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31 July, 2023
Teachers Union Files Legal Challenge Against Restrictions on Race and Gender Lessons
A teachers union in Tennessee filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s education department over its restrictions on curriculum surrounding race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
According to ABC News, the Tennessee Education Association and five public school educators are behind the lawsuit against the 2021 law. The law was implemented to keep devise ideology, like Critical Race Theory and gender theory, out of public schools.
The law reportedly requires an "impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history" as well as "impartial instruction on the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, or geographic region." Specifically, the law prohibits teaching that a person “by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously” and other concepts regarding “systematic racism.”
In a statement, Tanya Coats, the president of the Tennessee Education Association, claimed that the law “interferes with Tennessee teachers’ job to provide a fact-based, well-rounded education to their students.”
The lawsuit reportedly claims that “Tennessee educators have been faced with the threat that a student or parent will trigger an enforcement proceeding under the Ban's ill-defined standards, resulting in termination, license revocation, and reputational damage, for teaching lessons they have taught for years,” adding that it has impacted field trips to historical sites.
On X, the teachers union claimed that students in the state will fall behind because of the law.
During the 2021 bill signing, Gov. Bill Lee’s (R) press secretary said that he “believes Tennessee students should be taught history and civics with facts, not divisive political commentary,” The Tennessean reported.
Since then, other states, like Florida, have passed laws prohibiting this kind of divisive curriculum in the classroom
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A Back-to-School Warning
Parents of children going back to school — be warned! Your kids will continue to learn Marxist theories, hyper-sexualization, anti-American propaganda, social justice advocacy, and that capitalism and America are racist. They will be taught to hate themselves, others, and their country.
You would think that with all the legislation passed around the country to curtail these insidious pedagogies, parents could be more assured that teachers would get back to academics. Unfortunately, there is an abundance of evidence that teachers and administrators are admitting they will continue to indoctrinate children by finding ways to get around the new laws.
In fact, when the battle over critical race theory emerged two years ago, over 5000 teachers across the country signed a pledge initiated by the Zinn Education Project saying, “We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events — regardless of the law.” Accompanying The Zinn Education Project pledge is a statement that reads, “The major institutions and systems of our country are deeply infected with anti-Blackness and its intersection with other forms of oppression. To not acknowledge this and help students understand the roots of U.S. racism is to deceive them.” The Zinn Education Project provides training and materials to schools based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s controversial book A People’s History of the United States. In 2019, Dr. Mary Grabar published a book titled Debunking Howard Zinn wherein she identifies Zinn as a communist and provides evidence to expose the lies in his rewrite of American history.
Another example of school officials evading the law is found in a South Carolina law prohibiting the use of State funds to teach tenets of critical race theory. Many South Carolina school districts skirted the law by using federal COVID relief money to continue implementing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Social Emotional Learning, which are all conduits for Marxist critical theories.
Other tried and true ways to equivocate the law are also being implemented. Just as nearly every state in the nation rebranded their Common Core standards a decade ago to sidestep push-back from lawmakers and parents, an Idaho principal and district instructional coach said they would merely rebrand Social Emotional Learning as “behavior adaptations,” and “mental health curriculum.”
Moreover, many districts around the country are doubling down on grooming children into believing they are a gender contrary to their biological sex. Fargo Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Rupak Gandhi brazenly said he will not “openly out any student because of one law.” It appears school officials will not only continue to influence children to reconsider their biological sex, but they will continue to do it behind the backs of parents.
There is a ray of hope in California’s Chino Valley Unified School District where parents recently applauded the removal of California School Superintendent Tony Thurmond from its school board meeting. Thurmond spoke in opposition to a proposed local school district policy “to require teachers to notify parents of students that identify as transgender.” Even in very liberal California, parents object to indoctrination and local districts are stepping up to regain control of their classrooms despite pressure from State government to push their anti-parent policies.
Parents, as well as every freedom-loving American, need to be aware of what is happening in government schools with their tax dollars. Parents should start by watching the groundbreaking documentary Truth & Lies in American Education to become fully informed of the array of dangerous philosophies children are taught. Then they can connect with others in their community to fight this battle for the minds of children. It ultimately is a battle of good versus evil.
A parents’ first line of defense should be to protect their children. The toxic agenda in government schools is tantamount to child abuse. Once children are safe, we must work together to protect our countries’ freedom. If we don’t stop the indoctrination of children, we will lose our very freedom. As Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the school room for one generation is the philosophy of the government of the next.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/sherifew/2023/07/30/a-back-to-school-warning-n2626343
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Canadian principal’s suicide after alleged bullying for his ‘whiteness’ in CRT training sparks investigation
A Toronto school board and an education minister announced they are launching investigations Thursday into a professional development training after a former principal died by suicide following a lawsuit in which he alleged emotional distress from antiracist trainings and the fallout that followed.
The sessions included concepts from critical race theory.
Before his death, Richard Bilkszto, a 60-year-old former principal, sued the Toronto District School Board for emotional distress after he attended a training where he was accused of being a racist.
Bilkszto alleged in his lawsuit that Kike Ojo-Thompson – who runs an equity firm called the KOJO Institute – said that Canada was racist and has “never reckoned with its anti-Black history.”
When Bilkszto disagreed with the instructor and challenged her comments, he was condemned for appearing to undermine a Black woman, the lawsuit said.
“We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people” Ojo-Thompson said, according to the lawsuit filed by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
Ojo-Thompson was not directly sued by Bilkszto – it was directed at the district.
She has denied the allegations in FAIR’s lawsuit and did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
The principal also alleged he was called a “White supremacist” for sharing his beliefs.
The fallout from the training catapulted into further issues relating to the matter, and the family believes it was a hostile environment that took a serious toll on Bilkszto’s mental health.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce called the allegations raised by Bilkszto “serious and disturbing” Thursday.
A spokesperson told Fox News Digital that his staff will launch a review and present action items to ensure “this never happens again.”
“I offer my heartfelt condolences to Richard’s family and friends, as we remember an educator that truly went above and beyond for his students,” he added. “No staff member should ever be subject to harassment while in their place of work.”
The family released a statement following his death, listing the district’s KOJO training as part of the principal’s emotional distress.
KOJO, who ran the training in question, is an equity consultant which promulgates critical race theory. CRT holds that society is rigged against certain groups on the basis of skin color.
It decries the idea of succeeding by merit as a “myth,” and ranks races into privilege categories, with White people considered unfairly privileged.
Using this lens, its original theorists believed that only present-day discrimination can combat the deeply embedded systemic oppression they believe were intentionally built into every societal structure and system.
“We know that anti-Black racism is operating within education because of the outcomes we see for Black students,” Ojo-Thompson said. She further claimed that racism is embedded within all systems, and offers consulting to corporations, governments, etc.
During a follow-up session a week later, Ojo-Thompson allegedly recalled their disagreement from the first session and used Bilkszto’s efforts to challenge her claims as a “real-life” example of someone supporting White supremacy.
“[N]avigating the whiteness of the education system is a daily hardship,” Ojo Thomson has said. “The dominance of whiteness is not natural but the result of the legacies. Equally, the subordination of Blackness is also not natural.”
As other examples of KOJO’s CRT, the company’s slide deck on instituting an equity agenda criticizes “Eurocentric/Anglocentric curriculum,” “assimilationist culture,” and “school disciplinary policies.” The slide deck suggests that institutions – such as the educational system – can be wielded to influence society and the district’s community.
It asked, “How are institutions leveraging their power and proximity to inform the community’s narrative?” KOJO also calls for the elimination of disparities through “[w]ork that is focused on the systemic and structural context.”
Ojo-Thompson also believes in another idea central to critical theory, which is that individuals can belong to multiple categories of oppressed groups. The term for the concept is called “intersectionality.”
“With every identity that is subordinated due to the legacies, we face discrimination and oppression in a way that is interlocking. Each form of oppression impacts the others,” Ojo-Thompson said.
The Toronto district was contacted for comment, and referred to a previous statement, in which they announced the “investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragic passing of Richard Bilkszto.”
The district will be using an outside agency, King International Advisory Group, to conduct its investigation.
“Our intention is for this investigation to be conducted in a professional, sensitive and respectful manner,” the district said.
The KOJO Institute previously released a statement, which said, “The death of Richard Bilkszto is a tragedy and all of us at KOJO Institute offer our condolences to his loved ones.”
It denied all allegations and added, “This incident is being weaponized to discredit and suppress the work of everyone committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
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30 July, 2023
Staff at Britain's 'wokest university' that excluded white people from classes now to push bias tests
This sounds a lot like the self-criticism and "struggle" sessions in Mao's China. It is ineffably authoritarian
A university that barred white members of staff from free tai chi classes also encourages lecturers to take a 'unconscious bias' test, it can be revealed.
Woke toolkits for employees at King's College London tell academics there is a difference between being 'not racist' and 'anti-racist'.
If they are white, they should understand they have 'benefited' as a result of their racial identity, it advises.
The toolkit, which is not mandatory, surfaced amid a race row engulfing the university after it hosted stress-busting martial arts lessons exclusively for non-white staff – just days after a former senior lecturer labelled the institution one of the 'wokest' in the UK.
Dr Kai Jager, who quit his job last year, said the material forces academics to 'conform' to woke ideology. He added: 'These university programs are aimed to impose conformity to this ideology and to turn scientists into woke activists.
'But the very foundation of scientific knowledge is that it is based on evidence and thus open for criticism and different perspectives. Diversity programs often result in less diverse viewpoints.'
The anti-racism toolkit teaches staff how to be an anti-racist 'ally' and suggests they read books including What White People Can Do Next and Me and White Supremacy.
Other recommended reading includes Anti-Racist Ally: An Introduction to Action and Activism, in which activist Sophie Williams says 'not being racist is not enough'.
Staff are also encouraged to examine their prejudice with an 'implicit and unconscious bias test'. The term 'unconscious bias' is used to explain when learned stereotypes on race, gender or sex are made without conscious awareness.
A demand for reform by the Black Lives Matter movement has seen universities adopting the training to make staff and students aware of their biases.
At Kings's, the toolkit also encourages staff to find out more about a student-led initiative to 'decolonise' the university.
Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, described the training materials as 'infantile' and said they were 'seemingly designed for Year 10s in set three English rather than university lecturers'.
He added: 'It's disappointing to see how infected KCL has become by the woke mind virus.'
King's became embroiled in a race row over its martial arts classes that barred non-white staff. Academics were invited to take part, but were asked 'how do you identify in terms of your heritage/ethnicity?'
The question added: 'We are asking this to ensure participants are all from global majority backgrounds... the sessions are intended specifically for those who experience racism.'
The term 'global majority' is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as 'the group of people in the world who do not consider themselves or are not considered to be white'.
Dr Jager added: 'The woke movement likes to hide behind noble words like tolerance, inclusivity or diversity, but actively purges anyone who deviates from its orthodoxy.'
King's said it was 'proud to be a university which fosters an inclusive environment... where everyone can feel they belong regardless of their background or political views', adding: 'As a place of learning, we have a whole range of voluntary materials and resources for staff to engage with these issues and learn more.'
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University to undergo free speech training, pay $80,000 in settlement for allegedly issuing 'no-contact orders' against student, instructing peers to report her 'harmful' Christian, political views
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will pay $80,000 in a recent settlement agreement with a graduate student who accused the school of wrongfully issuing "no-contact orders" against her and instructing her peers to report her "harmful rhetoric."
Maggie DeJong and Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit against the school after the student claimed she was discriminated against for sharing her Christian and conservative political views.
Three of the school's professors have been ordered to undergo First Amendment training as part of the settlement agreement. Additionally, the university has been required to revise its policies and student handbook to protect students' political, religious, and ideological views.
In February 2022, school officials issued "no-contact orders" against DeJong after some of her peers reported her comments about religion, politics, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Marxism, censorship, COVID-related regulations, and the criminal justice system.
Students accused DeJong of "harassment" and "discrimination," claiming her rhetoric had "harmed and offended" them, according to the ADF's lawsuit.
