Tag: science

Seattle school district takes next step in ditching gifted program

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Privileged progressives, donning their white knight armor, are in the next phase of a plan to end Seattle Public Schools’ gifted students program — known locally as its highly capable cohort (HCC). They complained the HCC was too white.

HCC separates academically gifted students from others via different classrooms or entirely different schools. But in 2020, white Seattle school board directors voted to terminate the HCC over the objections of parents. HCC will be completely phased out by the 2027-28 school year. 

Outraged more by the success of white and Asian students than by the untapped potential of Black and Hispanic pupils, progressives would rather drag achievers down than elevate everyone…

What is replacing the gifted highly capable cohort program?

The “whole-classroom model” is replacing HCC and be implemented in each classroom starting in the 2024-25 school year. It’s unworkable.

Under the model, classrooms will include students of all different learning abilities. A teacher is supposed to address each group of students, in classrooms with 20-30 students, with no additional resources and limited new training. How does a teacher create individualized programs for so many students with disparate needs? It’s not likely that a teacher can help a student who can barely read while simultaneously challenging a classmate who is reading two advanced books a week.

“On a recent day in a first grade classroom, seven advanced learners sat on the floor reading silently on their iPads. Several others wrote independently at their desks. A special education student wrote with a paraprofessional aide at their side. The rest of the class sat in a front corner of the classroom while the teacher read a book out loud.”

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The ‘whole-classroom’ model is a guaranteed fail. It is extremely basic pedagogy that students of like ability be placed in classrooms together. If there are large gaps in talent between students, the talented will be bored and the less talented will feel discouraged. Or you will get the outcome italicized and highlighted above. ‘Gifted’ classes were designed to prevent that outcome. ABN

East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago

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Stone tools stratified in alluvium and loess at Korolevo, western Ukraine, have been studied by several research groups1,2,3 since the discovery of the site in the 1970s. Although Korolevo’s importance to the European Palaeolithic is widely acknowledged, age constraints on the lowermost lithic artefacts have yet to be determined conclusively. Here, using two methods of burial dating with cosmogenic nuclides4,5, we report ages of 1.42 ± 0.10 million years and 1.42 ± 0.28 million years for the sedimentary unit that contains Mode-1-type lithic artefacts. Korolevo represents, to our knowledge, the earliest securely dated hominin presence in Europe, and bridges the spatial and temporal gap between the Caucasus (around 1.85–1.78 million years ago)6 and southwestern Europe (around 1.2–1.1 million years ago)7,8. Our findings advance the hypothesis that Europe was colonized from the east, and our analysis of habitat suitability9 suggests that early hominins exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and relatively continental sites—such as Korolevo—well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition.

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Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

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When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

…In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.

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This article is weird as it discusses all the usual possibilities for the temperature anomaly of 2023, but ignores the less usual but eminently possible explanation that thermal transmission from earth’s core via abyssal ocean depths is the cause. The author is none other than the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. ABN