "It is cold outside" or `Traffic is busy in the morning.’ Rational examples include fractions with non-zero denominators, like 1/2 or 3/4.”

• Elsevier: F**k Science, Full Speed Ahead! The publishing house is accelerating its descent into obscurantist paradise, suffering the nearly total walkouts of the editorial boards of multiple different journals, 20 times over. The latest casualty? The Journal of Human Evolution, whose entire editorial board resigned en masse after Elsevier declared that “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy.” To make matters worse, Elsevier’s AI-generated article proofs have stopped capitalizing proper nouns as well as the use of italics for genera and species. Because who needs countries, cities, or scientific names… or science for that matter, when gibberish will do just fine?

• The Advancing DEI Initiative by the NYU Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging came with a strong support for the Instant University (Where is the equity, you ask? Well, lawyers must have felt that “equity” should go the way of the dodo, covering their butts before Trump kicks it to the curb). One of the founders, Kenji Yoshino, displays a shameless juxtaposition of competence and equity. So, removing the “disparate impact” liability from the anti-discrimination laws will “have a significant discriminatory effect — for example, unnecessary hiring tests that disproportionately screen out women and people of color.” He didn’t mention admission tests, bet he meant them.

• Seattle: Smart kids are the REAL problem: Seattle Public Schools have finally taken action against the real enemy: gifted programs. They are getting rid of accelerated classes to promote equity. The process was ignited by the 2020 Seattle Public Schools report that says literally: "The Seattle community and our families began to demonstrate discomfort [emphasis ours] with the racial gap disparity in classrooms and in schools now affiliated with the Highly Capable Cohort." Translation: we don’t like that some kids are excelling, so let’s fix that. Meanwhile, China is rolling on the floor laughing.

• From an Instant University overseas campus: Oxbridge moves away from “traditional exams” to increase minority representation. As it is often the case, Brits are more explicit in their bigotry of low expectations, unlike Jon Stewart who wants us to believe that identity-based recruitment increases competition.

Setbacks

• The California Data Science scam hit a major roadblock. After a prolonged battle, the University of California (UC) Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools ruled that Data Science (i.e. learning to use Microsoft office) is not a proper substitute for Algebra II (i.e., real math skills) in UC admissions. Bad, bad news for “Professor” Jo Boaler’s whose dream of pushing Algebra I into high school and ditching Geometry and Algebra II altogether just took a major hit. Her only hope now is resting on the NSF-supported “experts” who convincingly proved that…

• STEM workers do not need Algebra I, just a bit of linear functions.

• Newton South High Schools: Detracking sucks for everyone. Who woulda thunk that making a soccer amateur train with Lionel Messi doesn’t benefit either of them? Newton South High School, after several long years of agony, finally admits to what everyone has known all along: that so-called “multilevel classes” hurt everyone equitably. Or, As one teacher put it:

"Students - at all levels of performance, but especially our students who need the most support and for whom this model was intended to help most - aren’t having their needs met. In one of my multilevel classes, I received feedback that the lower-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to “look dumb,” and the higher-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want their classmates to “feel dumb.”

Shocking. Who could have predicted that?!

But then, the multilevel idea resonates with Jo Boaler anti-excellence approach. See her recent book Math-ish, more -ish than math.

• Learning to read by guessing a word doesn’t work: The “Whole Language” cult will soon be pushed to the land of the unicorn (as in non-existent, not as in “gender unicorn”) and be replaced by the good old Phonics system. Apparently, expecting kids to guess words instead of sounding them out wasn’t such a great idea after all. Who knew?

• According to the 2022 NAEP report, 2023 TIMSS report, and 2022 PISA report, one observes a “persistent stagnation in math and reading over fifteen years,” for nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and fifteen-year-olds respectively. Who would have thunk that replacing Algebra with the Anti-Racist Math can have consequences?! It’s a bad rap for the Instant University. But never you mind, career readiness is a capitalist concept anyways, per the Massachusetts Teachers Association leader Max Page.

The Future of Instant University

Of course, Instant University remains ahead of the curve. No students, no professors, just tuition and grades. After all, Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science, pioneered this concept during his time as Chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill: no students, no problems.

And that, dear readers, is progress.