Examples of DeJong's so-called "harmful rhetoric" included social media posts where the student shared others' quotes, including one from January 6, 2021, that read, "Storming the US Capitol is a set back for our cause. It undermines the purpose of the PEACEFUL protest. To the very small minority of protesters trying to break into the Capitol, please stop. We are better than this; we cannot destroy this country like BLM riots!"
DeJong also shared a quote from pastor and author John MacArthur: "Those who dare to take an unpopular stand, declare truth in a definitive way — or worst of all, express disagreement with someone else's teaching — will inevitably be marked as troublesome. Compromise has become a virtue while devotion to truth has become offensive."
DeJong was prohibited from having "any contact" with the peers who reported her and was never allowed to defend herself.
In a Wednesday statement, ADF legal counsel Mathew Hoffman said, "Public universities can't punish students for expressing their political and religious viewpoints. Maggie, like every other student, is protected under the First Amendment to respectfully share her personal beliefs, and university officials were wrong to issue gag orders and silence her speech."
"As a result of Maggie's courage in filing suit, SIUE has agreed to take critical steps to comply with the law and the U.S. Constitution and move closer to accepting and embracing true diversity of thought and speech," he added.
SIUE Chancellor James T. Minor noted that the school is "unequivocally committed to protecting First Amendment rights and does not have policies that restrict free speech nor support censorship," Fox News Digital reported.
"For decades, universities have embraced the challenge of vigorously protecting free speech while at the same time creating a safe learning environment for the expression of diverse views," he continued. "Protecting these two principles can create tensions. For example, while the First Amendment protects free speech (no matter how offensive), it does not protect behavior on a campus that creates a pervasively hostile environment for other students. We accept that balancing these two deeply valued principles of free speech and a safe environment, in real-time, represent inherent complications for administering prudence."
Minor encouraged people to "see beyond the sensationalism of clickbait, media reports and headlines in search of a more complete understanding of the facts."
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How big tech and big money made our schools go woke
Few issues have emerged as cultural flashpoints quite like Critical Race Theory. Better-known as CRT, the ideology — which places race and racism at the center of learning — has become a cornerstone of academic curricula nationwide. Some parents embrace it, others despise it – and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis tried to ban it from Florida public schools entirely.
In his new book “School of Woke,” author Kenny Xu explores the intriguing path CRT has navigated to reach this critical juncture and the roles that big tech, big money and political elites have played in the process.
In the summer of 2018, Merrick Garland, who had just lost his bid to become a Supreme Court Justice, walked his daughter Rebecca Garland down the aisle of the luxurious St. Vrain wedding venue in Longmont, Colo., her arm clutched in his.
He was leading her to her about-to-be husband, Alexander “Xan” Tanner.
Xan Tanner, then 27, was the wunderkind cofounder of Panorama Education, a New York Times-profiled full-service “analytical software and services company” based in Boston, Mass.
A millionaire and a Mark Zuckerberg acolyte, Xan Tanner sat at the pinnacle of what was increasingly becoming the height of liberal fashion — Yale grad, big-tech CEO, education activist.
But what was behind his fortune?
The New York Times may have described Panorama in cagey language in its coverage of the Tanner-Garland wedding, but the reality is that Panorama Education is not a software company at all but rather an educational technology company whose lead business model is data, particularly data about children.
Along with his fellow Yale graduates Aaron Feuer and David Carel, Tanner created a student-surveying platform that focuses on the mysterious concept of “social-emotional learning,” which Panorama defines rather vaguely as “supporting the whole student.”
Yet what’s curious is his quick rise to riches.
There’s nothing technologically savvy about Tanner’s product, which could have been created on SurveyMonkey. But strangely, Zuckerberg chose Tanner out of many potential investment opportunities and elected to fund him. Tanner ended up raising more than $16 million personally from the tech billionaire and $76 million from others by using Zuckerberg’s name between the years 2017 and 2021, as Forbes reported.
Zuckerberg had a very intense interest in “fixing” public schools, and his $1 billion Startup: Education fund, which he established in 2012, was actively looking to invest in educational do-gooders like Tanner. The fund was made to “[improve] education for the nation’s most underserved children.” Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, believed that they could “solve” education in America by leveraging what he knew best — the power of big business.
But the Facebook CEO needed loyal servants for his cause.
And Xan Tanner, with his prestigious background and social-justice bona fides, fit the profile. Tanner himself had plenty to gain from a partnership with Zuckerberg — in particular, money, and lots of it.
His path to riches was to run a child-research firm with Mark Zuckerberg’s money attached to it.
But as soon as Tanner took the job, Zuckerberg asked him to tackle what had previously been an intractable problem: how to persuade America’s public-school boards to give the fund access to private data about their children. After all, the last time Zuckerberg spent big money on education — in a widely publicized takeover of the Newark, NJ, public schools, in 2012 — he watched his $200 million disappear into a black hole of mismanagement and graft.
“There was $20 million that went to consultants who received, in general, $1,000 dollars a day for carrying out various management reform efforts,” wrote Dale Russakoff, a journalist who documented Zuckerberg’s attempt at school reform.
Another $89 million went into a teachers’ contract, which had little direct effect on learning. The New York Times excoriated Zuckerberg’s gift as one that “slowly melt[ed] into an ocean of recrimination.”
The national embarrassment convinced the fledgling philanthropist that he should exert his influence in subtler, more under-the-table ways in the future. And one of those ways was through conduits such as Tanner.
Still, how was the young Yale grad going to get his foot in the door with the notoriously hard-to-crack school boards? After years of keeping his nose to the grindstone, pitching, and trying to persuade the school board to adopt his Zuckerberg?backed surveying product, Tanner found the answer: go woke.
Tanner’s pitching strategy was to convince schools that they needed data on “racism” at their institutions to help children with their “social-emotional health.” (The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act mandated that schools find some way to address social and emotional wellness in students.) The company targeted the most progressive districts in the nation, such as those in El Dorado County, California, the city of Boston, and Washington, DC.
Promising that the districts would gain insights into the state of racism among local fourth graders, Panorama secured the contracts, which ranged in value from the hundreds of thousands to the millions of dollars, by asking questions such as “How clearly do you see your culture and history reflected in your school?” and “How often do you feel that you are treated poorly by other students because of your race, ethnicity, gender, family’s income, religion, disability, or sexual orientation?”
These questions, when answered by emotional nine- and 10-year-olds, would usually swing toward the direction of critical race theory — averring that our institutions and our schools retain and abet racism.
As revealed in new documents leaked from Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), in northern Virginia, Panorama had signed a five-year, $2.4 million deal with FCPS to conduct surveys among students about ways in which they were being targeted because of their race and gender. This included transgenderism: Panorama asked questions such as “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?”
The surveys were not optional for students, meaning that students had to sit down for at least an hour, probably more, to take this survey, conducted on behalf of a for-profit business.
But because Tanner positioned himself as the ur-woke surveyor, progressive school boards let him in. In fact, local governments eventually showered Panorama with more than $27 million in payments between 2017 and 2020. Other organizations quickly noticed Tanner’s business model and followed him.
In Loudoun County, Fairfax County’s immediate neighbor, students were asked to take “social-emotional” surveys conducted by the University of Virginia and the Virginia Department of Education. UVA went even further than Panorama when it came to injecting sensitive political issues directly into the bloodstream of the school day, asking Loudoun County ninth graders: “During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?” and “During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing some usual activities?”
Data-mining children by asking traumatizing questions may appear to be an exercise in futility. But rest assured, the progressive school administrators had a purpose for these surveys. Coincidentally enough, soon after the contracts were signed, school boards, including those in the District of Columbia Public Schools, started reporting things such as “Black and at?risk students were less satisfied with their schools than their White, Asian, and not at?risk peers.” Their evidence? Right there in the footnote: Panorama Education.
Armed with “data” on “racism,” activists and special interests could walk up to the front of the aisle and loudly crow “systemic racism” at the district and demand reparations and policy changes — usually to persuade weak-willed administrators to give them more money and power.
All the while, the Garland family, woke educational bureaucrats, and billionaire elites cashed in on the grift. Elite progressives got rich and politically influential by going woke.
So Merrick Garland must have been very pleased that his daughter was going to marry Xan Tanner. He fit every quality that Garland must have wanted in a son-in-law: elite, liberal, a natural at playing at the elite liberal game of kowtowing to the forces of social justice and bowing down to the Zuckerbergs of the world.
Most important, Tanner understood the business purpose of propagating Critical Race Theory: to land the contract.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/29/how-big-tech-and-big-money-made-our-schools-go-woke/
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28 July, 2023
Top Texas School District Removes LGBTQ Terms, Returns Religion to Nondiscrimination Policy Language
School board trustees in a top-ranked Texas school district voted to approve revisions to language in its nondiscrimination and harassment policies to align with state and federal definitions of protected classes.
The Carroll Independent School District (CISD) in Southlake, Texas, passed several revisions to its 2023-24 student code of conduct and student handbooks, including updated language that adds religion and removes LGBTQ-related terms from its nondiscrimination and harassment policies, as recommended by the district’s Policy Review Committee.
“CISD prioritizes the safety and well-being of our students with award-winning training protocols and procedures. The newly-approved Student Handbook details our nondiscrimination policy, which ensures that no student may be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, or age,” a CISD spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
In addition, the board adopted a policy that will not require teachers to call a student by a pronoun that does not match their biological sex and another that requires students to use the bathroom matching their sex and not their gender identity.
The seven-member board heard public comments before voting to pass the policy revisions for the 2023-24 school year, which begins on Aug. 15. Several nearby independent school districts (ISDs), Keller and Grapevine-Colleyville, have similar policies in place.
CISD is ranked No. 2 in the state of Texas by the Public School Review. The affluent Tarrant County district serves more than 8,400 students across 11 schools.
Since 2021, the district has been accused of “gender and sex discrimination,” racial discrimination, and violating the rights of students with disabilities. The allegations have led to eight investigations by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Nondiscrimination Language Changes
Late last year, the district removed references to religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity from its nondiscrimination statement.
Assistant superintendent for administration and Policy Review Committee member Tamy Smalskas introduced the revisions to the board and other attendees.
She said the committee had spent numerous hours reviewing the student code of conduct and student handbook before making its most recent recommendations to the school board.
Ms. Smalskas explained that the committee’s recommendation to add religion back to its statement of nondiscrimination would not change the protections previously provided for all students and staff. Rather, it reintroduced religion to be consistent with the nondiscrimination language used in federal and state policies.
“The District prohibits discrimination, including harassment, against any student. Discrimination is an action taken against or in favor of a student based on the student’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, or any other basis prohibited by law that denies access to an education program or activity,” according to the revised statement of nondiscrimination as outlined in an online document.
Throughout the document, LGBTQ-related terms—including gender identity, gender-based, and sexual orientation—were struck from the nondiscrimination and harassment policies for staff and students.
“I want the board to know that any changes to gender-based harassment [are] protected under sexual harassment and the Title IX law,” Ms. Smalskas said. “CISD will keep all our students safe from discrimination or harassment.”
Gender and sexual orientation were also removed from the district’s definition of harassment to align with the nondiscrimination policy, she explained.
“Harassment of a student is defined as physical, verbal, or nonverbal conduct based on the student’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, or any other basis prohibited by law,” the document states.
The board also passed two new policies.
The first requires students to use the designated bathrooms and locker rooms that matching the sex on their birth certificates.
“Individuals shall be required to use the facility that corresponds to their biological sex at birth,” the policy states, adding that the policy “does not prohibit the district from providing reasonable accommodations upon request.”
The board also moved to formally adopt a second policy that prohibits the requirement for teachers and other employees to promote, encourage, or call a student by a pronoun that is inconsistent with their biological sex.
“Previously, Carroll didn’t have a formal policy on this,” Trustee Andrew Yeager said during the discussion. “The practice that CISD followed was that it left it up to the individual to decide whether or not to accommodate another individual’s request to use a certain pronoun.”
“This new policy essentially codifies the practice,” he added.
The trustees approved the policies in a vote of 6-0, with one member not in attendance.
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Parents Warn That Social-Emotional Learning Is Not What It Appears
During the pandemic, millions of children in the United States had to attend virtual school on their computers at home, and parents began to witness that their children’s lessens were wrapped in critical race theory, gender ideology, and inappropriate sexual topics.
But one area of concern is more difficult to detect, and it’s catching more parents’ attention.
Parents are concerned about social-emotional learning (SEL), which is often infused within all subjects and in the culture of a school itself, which makes it more difficult to separate and detect. SEL has managed to stay below the majority of parents’ radar because it is packaged as therapeutic and promoting compassion.
Marsha Metzger is the president of a parental rights group in Georgia called Parents on the Level.
Ms. Metzger told The Epoch Times that she has been researching and exposing her school district’s use of SEL because school administrators in her district refused to answer her questions about sex education and SEL, which made her determined to find why the curriculum was not readily available.
Ms. Metzger thought it would be easy to get authorization to teach a class on abstinence or sexual risk avoidance in Tift County, Georgia, generally considered to be a conservative area. She even had grant money to teach this sex education program in public schools, but her request to the school district was met with silence, she said.
She did not take “no” for an answer and went to district administrators.
Fighting for Information
One of the school administrators along the way told Ms. Metzger the district combines sex education with SEL, and then they “follow the data,” which piqued her curiosity, and she began to research and expose SEL.
“I had to go toe-to-toe with them, and push them and threaten a lawsuit, and finally, I got an access code to this social-emotional learning platform,” Ms. Metzger said.
Ms. Metzger is not the only one who has had to confront their school district to get access to SEL curriculum.
Stephanie Lindquist-Aurora, a Virginia parent of three in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), told The Epoch Times she had to file an open records request to gain access to her child’s SEL curriculum, which the district did not fulfill, so Lindquist-Aurora was forced to find another way to get the SEL lessons.
“I’ve filed a PPRA violation complaint against FCPS for their refusal to share curricula information with me. It is currently underway,” Ms. Lindquist-Aurora said, referring to the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.
The PPRA is meant to protect students and parents from invasive evaluations and surveys that collect sensitive information.
Despite claims of its benefits, Ms. Lindquist-Aurora, Ms. Metzger, and other parents told The Epoch Times there is more to SEL than meets the eye.
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The ruinous miseducation of Gen Z, who actually believe America is worse off today
The average college student graduates with nearly $30,000 in debt.
But if a stunning new poll is anything to go by, students shell out all those tuition dollars just to finish remarkably misinformed.
North Dakota State University researchers polled students from 131 colleges and universities — and the results are quite something.
For one, college students are remarkably pessimistic about American and world history, to the point of complete historical illiteracy.
The survey finds nearly 60% of students think life in America has gotten worse or stayed the same over the last 50 years.
Only 41% correctly understand it’s overall gotten better over the last five decades.
And it’s not a partisan phenomenon: This delusional belief was shared roughly equally among liberal-leaning, conservative-leaning and independent-leaning students.
Just how inaccurate this perception is becomes clear when you consider the exact question pollsters asked: “Based on what you have learned in college so far, do you think that life in the United States has generally been getting better or worse over the last 50 years (considering issues such as life expectancy, income per person, and level of education)?”
Let’s look at those metrics.
In 1973, 50 years ago, US life expectancy was 71.4 years, per the World Bank. In 2020, it was 77.3 years.
By any objective measure, that’s a huge improvement.
In the same vein, average income per person has significantly improved since 1973.
To accurately compare across time and account for inflation, we can look at income with all figures adjusted to reflect, say, 2015 dollars.
When we do that, we see income per person in America rose from $28,114 to $66,866 over the last 50 years.
Yep — it’s more than doubled.
And that’s to say nothing of the rapid social progress and change that’s occurred over the last five decades, which you’d think “woke” college students wouldn’t be so quick to discount.
America has, for example, made tremendous progress toward racial acceptance since 1973.
Back then, according to Gallup, only 29% of Americans approved of interracial marriage — now, 94% do.
(It’s kind of hilarious to think of the prototypical white woke college student trying to explain to an elderly African American just how much worse America has gotten over the last five decades.)
It’s not just race where we’ve seen tremendous progress either. Heck, as Forbes reports, many women couldn’t even get credit cards in their own name in 1973.
And gay people faced anti-sodomy laws on the books in many states that literally criminalized their lifestyle — gay marriage was still a pipe dream.
That’s all radically changed.
Are woke college students really unaware of this basic history?
In a funny twist, 77% of students told pollsters they believe their college education is helping them develop “a more accurate view of the United States.”
So much for that, huh?
None of this is to say things have exclusively improved since the ’70s or there are no problems today.
But to earnestly believe that America is worse off today than in 1973 requires an astounding level of economic and historical ignorance.
That ignorance actually gets worse.
Among those students who somehow believe the United States has gotten worse over the last 50 years, a majority think this imagined lack of progress has occurred because we don’t have “enough government programs to make sure resources are used wisely.”
This belief betrays a remarkable unfamiliarity with our economic system.
Even back in 1970, we were dedicating so much to government programs that it amounted to 32.3% of our economy, per the International Monetary Fund.
By 2021, that figure had risen to 42.36%.
That’s right: More than 40% of our resources are funneled into government programs — but somehow, the problem is that we don’t have enough government programs.
So does it really seem like students are actually developing “a more accurate view of the United States” in college these days?
The price of university is already outrageously high.
But the status quo becomes all the more intolerable when you realize Americans are paying tens upon tens of thousands of our hard-earned dollars — only for students to become more ignorant about our country.
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27 July, 2023
‘Brutal Minds’ is a Devastating Critique of the Brainwashing in Higher Ed
Award-winning Professor Stanley K. Ridgley has written a book exposing how badly higher education has become infested with dogmatic progressivism. Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
“Many call themselves ‘marginalized voices’ and are declared off limits to criticism,” he explained. “The fact is they are not marginalized. They are lionized, they are feted, they have a canon of books and seminal thinkers, they have a zealous following, and some earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity consulting.”
“If folks think of the university as an aristocracy of the learned, of the best and the brightest, the reality in the bureaucracy is increasingly that of a ruling clerisy of the worst and the dullest,” he went on. Ridgley said the activists “are trying to transform the university into an institution more appropriate to the thirteenth century” that will “ensure ideological conformity.”
He compared the status in higher ed to Václav Havel’s real-life essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” The former Czech president explained how a small business owner in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia put a sign in his window that said, “Workers of the World, Unite!” not because he supported the communist movement, but “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble … someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”
Ridgley revealed that much of the indoctrination and wokeness is imposed by the Student Affairs departments in universities. Students need to be prepared to be assaulted “intellectually, verbally, psychologically, ideologically [and] racially.” He warned that “these folks aren’t satisfied just performing their handsomely subsidized antics on the campuses. They’re on a mission to ‘boldly transform higher education.’”
He explained how it is allowed to continue happening. “Sleepy boards of trustees are feted and given PowerPoint presentations that show progress of a sort, with metrics sufficiently abstract and yet seemingly on point.” The book is peppered with recent outrageous incidents that have occurred at universities around the country, and he described a few of the most outrageous professors.
Ridgley compared the indoctrination to that of cults, using the Unification Church as an example. Cults “prey on the weak and well-meaning, the uncertain and unaware.” They are directed like “sheep” into one group. Whereas “the strong, assertive, confident, grounded, morally secure student with a strong belief system” are akin to goats, and “quickly returned.” He said, “Cultspeak” is recognized as “big smiles and the mantra of inclusion and belonging.” He laid out several revealing red flags, such as keeping recruits “occupied to such a degree that they don’t get around to thinking about what they are doing or what is being done to them.”
Phrases like “Critical Race Theory” are no longer used since the public is onto them. Instead, it’s “learning about race” or “antiracist pedagogy.” Ridgley has a gift for breaking down the propaganda and defining it at its root level. “The content of antiracism is a mash-up of pseudoscientific speculations inspired by psychopathic paranoia and codified into a conspiracy theory,” he explained.
One chapter goes over the extracurricular workshops the do-gooders push on students, while another focuses on “hook and hammer;” how the “authoritarians” craft a “seductive, idealistic, visionary” message to hook students, then hammer them “with the stark message of racial reality” to “move them quickly along a conveyor belt of conversion.”
Ridgley offered solutions. He said parents should push back, since they are paying huge amounts of tuition. He ridiculed the correspondence universities send to parents, “They offer upbeat, wholesome mails couched in the occasional jargon-laden abstractions.” There is nothing on the parents’ portal or “school’s website about destabilizing the student’s sense of self and replacing the student’s belief system with a crypto-Maoist doctrine in a process of unfreezing-changing-refreezing.”
The universities can be sued over workshops and racial caucuses that violate anti-discrimination laws regarding race, gender, etc. He provided a list of 15 key steps that may be taken, such as cutting all ties with the radical leftist American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). Ridgley decimated the organizations. Their national “[c]onferences are places where student affairs staffers go to be somebody,” he said. “It is there they can be taken seriously, no matter now vapid … they take selfies with the high gurus of the faith.”
He recommended that students contact the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for free speech issues, the National Association of Scholars to find helpful faculty, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for resources promoting “academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability in our universities.”
Too bad this book wasn’t required reading for every student entering college. It would eliminate a lot of unnecessary divisiveness and they could avoid learning the hard way later in life that they’re really conservatives.
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CA School Board Caves to 'Bully' Gov. Newsom's Hefty Fine to Force Adoption of New School Curriculum
On Friday, the Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) board convened for an emergency meeting, amid controversy surrounding their school curriculum and Governor Gavin Newsom’s intervention.
The controversy originated from the curriculum’s inclusion of material on Harvey Milk – the first openly gay political office holder in California, and accompanying allegations of his involvement in pedophilia.
Called in response to a considerable fine levied by Governor Newsom, Friday’s meeting led to a resolution. Board members unanimously agreed to adopt the disputed curriculum.
Earlier on Wednesday, a 3-2 vote saw the district board members reject a state-endorsed social studies curriculum that referred to Harvey Milk’s role as a gay rights activist. This was the second instance of the district rejecting such material.
Subsequently, Governor Newsom penalized the district with a $1.5 million fine for what he termed as a “willful violation of the law.” Additionally, Newsom planned to burden the district with the $1.6 million cost of the new textbooks for students.
Congressman Darrell Issa, in a press release, rebuked Newsom’s authoritarian approach and voiced his support for the school board and the parents. “I stand with the parents of Temecula,” he asserted, commending the School Board’s efforts to heed parents’ and educators’ concerns and work collectively to sensibly select educational content.
He called out the governor stating, “Governor Newsom has resorted to bullying and intimidation, even going so far as to threaten a multimillion-dollar bill to Temecula for what he falsely terms a ‘fine.'”
TVUSD Board President Joseph Komrosky, who had been in an ongoing verbal feud with the governor, issued a statement post the fine, indicating that the district was still engaged in refining the curriculum for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Accusing Newsom of brash intervention, Komrosky expressed, “What he calls inaction we see as responsible considerations for all of our community’s viewpoints as we come to a final decision and with time left to do so.” He criticized Newsom’s attempt to undermine local control and his perceived wastage of taxpayers’ money.
In Friday’s meeting, board members voted first on whether to retain the district’s existing 17-year-old curriculum, inclusive of textbooks from 2006. Subsequently, marking the third such vote in the past two months, they decided to adopt the new curriculum.
The board will continue its efforts to refine the new curriculum, hoping to find alternative material to replace references to Milk, while still adhering to state mandates.
After the resolution, Governor Newsom posted a statement on Twitter. He argued that the debate was not about local control or parents’ rights, but about an alleged “extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children.” He further claimed that the board members still have a civil rights investigation to answer for.
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Teachers cannot teach what they do not know
Well, here we are with another review of teaching. Australia has itself a bit of déjà vu with a well-meaning Education Minister who wants to do his bit to fix the problems in our schools – this time by focusing on how we train our teachers.
To be fair, the Minister seems to be asking some of the right questions. Given the money we spend on education, why don’t we do better as a nation? Looking at how teachers are trained is important – they cannot teach what they do not know.
Here is a practical example. After recently marking the first essays of first year teacher trainees, I saw the need to do some revision of grammar. I asked the group a simple question: ‘What is a sentence?’ One of the young students, who was embedded in a school while doing her degree, said, ‘I don’t know, but my teacher is doing that with her year 5 students – I’ll look it up.’ The answer she found from her mentor teacher was: ‘A sentence is a clump of words that makes sense.’ Really…
So, my experiences would agree that there is core content that we simply do not consider important to teacher training, so a review might help there.
But it may not. There are complexities that go much deeper than simply adding ‘what the latest science says we need to do while we get back to basics’ (which is the reported framework through which the Minister is thinking).
I wonder if Minister Clare has done his homework in order to understand just how complex this apparently simple problem is? My suggestion is that The Minister should start his homework by reading Chapter 1 of the 2014 Donnelly and Wiltshire review of the National Curriculum, as commissioned by former Prime Minster Tony Abbott. These two reviewers fairly note improvements nationally with the introduction of ACARA – for we now have a curriculum that can translate across borders, to an extent.
But a decade ago these reviewers highlighted two deep areas of structural difficulty within the education system. Each of these aspects bring with them assumptions about the purpose of teaching, and therefore which ways of teaching are privileged over others. As Donnelly summarised later in his book How Political Correctness is Destroying Education:
As noted by the late Ken Rowe in the Commonwealth inquiry into the teaching of literacy, the prevailing orthodoxy in teacher education is based on constructivism; an approach to teaching that emphasises child-centred, inquiry-based learning and less explicit forms of teaching.
Such ‘child-centred’ approaches do not simply imply knowing your students well so that you can teach them better. It implies that teachers cannot impose sequential core knowledge into their lessons. Why? Because, according to the constructionists, all we need to do is to help our students think, and they can find the rest on the internet.
So, when the terms of this review suggest getting back to the old fashioned teaching core of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, it begs the questions, ‘to what end’, ‘in what way’, and ‘with what content?’
For example, is the purpose of our education simply utilitarian – aimed at getting everyone to work in the government’s priority areas, which include environmental alarmism, anti-family identity theory, and victim-blaming anti-Judeo-Christian history?
To help the Minister understand these dynamics better, he might also do another piece of homework that involves reading Professor John Sweller’s work. His theory flies in the face of the popular notion, supported by pseudo-science, that students do not need to learn anything off by heart because it is on the internet. The fact that the internet is also littered with conceptual rubbish seems to escape proponents of ‘21st Century education’. The constructivist process of education is given so much privilege that we have students who simply do not know enough (like, ‘What is a sentence?’).
But neither do the teachers of these trainees know good content, because they have not learnt about it – the problem is generational. After reading Sweller’s work, the Minister could then graduate to E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters, and the report by the John Hopkins Institute, What We Teach Matters. Or he could read the case study about Sweden’s decline in standards by Henrekson and Wennstrom.
So, does the Minister understand that the methods by which teachers teach reflect their deeper assumptions, or what we used to call ‘philosophy of education’? And similarly, does he understand that these presuppositions which we bring to our teaching also have an impact on what we consider is good content? This is where Minister Clare needs to do even more homework. An ideology is the belief system in which we put our faith. Such deep beliefs steer what we believe is essential content for education. That is why the IPA report that came out earlier this year by Bella D’Abera and Collen Harken would be the next homework piece for the Minister.
This report revealed afresh the depth of distortion in the content of the ninth iteration of the National Curriculum. This national document is what the teacher trainers will still be expected to work too. But as the authors summarised:
As this report reveals, where the National Curriculum is failing in one area, it is succeeding in another. Instead of teaching children how to read and write, it is indoctrinating them with identity politics, radical race theory, and radical green ideology.
These emphases reflect the priorities of the current political elites. The authors note ‘… as this report demonstrates, Version 9 of the National Curriculum is a highly politicised document; it reflects the current ideologies held by bureaucrats who have control over what is in the curriculum.’
These privileged emphases are in line with the ideologies of the Labor Party. Will the Minister really reject his party’s ideology to release teacher trainers to revise the content away from environmental and pantheistic alarmism, the racially biased critical race theories, and the emphasis on history that downplays the constructive aspects of Western heritage?
I doubt it – we have been plagued by Ministers who seem to lack experience with these educational philosophical assumptions, knowledge of the National Curriculum, and an understanding about the teaching of teachers. Yet here we are, with another Minister trying to evaluate whether teachers and their trainers know enough about going back to the basics in schooling…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/teachers-cannot-teach-what-they-do-not-know/
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26 July, 2023
Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions
Clearly Discriminatory
The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s preferences for the relatives of alumni and donors when making admissions decisions, according to lawyers for several groups that claim the practices are discriminatory.
“The U.S. Department of Education has notified Lawyers for Civil Rights that it has formally launched the federal civil rights investigation requested,” the legal group said in a statement.
The inquiry comes after a formal complaint that three groups filed after the Supreme Court’s decision last month on the use of affirmative action by colleges and universities that severely limit race-conscious admissions.
Lawyers for the groups — Chica Project, ACEDONE and the Greater Boston Latino Network — argued that Harvard’s practice of extending preferences to so-called legacy admissions illegally discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of wealthy students who were less qualified.
The Education Department said in a statement that “the Office for Civil Rights can confirm that there is an open investigation of Harvard University under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We do not comment on open investigations.”
Title VI is a part of federal law that prohibits discrimination, exclusion from participation or denial of benefits “on the ground of race, color or national origin.”
The move by the Biden administration comes amid heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices after the Supreme Court decision, which reversed decades of policies that increased admissions chances for Black students and those from other minority groups. In a case that grew out of a challenge to Harvard’s admissions practices, the court said that the practice of affirmative action violated the Constitution.
Groups angry with that decision are criticizing the longstanding practice of legacy admissions.
Nicole Rura, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a statement that the university was already reviewing the way it admits students to ensure it is in compliance with the law after the court’s decision.
“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information,” she said, “along with learnings from Harvard’s efforts over the past decade to strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community that is fundamental to our pursuit of academic excellence.”
Ms. Rura added: “As this work continues, and moving forward, Harvard remains dedicated to opening doors to opportunity and to redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admissions-civil-rights-inquiry.html
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California Math Framework: Proven Methods vs. Political Ideology
On Wednesday, July 12, The California State Board of Education adopted a new K–12 math curriculum and condemned the state’s 5.8 million public schoolchildren to innumeracy. The board has hobbled math education for the next eight years, until the curriculum is scheduled for re-examination.
The theme of the new curriculum is the fashionable shibboleth “equity,” meaning equality of results. Equity manifests itself in the curriculum in two ways: re-engineering the teaching of math so that it is easier and sugar-coated; and making political organizing and political issues the subject of math class.
Re-engineering takes place by making math class more frivolous and less demanding.
An example of frivolity is the creation of “math identity rainbows.” The students weave together six colored cords (pink, orange, yellow, blue, and purple) to show that they are part of a classroom community. Yellow, for instance, represents “communicating.”
Making math less demanding entails: Downgrading of memorizing addition-facts, subtraction-facts, and times-tables. Downgrading of standard algorithms (like long division). Vague, billowy “big ideas” (like relationships) instead of the normal course progression: arithmetic, Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, trigonometry, and so forth. Student self-discovery instead of explicit, direct instruction.
The new curriculum argues that math teachers should hold the political position that mathematics has an important role “in the power structures and privileges” in American society and that math class “can support action and positive change.”
The curriculum recommends that teachers employ “trauma-informed pedagogy” in the classroom. Such pedagogy contends that students are crippled emotionally by a racist, sexist, violent society ruled by a capitalist class. Consequently, teachers should train students to effectuate transformative social change.
Political organizing and making political issues the subject of math class leads to lessons on, for example, the need for decision-making about natural resources and ecosystems in light of “political virtue.” The teacher is supposed to highlight “connections” between math and “environmental and social justice.” Students might write an “opinion piece” or an “explanatory text.”
Another policy topic in math class is minimum wage laws. The curriculum promotes the idea of a “living wage” as the only “fair” wage—one wage must be enough to cover all basic living expenses. Of course, this policy topic doesn’t belong in a K-12 math class. Not only that, but the math curriculum designers have ignored social science.
In reality, wages are determined by marginal value productivity—what each worker contributes to the firm—not by wishful thinking. The curriculum is supposedly focused on equity, but the designers display woeful ignorance of the disparate impact of minimum wages. They should read the classic study by the late African-American economist Walter E. Williams of how minimum wage laws make black teenage unemployment compulsory.
The curriculum designers should not have wallowed in utopian political sentimentality, nor should they have neglected efficacy in teaching methods. There is no royal road to geometry; it takes hard work.
Teachers should adopt instructional methods tested by randomized trials and evaluation techniques that come close to random assignment. Education researcher Tom Loveless, now retired from the Brookings Institution, looked at what research is not cited or not drawn upon in the new California math curriculum. It turns out that the framework “ignores the best research” on K–12 mathematics.
Expert panels organized by the What Works Clearinghouse, Loveless points out, have combed through the research literature and have filtered out studies based on quality, using strict protocols. Is this the research that the designers of California’s math curriculum relied on? No, they ignored it. It didn’t match their progressive-education biases.
Brian Conrad, professor of mathematics and director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University, spent considerable time and effort looking at the research the California curriculum does cite. The curriculum claims to be research based, but in fact, relies on “false or misleading” descriptions of what’s in the cited papers. He found that curriculum designers were, at best, sloppy and, at worst, misrepresented the research. They pushed research claims that looked like they supported progressive approaches but didn’t really.
For example, Conrad says the curriculum wrongly cites a paper to promote the general use of “invented strategies” (that is, students discovering their own strategies) as a proven approach to learning standard algorithms.
Conrad likewise finds that the curriculum distorts citations in a way that indicates “an ideological (rather than evidence-based) opposition” to students being allowed to progress in math ahead of their grade level.
Svetlana Jitormirskaya, professor of mathematics at the University of California at Irvine, sums up the “sad and dangerous” situation for K–12 math teaching in the state. The new curriculum, she says, makes California “a worldwide laughingstock.” Unfortunately, workforce preparedness will decline, and student knowledge will suffer because of the wrongheaded efforts of the new curriculum’s designers.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14628&omhide=true&trk=title
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The mendacious assault on Florida's new curriculum
by Jeff Jacoby
The Left will distort anything
THE LATEST left-wing indictment of Governor Ron DeSantis is that his administration, through its new Social Studies curriculum standards, is actively seeking to downplay the evil that was slavery. If you haven't examined the standards, or if you are easily swayed by tendentious headlines, you may be tempted to assume the accusation is true. In fact, the accusation is idiotic.
The new academic standards, approved Wednesday by the state board of education, is 216 pages long. The document covers a wide array of classroom subjects, including economics, geography, financial literacy, and Holocaust education. Considerable attention is devoted to African American History in general and to slavery and its impact in particular.
In fact, there are nearly 200 specific lessons related to slavery, racism, civil rights, and the persecution of Black Americans that Florida teachers are expected to cover. To mention just a few:
"how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad";
"how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights";
"how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates";
"the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, lynchings)";
"the shift in attitude toward Africans as Colonial America transitioned from indentured servitude to race-based, hereditary slavery"; and
"the immediate and lasting effects of organizations that sought to resist achieving American equality (e.g., state legislatures, Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens' Councils, [and] law enforcement agencies.)"
On page 71, the curriculum guidelines call for students to be taught about "the various duties and trades" that enslaved people were compelled to labor at, including "agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation." Within that context, the standards note that instructors can exlain "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
That single line — hardly more than a footnote in a remarkably detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive survey of Black history — has triggered the current explosion of hyperventilating outrage.
"Kamala Harris condemns Florida over curriculum claim of slavery 'benefit'," a Guardian story is headlined. Reports the Miami Herald: "Teachers enraged that Florida's new Black history standards say slaves could 'benefit.'" Former US Representative Will Hurd tweeted: "[S]lavery wasn't a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms."
Anyone who didn't know better would assume that the whole point of the new curriculum standards is to whitewash slavery. In their eagerness to bash DeSantis, progressives and their media allies have reduced a sweeping academic outline — one that thoroughly explores slavery's wickedness and brutality — to just one sentence.
"They want to replace history with lies," Vice President Harris said in Jacksonville on Friday, having flown down from Washington specifically to rail against DeSantis and the new curriculum. "How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?"
When DeSantis was asked about the attacks at a press conference, he said that the point of the instruction was "to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed — you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life." Whereupon The Washington Post declared that DeSantis was "intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state's public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved."
The whole thing is so foul and mendacious — one more illustration of how political discourse and news coverage in America is dominated by partisan fanaticism and utter disregard for fairness and objectivity.
And also, in this case, simple historical accuracy.
The eminent historian John Hope Franklin, who in 1995 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, writes in his authoritative work "From Slavery to Freedom" that in some of the South's biggest cities, enslaved Black artisans were a dominant segment of the workforce.
"In the Charleston census of 1848, for example, there were more slave carpenters than there were free Black and white carpenters," Franklin notes. "The same was true of slave coopers. In addition, there were slave tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, painters, plasterers, seamstresses, and the like." With the coming of emancipation, many white Southerners demanded legislation barring freedmen from certain trades. When that didn't work, they resorted to "intimidation and violence to eliminate the competition of free Blacks."
Nevertheless, Franklin writes, "thanks to . . . the practice of training many slaves as artisans, a considerable number of free Blacks possessed skills that enabled them to achieve a degree of economic independence."
The critics slamming the Florida curriculum might consider the testimony of Booker T. Washington, the great 19th-century educator and civil rights leader. Though he was born into slavery and wrote eloquently of its bitterness, Washington was likewise of the view that "notwithstanding the cruel wrongs inflicted upon us," plantation life had left formerly enslaved people with one advantage: a degree of "self-reliance and self-help" that many white people lacked. "My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry," Washington wrote. "All of this was left to the slaves."
Consequently, when freedom came,
"the slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry. They unconsciously had imbibed the feeling that manual labor was not the proper thing for them. On the other hand, the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were ashamed, and few unwilling, to labor"
It isn't necessary to accept this as the last word on the subject. But it is sheer poisonous demagoguery to claim, as Harris does, that making students aware of the range of skills many Black people mastered while enslaved is "replac[ing] history with lies." There is no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticize DeSantis — I am far from a fan of the Florida governor — but this doesn't come close to being one of them.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27113/the-mendacious-assault-on-florida-new-curriculum
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25 July, 2023
Children need to fight back against political indoctrination
There’s something troubling happening in our schools. In art class, my children have been instructed to make Black Lives Matter posters. Assemblies in recent years have been a dreary parade of presentations on sexuality, identity and race politics. They have been subjected to workshops involving LGBTQI+ flash cards and printouts of tweets about transgenderism, and taught that Sam Smith – who is obviously overweight and wears provocative bondage clothing – is a shining example of ‘body positivity.’
The government, until very recently, has effectively conceded the education system to a cabal of zealots
It’s not that I object to them being exposed to this stuff at school. I’d be quite happy for identity politics to be presented critically and examined alongside competing philosophies. They are teenagers and it’s an unavoidable part of contemporary culture. But there’s a difference between teaching and preaching. In too many British schools, a fashionable creed is presented as an ideological certainty, brooking no opposition. Independent thinking is discouraged and dissent, however reasonable, is suppressed. You thought that story about a pupil being rebuked for refusing to accept that it was reasonable to identify as a cat was an outlier? Think again. This stuff is all over the education system like a drag queen’s make-up.
Last week, a report by the campaign group Don’t Divide Us looked at the way schools have allowed organisations to teach controversial ‘anti-racism’ theories. The materials they looked at included ‘unconscious bias’, ‘privilege’ and ‘micro-aggressions’. The teaching profession is being ‘radicalised’, the report’s author, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, said. This is social engineering – no, social experimentation – on a massive scale, using our children as the monkeys. And there has been zero democratic consent.
At a sixth form college near where I live in Winchester, teachers have been given training sessions in which they are forced to play ‘privilege bingo’ and bombarded with the latest in ‘neurodivergent’ ideology. Wall displays promoting the creed of ‘EDI’ (equality, diversity and inclusion) are ubiquitous. This is the intentional seeding of social contagion.
In the children’s section of my local library, a display of books includes titles like Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity; Princess Kevin; and Black Artists Shaping The World. Clearly, the rise of dogmatic moralising is reflected in the demise of quality fiction. Milan Kundera, who died last week, put it best. ‘All over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties,’ he wrote.
Parents are powerless in the face of this rising tide. They are locked out of the school system, with the government only just getting round to issuing non-statutory guidance stipulating that they should be informed if their children are ‘socially transitioning’ (official guidance is expected this week). All well and good, but King Canute himself would have scoffed. This is heart-breaking, and to a parent it feels like a personal and societal failure.
As for the teachers, those who harbour private alarm at the spread of the cult are intimidated into silence, fearing for their careers. The best they can manage is delivering mandated ideological instruction in a half-hearted or subversive way. (Though I do know one or two souls who carry the torch online, using pseudonyms.) Meanwhile the government, until very recently, has done woefully little to counter this disturbing trend, effectively conceding the education system to a cabal of zealots, fanatics and ideological cultists who seek to mould the future of our country by moulding the minds of our children.
The tragic conclusion is clear: the only ones capable of saving society are our children themselves. Just as the treatment of the year eight pupil arguing about feline self-identification was not an outlier, the bravery of the child herself was not entirely unusual. There aren’t that many of them, but there are some courageous souls who are determined to go down fighting.
Only our children can stand up for their friends. It is as depressing as it is true. A larger and larger number of youngsters are sliding into confused introversion as they try to work out which of the umpteen different sexual identities they should ‘identify with’, rather than just getting on with living their lives and working things out naturally as they go along. Many are taking on different genders and playing with fantasies of disfiguring, painful and life-changing surgery. Mental health difficulties are soaring among young people, and even those who have not succumbed have been left ill-equipped to deal with the cut and thrust of the real world when they grow up. Teachers – who themselves benefited from childhoods free from all this stuff – expend much effort providing emotional support to anxious and mollycoddled teens. This is like poisoning them while cushioning the symptoms; given the amount of time they spend enforcing gender and race ideology, it’s a wonder they get any teaching done at all. The remaining children who, usually as a result of good early years’ parenting, still have brains and hearts intact, are increasingly distressed. And with the government coming too late and too weakly to the fight, they are starting to shoulder the burden.
Recently, after a particularly galling lesson about the number of ‘genders’ that apparently exist – was it 46? 200? 1,000? – my son engaged his teacher in debate. You’re not supposed to be promoting political views at school, he pointed out. ‘It’s not political, it’s politicised,’ the teacher nonsensically replied. In response to this word salad, my son simply remarked: what’s the difference? That won him the argument. Thankfully, he wasn’t sent to the headmistress.
But maybe there is something parents can do. If your child had decent early years that were not saturated with television, mobile phones and junk food, but instead played with Lego or dolls, read books, engaged in sports, built dens, climbed trees, bashed around on musical instruments and played imaginary games, they may be showing signs of courage now. If so, equip them with the arguments and material they need to fight back. To start with, familiarise them with Section 406 of the Education Act 1996. Entitled ‘Political Indoctrination’, it states: ‘The governing body and head teacher shall forbid (a) the pursuit of partisan political activities by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and (b) the promotion of partisan political views, in the teaching of any subject in the school.’ Tragically, the rest is up to them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/children-need-to-fight-back-against-political-indoctrination/
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PETER HITCHENS: I’ve learned one precious lesson... our expansion of universities has failed
It is just 50 years since I graduated from what was then the shiny new University of York. I and a few hundred others had spent three years on a wooded campus entirely divorced from normal life.
We had full grants and our fees were paid. I had no debts. And it was the modern world, before it existed. We did more or less exactly what we wanted, and did not do what we did not wish to.
For several reasons I did not enter fully into the spirit of things. People used to say that I and Harriet Harman were the only two York students in that era who did not smoke marijuana, but I cannot vouch for this. There may have been one or two others.
The novelist Linda Grant, who was there around the same time, described the experience of her generation leaving York as like a lorryload of baby koalas being tipped out on to an ice-floe in the Arctic and left to fend for themselves.
I fended. I had been brought up (literally) in hard schools. But I am not so sure about the others. Imagine. We had to re-enter a world where laws were still more or less enforced, where people believed in respectability of many kinds, where food and rent were not subsidised and where employers expected us to turn up on time and not leave till the job was done.
More than that, they had never heard of the ‘inclusive’ opinions we had on everything, which in those days were not called that.
Banks, for instance, were highly conservative institutions and, while they hoped that we would one day bring them fat accounts, they were stand-offish about our lifestyles. No wonder so many of us devoted ourselves to turning the world upside down, so that we could go back to being free.
It was people like me who infiltrated the banks, not to mention the schools, the BBC, the law and the police and turned them into what they are today. For, as somebody once said, the main purpose of a university education is to teach a man to disagree with his father, and our universities have certainly achieved that successfully.
I have often wondered since whether the three years I spent in that dream world might have been better spent at work, or perhaps before the mast in a sailing ship, or learning the military arts of which I now know nothing.
I reckon I was about ready to be a university student when I turned 45, by which time it was not an option. Even at almost 19, my age on entry, I was far too young to benefit properly.
And as my older brother got to college before I did, I have never been able to make the Neil Kinnock boast that I am ‘the first from my family to go to university’.
Not that it is much of a claim.
Mr Kinnock and my brother and I went to university in those years because a wealthy country made it easy for us to do so. It is not much more of a claim than saying you were the first in your family to wear polyester, or eat fast food.
I am not quite sure how I ended up assuming (as I must have done from around the age of 14) that I would automatically go to university. The word glittered in my mind, conjuring up a picture of stars shining in the night sky, which I still haven’t quite shaken off.
The Monday morning reality in my first week was very different. In retrospect, I am grateful to them for being tactful enough to award me a degree at the end, though, typically of my generation, I never turned up to collect it, or scrambled into a mortarboard and gown, as people do nowadays.
It is not just a matter of ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. The whole idea of mass university education is wrong, especially now that it lures the young into debt. Universities, by definition, are for the few, who can get the most out of them – and that means a tough, highly selective education system based on merit – which we destroyed in 1965.
Good secondary schools, good technical and vocational colleges, good polytechnics are what this country really needs and has not got.
While I think (and know from the experience of others) that the Open University is a wonderful thing, and favour all kinds of heavily subsidised access for those who later in life feel inspired to study, I think the great expansion that began in the 1960s has been a mistake. I was lucky with it. Others are not.
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Australia: Fix the schools first
Labor knows that better educational outcomes do all manner of good, for the national economy and social cohesion. It also fits neatly within the party’s ethos, which is why if the Albanese government does become a long-term one, education reform could be one of its central achievements – if it sees this reform process through.
But we do need to ask hard questions. How well qualified are prospective university students for the studies they are about to embark on? Sadly, the answer too often is that many simply are not. Not in terms of basic literacy and numeracy, just for starters.
This points to the need to prioritise improving standards within the primary and secondary schooling sectors, but that doesn’t have to come before embarking on higher-education reforms.
The Australian Universities Accord interim report points out that the expected uplift in university students needed to fill the jobs of the future will largely happen in the 2030s and 40s, not this decade.
That leaves a small window to fix primary and secondary education in time to get prospective university students to where they need to be. It also allows time for university reforms to be carefully crafted and implemented.
The most alarming revelation attached to this week’s release of the interim report was Clare’s observation at the press club that during the past six years there had been a decline in the percentage of high school students completing year 12. How that escaped greater attention during the life cycle of the last Coalition government is perplexing.
The public school system, outside of selective schools, is underfunded and underperforms compared with the private sector. This affects the disadvantaged students the minister wants to increasingly usher into the university system. He’ll be setting them up to fail or lowering tertiary standards if they get that opportunity without the groundwork of first lifting standards at school. So we need to watch closely what happens there.
Once at university, what’s the purpose of obtaining a higher education? Like it or not, learning for the sake of intellectual advancement ceased to be a national priority long ago. The state simply sees universities as an extension of the school education system and a prerequisite to getting a job. Or, put differently, as degree factories with the purpose of giving the workforce the skilled applicants it needs and wants.
I don’t want to be too negative in making this point. It’s a global reality that is a consequence of the sector having been opened up; had it not happened most of us never would have received the benefit of access to higher education in the first place. And there are still areas of study offering classical learning.
Indeed as we survey recent ethical breaches across the business sector it’s not a stretch to see vocational benefits of learning philosophical principles at university, perhaps even the need to embed such units into courses not automatically linked with such study.
The interim report is light on when it comes to the important role of universities as institutions of higher research. We are told there is more to come on this front. It is the research that goes on in these so-called ivory towers that accounts for not only all manner of innovative advancement to benefit the modern world but also dictates the global university rankings of our institutions.
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24 July, 2023
Traumatized Florida girl flees state after viral beating video haunts her across two schools
Disgraceful to have a school that does nothing about this
A traumatized Florida 6th grader fled the state after a video of her being beaten by a classmate haunted her across two different schools, according to a report.
The child’s mother, Danielle Kicker, told WINK she noticed her daughter’s reluctance to attend classes last year at her Lehigh County middle school.
Eventually, she confided in her that she was being mercilessly bullied.
The worried parent pleaded for help from administrators at the school, Veteran’s Park Academy For the Arts, in person and was assured that they would protect the frightened middle schooler.
Hours after that meeting, she was brutally beaten by a classmate in a school bathroom as shrieking spectators looked on — without an adult in sight.
The bullied 12-year-old lay in a crumpled heap on the floor and later confided in her mother what happened.
Things only got worse after footage of the attack surfaced on social media and was shared among the mortified girl’s classmates.
“It is absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever had to go through,” Kicker told the station in tears.
“It was horrible. You didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know how to take the pain away.”
Hoping to provide her daughter a fresh start, Kicker transferred her to another local school.
But her new classmates quickly caught wind of the beating video and the bullying started anew.
Desperate and out of options, Kicker has now sent the child to live in Missouri with extended family.
As she is separated from her child, she’s scrambling to find a long term solution.
“I have to ensure her that I can find a safe place for her to actually feel safe every day,” Kicker said.
“I just want her to come home. I want her to have a safe place to come.”
“She had no one,” the mother said, asserting that local school officials neglected her daughter’s plight.
School officials told the station that they were strengthening anti-bullying training regimens for staffers — but the response rang hollow for the now ex-Florida girl.
WINK uncovered dozens of fight videos from local schools depicting beatdown after beatdown across all grades.
Local school board member Armon Persons told the station he believes cell phones are driving school disorder and that he would support having kids turn them in during class.
Parents, he said, have generally opposed the idea.
A district source told The Post that violence has worsened in recent years, and that administrators are struggling the stem fisticuffs.
“I’ve worked in schools for 23 years and I have never seen this level of readiness to fight. Add phones and social media and you have a major problem that is getting worse by the year.”
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Florida Education Board Updates Standards on Black History Education and Transgender Issues
On Wednesday, the Florida Board of Education approved new standards on transgender students and how black history would be taught in schools.
The updated standards advise schools to teach that enslaved people in the United States “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit” and teach that there were “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” according to The Washington Post.
In addition, the board moved forward Wednesday with rules that restrict which bathrooms transgender students can use and prohibit the use of “preferred pronouns” in schools.
In a statement, the Florida Education Association (FEA), said that the new standards “are a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for the state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
In May, DeSantis signed a bill into law that prohibits teachers unions from automatically deducting money from public employee’s paychecks for union dues. In response, the FEA announced it would hold a news conference to detail “next steps” in response to the law.
Earlier this year, Townhall covered how the College Board announced it would revise its Advanced Placement African American studies course following criticism from DeSantis’ administration. Previously, the governor said that he would not allow public schools to use the course over its “woke” and “radical” indoctrination concepts.
Later on, the College Board told Florida officials that it would not revise its psychology course that covers the topics of sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Florida is proud to lead the way in standing up for our children,” DeSantis said in a statement about restricting transgender restrooms in May. “As the world goes mad, Florida represents a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy.”
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Reforms needed for Australian universities -- but what reforms?
There seems to be an underlying goal in the article below to get more young people into universities. But it coud be argued that FEWER students should go to universities. There is much more demand for tradesmen than there is for (say) social science graduates. And the tradesmen often end up paid more.
Additionally, the emphasis on getting students from poorer backgrouds into university may well be a waste in many cases. Such students will often drop out, having achieved nothing.
Admission should be based solely on ability criteria, from senior exam results to IQ scores. The "equity" goals can be achieved by giving financial support to able students from poor backgrounds. But the demonstrated ability must be there or there is no point.
What I am suggesting is not blue sky. It is exactly what the old Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme introduced by Bob Menzies in 1951 did. I benefited from it in the '60s. I was a smart kid from a poor background and sailed through my tertiary studies with that assistance. Of the seven justices of the High Court of Australia, none was the child of a university graduate. All but one were Commonwealth scholars.
Universities are engines of the economy, producing the research and workforce that help grow GDP. But the idea of who universities are for needs to change, says federal Education Minister Jason Clare. More than half of all jobs in Australia will need higher education qualifications by 2050, compared with 36 per cent today, according to analysis released this week in the interim report of the landmark accord review of universities. That means about twice as many people will need to go to university – including students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and the regions who typically haven’t considered tertiary education as an option.
Yet the higher education sector itself is in crisis, propped up by international student fees after decades of government funding cuts, with a heavily casualised workforce and, increasingly, experts say, an excessively corporatised executive. Some warn Australian universities have lost sight of students in their scramble to stay competitive with elite institutions around the world.
To succeed, they’ve had to get bigger. The rise of the homogenous mega-university means institutions are becoming more like “supermarkets for credentials” at the cost of specialisation, according to RMIT University’s principal adviser in institutional research, Angel Calderon.
The days of university as a transformational experience are fading, says Xavier Dupe of the National Student Union. “And it started before COVID. Universities are pushing students through a degree factory and increasingly gearing study around the priorities of big business.”
What’s needed, everyone agrees, is a complete overhaul.
Big ‘spiky’ change
The accord’s interim report lays out five priority moves to jumpstart reforms: all Indigenous students will be guaranteed a Commonwealth-supported university place when they are accepted for study; 34 new study hubs will be established in outer suburbs and regional areas; and university governing boards will be overhauled to install more people with higher education experience. A key part of the former Coalition government’s controversial Job Ready Graduates Package – which was lashed by the accord panel as disadvantaging poorer students – will be dismantled, meaning students who fail more than 50 per cent of subjects will no longer lose their Commonwealth place. And government funding agreements, which had only been guaranteed until the end of this year, will be extended into 2025.
But radical reform calls for radical ideas, says Clare, and the accord panel has also laid out a raft of “big spiky” ones that could shape the sector’s next steps ahead of its final report in December. “That’s why there’s an echidna on the front cover,” Clare quipped as the report was handed down.
The review comes at a time when NSW and Victorian universities are almost universally in deficit. The exception is the University of Sydney, which has reported an operating surplus of $1.3 billion over the past two years.
The next six months, says higher education expert Andrew Norton, is where the debate could get divisive. Some ideas flagged are especially spiky, including a proposed levy on the almost $10 billion universities make annually from international student fees, that could be used to cover gaps elsewhere such as research funding and student housing. Group of Eight universities that earn the most from international students have already slammed the idea as a tax on high-achieving institutions, even as many regional institutions voice interest.
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell questions how such a levy could be fairly applied. “It costs us a lot of money to attract international students, we then use a big chunk of their fees on teaching them or building infrastructure for them,” he says. “By the time you factor all that in, there wouldn’t be much left to tax.”
Still, La Trobe University vice-chancellor Professor John Dewar says the levy idea has “a lot of merit”. The sheer scale of the changes needed demands bold moves, he says, welcoming the accord panel’s willingness to “pressure test and wargame” such ideas now to avoid unintended consequences later. For example, “a levy could lead to the cost being passed onto the students and that’d be a shame”, he says. “It already costs a lot to come here and study.”
Norton says the levy could reinforce the perception of international students as cash cows and potentially drive away a key source of revenue for the sector. What’s clear though is that there is a resource divide between many universities and, according to the accord, universities are incentivised to maximise their international student cohort, blowing out class sizes. “This can be detrimental to the student experience,” the report says.
Rich university, poor university
Reforms down the years have tried to close the equity gap and failed. Now, the accord panel says, reaching parity requires 60 per cent more students from low socio-economic backgrounds going to university, 53 per cent more from regional areas and about 11 per cent more First Nations students.
If we’re going to get there, Dewar says, “we need to pull every lever. We haven’t really had a plan for higher education in this country. We need targets.”
Clare, who is also plotting big reforms in early education and schools, says students are being failed before they reach university. Those from poorer backgrounds are three times more likely to fall behind in school and only 15 per cent go on to get degrees. “Six years ago, 83 per cent of students in public schools finished year 12,” he told the Press Club this week. “Last year it was 76 per cent. And all of this is happening at a time when finishing school is so much more important than it was in my mum and dad’s day, or mine ... If you’re a young Indigenous bloke today, you’re more likely to go to jail than university.”
These grim figures are why Norton still sees reaching equal university participation as a “pipedream” until school results and year 12 completion rates go up. In NSW, one in three public school students are now dropping out of school. “We should be realistic about what’s achievable,” says Norton.
Equity targets have been missed before, concedes Dewar, but he senses a real momentum in the sector this time, something he hopes is matched by more serious funding and policy. An independent tertiary commission to guide the reform, another spiky idea flagged by the accord, may well be needed given the amount of taxpayer money involved. “They need to hold universities accountable for targets,” says Dewar. “They need to assure the taxpayer that the results are worth it. In a busy world, no matter how much appetite the sector might have to do something, and it does have the appetite, if you’re not actually going to have your feet held to the fire over it, then it may slip.”
A second national university, this time focusing on the regions and based on the University of California model, is another idea flagged worth a discussion, Dewar says. “Under the UC model, their campuses all have a degree of autonomy, and are big unis in their own right, but they benefit from some aggregation of function that are expensive for each university to run separately.” Others question whether a federated model is needed.
Clare has said Australia would likely need more universities and new kinds of institutions, including more specialised models, to cater to the coming demand.
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23 July, 2023
Student derision for concerns about sexual identity
The constant stress on the woes of sexual minorities can get pretty tiresome and in responses to an online survey some respondents found ways of mocking it. The earnest researchers below call that "Fascism". The real Fascists are the ones who try to suppress disagreement with minority concerns. Rather good to read that the academic journals rejected their stretched interpretations by refusing to publish the article
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields.
The team claimed 50 of 349 responses to their questionnaire on the topic contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.”
Labeling them “malicious respondents,” they adapted their project to examine how the joke responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”
The result was the paper titled, “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences.”
The paper broke the responses down into themes like demographics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, “anti-trans, anti-queer,” racism, antisemitism, and “online hate subculture references.” Several answers contained profanity and other offensive and obscene language and many referenced memes.
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.”
In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender.
Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability, the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
Other responses to questions about identity rejected the researchers’ project entirely, with answers such as “My skin color is not important,” “Come on man, these questions are stupid. Everyone is a grab bag of genetics from all over the world,” and “What else do you want to know? What I ate for breakfast. [T]his question is unnecessary.”
“Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture,” the researchers further claimed.
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.”
The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.
The scholars concluded the “malicious responses” indicate that fascism has become a common ideology in engineering and computer science academia.
They suggested the counter response should be “social justice STEM education” that includes “perspectives on online hate radicalization and center anti-colonial, intersectional solidarity organizing as its opposition.”
The researchers appeared surprised that their own findings had been “ultimately rejected” by many academic journals, leaving them with the impression that their research decrying so-called fascism in academia is viewed by some as “irrelevant to engineering education if not alarmist.”
They claimed their research methods used “antifascist and trans/queer methodologies to transform the raw data” and “make effective interventions and transformations to our programs and institutions.”
They described “Anti-fascism” in particular as a framework that connects “contemporary fascist movements to the foundation of the U.S. as a racial project,” noting elsewhere that “White supremacy” remains ubiquitous in the U.S.
Saying the solution for the rise of fascism is to change education itself, the team wrote, “The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation.'”
It was suggested the plight of transgender citizens be used as a teachable example of “experiences with power and oppression — and that categories such as race, gender, and sexuality have roots in European colonial logics shared by fascist movements.”
Engineering in particular, they argued, is a critical field to teach their far-left ideology because such graduates “frequently work in fields such as fossil fuels, defense, construction, and technology upon graduation, and could be taught about these field’s relationships with national and global racial capitalism and ongoing apartheid in Palestine, as an example.”
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Most Ivy League schools have LGBT rates that far surpass national averages
It looks like it has become a road to social acceptance to stick your appendange into the anus of some other guy
Brown University made headlines in early July 2023 when it reported that 38% of its student body identified with a sexuality other than straight — doubling its numbers from 2010 — far above the national numbers for Generation Z (1997-2004), which Gallup determined to be 19.7%.
After a review of five other Ivy League school's self-reported numbers, Brown is not an anomaly by any stretch of the imagination, but it is indeed a front runner.
As reported by the New York Post, numbers have soared at the once prestigious institutions, which now routinely publish their gender and sexuality censuses as a point of pride.
The Daily Princetonian reported shockingly high numbers, similar to Brown University. The school's bisexual, "queer," gay, asexual, lesbian, unsure, and pansexual numbers represented more than 35% of the school's respondents.
An astounding number of asexual students (5%) are represented at the school, a rate that is 50 times the national average (0.1%).
As well, nearly half of those surveyed identify as politically left, with slightly liberal, very liberal, and leftist/socialist totaling 45%. Just 11% identified as right of center.
According to Yale Daily News, around 29% of its responding student body identified as something other than straight, as the school boasted that it "welcomed the largest and most diverse class in University history."
More specifically, 14% said they were bisexual, 6% gay/lesbian, 8% "questioning," and 1% asexual.
Politically, 74% "characterized their political leanings as leaning left."
Over at Harvard, the 2023 class had about a 21% non-straight population, according to the Harvard Crimson. But the school is ready to outdo itself, as the class of 2025 will increase that number to 29%. That rate is a more than 18% increase from the class of 2017, which was represented by an 89.9% straight student body.
The Cornell Daily Sun reported its latest numbers at 21% of 589 students who responded as not identifying as straight. Of students who were asked, 69% were virgins, while 65% identified as either somewhat liberal or very liberal. Just 13% were conservative.
Perhaps the outlier, the University of Pennsylvania said that 15% of its student population "self-identify as LGBTQ+."
The school's LGBT center also brags about its 24 gay student groups and the fact that it has 94 faculty members on its "Out List," which is quite literally a list of faculty who have agreed to put themselves on a public-facing website to showcase that they are LGBT.
Numbers for Columbia University and Dartmouth College were not publicly available.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/lgbt-rates-ivy-league-schools
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California school superintendent is thrown out of meeting after opposing new rule forcing teachers to notify parents if a student asks to identify as a different gender
Parents reacted with cheers of 'leave our kids alone' as a California superintendent was thrown out of a school board hearing for aggressively opposing a policy forcing teachers to notify parents if their child is transgender.
Tony Thurmond, the California State Superintendent of Schools, was booted from the Chino Valley Unified school board meeting on Thursday after going over his allotted time to vigorously attack the policy.
Over 300 people filled the main hall at Don Lugo High School in Chino, California to weigh in at the hearing, which was marked with hostility as Thurmond clashed with the school board's president, Sonja Shaw.
After Thurmond condemned the new guidelines for putting transgender students 'at risk', Shaw fired back that the official was 'proposing things that pervert children.'
The board eventually voted 4-1 to introduce the parental notification policy, a move which was met with cheers from the audience.
Before Thurmond was led away by security to shouts of 'kick him out', the administrator slammed the proposal for targeting vulnerable students.
The policy, which was introduced in June, requires schools to notify parents within three days after their child identifies as transgender. Teachers must also inform parents if their child is involved in any form of violence of talks about suicide.
Students identifying as transgender are defined under the policy as seeking to change their name or pronouns, or asks to access gender-based sports, bathrooms or changing rooms which are different from their biological gender.
'The policy you consider tonight may not only fall outside of privacy laws, but may put our students at risk,' Thurmond said at the meeting.
After reaching the end of his time, Thurmond was heard in footage from the hearing interrupting Shaw as she ordered him to return to his seat.
Loud cheers rang out as Thurmond sat back down, leading Shaw to ask the audience to 'be respectful.'
She then slated the superintendent for his role in escalating issues over transgender students, saying: 'Tony Thurmond, I appreciate you being here tremendously, but here's the problem - we are here because of people like you.'
'In Sacramento, you're proposing things that hurt children,' she continued. The California state legislature, which has approved several controversial laws over transgender youths, is located in the city.
Thurmond then returned to the soapbox as Shaw continued to tear into him, leading her to slam him for supporting her opponent during her last election to the school board.
'Why was it so important for you to walk with my opponent?' she asked. 'You are the very reason why we're in this.'
Thurmond attempted to call a 'point of order' to halt her attacks, to which Shaw again shot him down and said: 'No! This is not your meeting, you may have a seat.
'If I did that to you in Sacramento you would not accept it,' she added. 'You are not going to blackmail us, you already sent us a blackmailing letter previously... you will not bully us here in Chino.'
The chasm between many Americans over the issue of transgender minors was on full display in the California school hall, as a large section of the audience behind the dueling officials yelled 'leave our kids alone' while others held signs calling for Shaw to be recalled.
Due to the large number of people in attendance, speaking time at the hearing was cut down from the usual three minutes to one minute.
Furious parents on both sides of the aisle chimed in at the event, with Chino Valley school parent Nick Wilson telling the board: 'It is morally repugnant that they think parents shouldn’t be involved with their children,' according to Mercury News.
'We are here today because our kids are in danger,' another parent, Oscar Avila, added. 'Our kids are in danger from groomers.'
After the debate, the board voted 4-1 to introduce the parental notification policy.
It has not been verified what 'blackmailing' letter Shaw was referring to in the footage, however she may have been referring to a letter sent to the school board Thursday evening by California's Attorney General Rob Bonta.
'By allowing for the disclosure of a student’s gender identity without their consent, Chino Valley Unified School District’s suggested Parental Notification policy would strip them of their freedom, violate their autonomy, and potentially put them in a harmful situation,' Bonta said.
'(My) office has a substantial interest in protecting the legal rights of children in California schools and protecting such children from trauma and exposure to violence,' the letter continued.
'I will not hesitate to take action as appropriate to vigorously protect students’ civil rights.'
The hearing comes as questions are raised over the most appropriate way to help minors suffering from gender dysphoria. In recent years, a series of lawsuits have been filed against healthcare providers from formerly-transgender individuals who feel they were pushed into invasive surgeries.
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21 July, 2023
Why Would Hasidic Parents Send Their Kids to Failing Schools?
The latest salvo in The New York Times’ ongoing exposé of the yeshiva system in New York focused on a new report issued by the New York City Department of Education that found 18 religious schools failing to meet secular education standards set by the government. The article raised some troubling questions but ignored one of the most important: Why do Hasidic parents continue to send their children to “failing schools?”
I am a former Hasid who makes a living as a tour guide and YouTuber exploring Hasidic Williamsburg, where many of these implicated Hasidic schools are located. Since I am in the neighborhood often, I have come to know the rhythm of the schools that are at the center of the ongoing controversy. Every day I watch hundreds of happy boys spill into the streets during recess and pile into buses at the end of the afternoon. I see children who are deeply cared for. I see a neighborhood with one of the lowest median ages in the country, where life revolves around raising the young. Furthermore, I see parents who pay private school tuition to send their children to these schools. So why, if they are failing, do the schools continue to burst at the seams?
There are times when parents don’t have a choice. When a couple splits, one of the parents can end up in a contractual obligation to enroll their children in specific Orthodox institutions. In other situations, there may be social pressures that leave parents with few real options. These things do happen, but I believe they represent a minority of cases.
The majority of Hasidic parents send their children to these schools because they succeed by some significant metrics. That doesn’t offset the ways in which they fall short. But in a holistic accounting that considers not only their efficiency as preparatory institutions for future workers but also the social value they provide, these so-called failing schools accomplish a great deal. Perhaps much more than an ordinary public school.
First and foremost, these schools are Talmud Torahs—institutions dedicated to the study of Jewish texts. This is what the boys spend the bulk of their time in school doing, and it is a yeshiva’s raison d’etre. According to Eli Spitzer, a Hasidic boys’ school headmaster, the Torah study is not as rigorous as yeshiva defenders often portray it. “In elementary and middle school, many hours are spent singing songs, listening to stories, and repeating material that has already been learned. In high school, meanwhile, most of the day is devoted to unstructured learning. This, for many students, consists primarily of socializing while absorbing a tiny amount of material.”
Beyond providing their formal curriculum, these schools socialize boys, helping them grow into Hasidic men. The boys spend their days cultivating a special piety, earnestness, and curiosity, as well as a strong sense of belonging. Girls, meanwhile, are socialized in modesty in schools of their own. This is not taught at a designated period during the school day but rather is the cumulative product of the culture in these yeshivas.
As a mother having once sent my son to a Satmar boys’ school, I would argue that the most important function these schools provide is the help they offer to families. Hasidic boys’ schools are in a league of their own in getting children out from under their mother’s fartich—from under her feet. Mothers tell me that the boys are in school so many hours because “boys need to study the holy Torah,” but I think there’s more to it: Unlike the girls who help run the household, families—which often live in small apartments—need the boys and men to leave daily.
Among Williamsburg Hasidic sects, the boys start school from as young as two-and-a-half years old and remain in the system until marriage. They are in school six days a week, all year round. They are bused from the family’s home and dropped back off at the door at the end of the day. They are kept busy all day without any screens. They get served multiple meals in school. They don’t usually bring home homework or need to prepare for tests. Notably, they don’t even go to school with backpacks. Everything they need is there at the school. The day gets longer as they get older: After Bar Mitzvah comes fartuks (study at dawn) and masmidim (study late in the evening). While in the secular world educators bristle at any insinuation that they are babysitters, Hasidic schools plainly take on the task of easing the burden for parents. They also seek to address students’ emotional needs.
People are so used to conflating education with economic preparation—because this is what modern education has become—that they assume that Hasidic schools seek to do the same.
It is an irony of the current debate that liberals who believe in strong social safety nets, who would balk at the assertion that a person should be judged by their wealth or career attainment, and who once celebrated the maxim made famous by Hillary Clinton, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ seem incapable of appreciating those same values when they come from religious communities.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when public schools shut down, causing long-term emotional and academic damage to students, Hasidic schools continued to operate, often underground, and even after some were raided and closed by the NYPD. While these moves were controversial, the same schools that have been singled out by the Times put their necks out for their students and parents—sparing them some of the terrible losses that were suffered by students in other institutions.
But the critical reports from The New York Times and from the Department of Education don’t focus on the ways these schools serve as vital organs to Hasidic communities. Instead, they focus on what the Hasidic schools don’t do: They do not prepare the boys to be efficient workers and reliable consumers inside of mainstream, secular economic arrangements. And this is true. Hasidic schools don’t do the kind of career prep that can help students become future brand managers, corporate tax consultants, or equity administrators. It seems that in the wider world, people are so used to conflating education with economic preparation—because this is what modern education has become—that they assume that Hasidic schools seek to do the same.
Some conclude that since Hasidic boys study Torah, the goal of their schools must be to make them rabbis. As Naftuli Moster, the founder of Yaffed, an organization pushing for more government intervention in Yeshiva education, told The Washington Post, “Every boy is groomed and destined to be a rabbi of some sort.” But Hasidic schools don’t prepare children for careers as rabbis; in fact, they don’t prepare them for any career at all.
A short while after Hasidic boys marry, they often go out to work. They don’t have any formal training, and their English might be broken, but they have a community that serves as an economic network, and they are immersed in a culture of hustlers. As I’ve explored in a video on how Hasidim earn a living, the community’s local economy of mom-and-pop shops compensates for the disadvantages the boys have in not being fluent in English or traditionally prepared for careers. It remains true that poverty rates are very high, but I believe the main cause of this is the high cost of living: New York City’s Hasidim have large families, live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and pay the price for expensive kosher food, a rich calendar of holidays and festivities, and private schools. Hasidim also live in geographically concentrated areas in order to be within walking distance of the synagogue and close to their families. This drives up property values to an incredible degree.
All of this doesn’t mean that Hasidic parents don’t have criticisms of their sons’ schools. In fact, I believe the debate over Hasidic education stems, in part, from internal frustrations. As someone who is on the periphery, parents talk to me candidly about the things that bother them. Plenty have complaints about education, as parents will have anywhere, and I hear especially about the state of “English” for boys. Parents tell me they don’t want to raise New York-born boys who struggle to speak the language of the land and who do not know the basics in math, spelling, history, and so on. But at the same time, these parents value the many things they do get from the schools, and would by no means want the good to go away.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/why-would-hasids-send-children-to-failing-schools
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Faith in higher education has hit record lows — and rightfully so
For decades, colleges have been gatekeepers to success — thanks to the perception that you need a degree to land a decent job.
But those days are numbered. Americans have finally had enough. Faith in higher education has hit a new low, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Only 36% of Americans say they have confidence in colleges and universities, with just 19% saying they have a “quite a lot” of faith and 17% “a great deal.”
That represents a 12% drop in confidence since 2018 and a staggering 21-point drop since 2015.
Between the student loan crisis and rampant campus craziness — from woke curriculum to out-of-control language policing — is it any wonder?
The American public just witnessed their president make a legally doomed attempt to wipe out billions in student debt held by millions of borrowers who learned the hard way that a degree isn’t necessarily a ticket to a high-paying job.
In fact, more than 50% of students from a third of American colleges make less than the average high school graduate.
The master’s program with the worst debt-to-earnings ratio of any major school in the country is the film program at Columbia University, a prestigious school with a $13 billion endowment. And now taxpayers — and not the university — could be on the hook for bailing them out.
Why would Americans have any faith in a system that drains students’ bank accounts and leaves many unlikely to fill them back up?
Meanwhile, schools have jacked up tuition by 748% since 1963.
And many had the nerve to charge students attending classes over Zoom the full rate during the pandemic.
And that’s not to mention the woke insanity that has taken over colleges.
Hardly a day goes by without another campus horror story capturing headlines.
Students at elite law schools like Yale have shouted down conservative speakers on campus, acting more like petulant toddlers than future lawyers and judges.
Stanford University’s IT department even released a guide for avoiding “harmful language.”
There’s no better way to damage your school’s credibility than declaring that words like “American” and “grandfather” are offensive.
And colleges have completely abdicated their role as bastions of free speech and robust debate.
In fact, a quarter of US college students say that it’s at least sometimes acceptable to shut down speech they don’t like with violence.
Americans are simply tired of spending thousands of dollars to send their teen to college, only to get a language police officer with a gender theory degree out the other end.
But a revolution is coming — and young people are at the helm.
Many Gen Zers, myself included, are waking up to the fact that colleges are simply not living up to their promises.
There are currently a million fewer students in college than there were before the pandemic. Meanwhile, trade schools and apprenticeship programs are flourishing.
In fact, four in 10 Zoomers don’t think college degrees are necessary.
Colleges are in for a huge market correction because they no longer hold a monopoly over young peoples’ perception of success.
Corporations like IBM, Tesla, and Google are eliminating degree requirements to attract enterprising young employees who paved their own path.
I’m glad to see the American public has woken up to the reality that higher education is not worthy of our trust — especially as a college dropout myself.
I left NYU with a 4.0 GPA after the school attempted to charge the full price tag for remote learning in the pandemic, and I’ve quickly learned that a fancy institution’s stamp of approval doesn’t determine my personal worth.
But I hope this crisis of faith helps colleges and universities rise to the occasion, not crumble.
Higher education has a crucial role in society — from producing scientific discoveries to facilitating robust debate to incubating the next generation of doctors, engineers and Supreme Court justices.
Campuses should be a place where bright minds mingle, not where language is policed. We need them as bastions of intellectual curiosity and free speech.
It’s time for institutions that got rich on federally backed loans and false promises to return to that core mission.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/13/faith-in-higher-education-hits-record-lows-and-rightfully-so/
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Newsom’s Plan to Fine School District $1.5 Million Over Blocked Textbook Lacks Legal Grounds
There are currently no legal grounds for California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to fine a local school district $1.5 million for rejecting what the school board says is an “inappropriate” social studies textbook, the state’s top education official confirmed July 20.
The governor announced the fine in a July 19 statement, adding that the state is securing the textbook in question for all 1–5 grade students in the Temecula Valley Unified Valley School District.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the anticipated passing of Assembly Bill 1078—a proposal that would prohibit local school boards from excluding books that contain LGBT and other minority groups—would allow the state to intervene in Temecula’s situation. The bill contains an urgency clause for it to take effect immediately should it pass the Legislature, Mr. Thurmond said.
“Assembly Bill 1078 would establish this process and that bill is being heard in the legislature and it does have an urgency clause, so we’re waiting to see what happens with that bill,” Mr. Thurmond told The Epoch Times at an unrelated press conference in Chino, California, July 20. “We’re currently investigating the Temecula Valley Unified School District based on complaints from students about … LGBTQ+ student needs.”
The bill will be heard in the state Senate Appropriations Committee after the lawmakers meet again in August after the summer recess.
Former state Sen. Melissa Melendez (R-Riverside) was among the first to question the legality of Mr. Newsom’s plan.
“It appears the governor is trying to create the authority to insert himself into [the district’s] business by leaning on the anticipated passing of [Assembly Bill 1078], which is still going through the legislative process,” Ms. Melendez told The Epoch Times before Mr. Thurmond’s response. “Aside from that, no one has explained who will determine compliance, and the governor’s office has yet to cite the legal authority that would give him justification to buy books a district doesn’t want, and then charge them for those books.”
Some also claim the governor lacks the authority to impose such consequences.
“The governor does not cite any legal authority for distributing the books to Temecula Valley … students or to allow the state to do so in place of the district,” said the California School Board Association in a statement posted on Twitter, adding that the current law requires the county superintendent to request the state provide textbooks if they are unable to provide such on their own.
In response to Mr. Newsom’s announcement, Temecula Unified board president Joseph Komrosky will call a special meeting for July 21 to consider other options for curriculums that meet state standards.
“Despite our continuing work and commitment to core values, Governor Newsom has taken unilateral action to intervene in the middle of our work without even contacting the school district first to understand what the school district may be further doing to meet all of the curriculum needs of our students,” Mr. Komrosky told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “What he calls inaction we see as responsible considerations for all of our community’s viewpoints as we come to a final decision and with time left to do so.”
The board president called Newsom’s announcement fiscally irresponsible.
“We do not appreciate Governor Newsom’s effort to usurp local control and all that will apparently result from these tactics is a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” he said. “We sincerely hope he has a 14-day return policy with the publisher of the books he just purchased.”
Mr. Newsom’s announcement comes one day after the school district doubled down on its rejection of a social studies curriculum that the board’s president deemed “inappropriate” due to its inclusion of an adult LGBT activist who reportedly had a sexual relationship with a minor.
The district has spent the year searching for an updated social studies curriculum as its current social studies curriculum, adopted in 2006, does not comply with updated state educational frameworks or California’s 2011 Fair Education Act, which requires schools to include historical LGBT and minority figures in social studies.
However, the board voted 3–2 to reject “Social Studies Alive,” a state-approved social studies curriculum for grades 1–5 that was piloted in the district’s classrooms last semester.
The decision reflects the board’s initial 3–2 vote in May to reject the curriculum, where Mr. Komrosky, the board president, expressed concerns over the curriculum’s inclusion of activist and politician Harvey Milk—whom Mr. Komrosky then called a “pedophile” based on reports Milk, then 33, had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old male.
Mr. Komrosky has since clarified that his comment did not refer to Milk’s sexual orientation.
“My remarks about Mr. Milk are not based upon [his] being a homosexual but rather, based upon an adult having a sexual relationship with a minor. I would express the same sentiments [against] any adult being [featured] in K–5 textbooks,” he said in a June press conference.
However, Mr. Komrosky’s comment gained attention from Mr. Newsom, who threatened to send copies of “Social Studies Alive” to Temecula students and to enact legislation that would fine the district if the board doesn’t accept the textbook.
“We’re going to purchase the book for these students, the same one that hundreds of thousands of kids are already using. If these extremist school board members won’t do their job, we will, and fine them for their incompetence,” the governor said in a July 13 Twitter post.
Mr. Newsom also claimed, in the statement, that Temecula’s students would begin the school year on Aug. 14 without enough social studies textbooks for every student “because of the school board’s decision to reject a widely used social studies curriculum.”
The governor also said in the same statement he would partner with lawmakers to pass Assembly Bill 1078 to prohibit local school boards from excluding books that contain “diverse perspectives.”
In response, Mr. Komrosky said in a statement the same day that the board did not ban the textbook in question, but simply chose not to include it in the district’s social science-history curriculum.
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20 July, 2023
Benefactor behind Arizona State University center pulls funding after faculty shows 'alarming' hostility toward event's conservative speakers
The benefactor behind an Arizona State University center announced last week that he pulled his annual funding after faculty members showed "alarming" hostility toward conservative speakers who hosted a campus earlier this year.
Tom Lewis of the T.W. Lewis Foundation released a statement last Friday declaring that he would no longer be funding the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett, the Honors College at ASU.
In 2019, Lewis' foundation donated $2.5 million to Barrett to finance the center.
Lewis, the CEO of the real estate group T.W. Lewis Company, blamed the school's apparent "left-wing hostility and activism," claiming that he "no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift."
He explained that the decision to pull the $400,000 of annual funding was in response to faculty members' and administrators' strong resistance to a February 8, 2023, event titled "Health, Wealth & Happiness" at the school's Gammage Auditorium. The event featured "Rich Dad Poor Dad" author Robert Kiyosaki and conservatives Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk.
"Because these were mostly conservative speakers, we expected some opposition, but I was shocked and disappointed by the alarming and outright hostility demonstrated by the Barrett faculty and administration toward these speakers. Instead of sponsoring this event with a spirit of cooperation and respect for free speech, Barrett faculty and staff exposed the radical ideology that now apparently dominates the college," Lewis stated.
In response to the scheduled event, nearly 40 faculty members, who claimed to support "a broad diversity of voices and viewpoints," signed a letter calling Prager and Kirk "purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, as well as the institutions of our democracy."
"I regret that this decision was necessary, and hope that Barrett and ASU will take strong action to ensure that free speech will always be protected and that all voices can be heard," Lewis said.
He told KNXV-TV, “The speaker series was intended to… teach self-awareness, leadership, and career management."
“They were not complaining that we were being too conservative, they don’t want any conservatives,” he added.
Last month, the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development's executive director, Ann Atkinson, claimed the university fired her for organizing an event featuring Prager and Kirk.
ASU denied firing Atkinson because of the event, stating that she "has lost the distinction between feelings and fact." The university claimed that Atkinson's termination was due to Lewis' foundation pulling the center's funding.
"Ms. Atkinson's current job at the university will no longer exist after June 30 because the donor who created and funded the center decided to terminate his donation. Unfortunate, but hardly unprecedented. ASU is working to determine how we can support the most impactful elements of the center without that external funding," ASU said.
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Universities: The Public and the Rule of Law Be Damned
College admissions won’t become “color blind” anytime soon.
The collegiate brouhaha over the landmark Supreme Court decision striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions has revealed the true colors of the supposed crème de la crème of American higher education. Let me share the views of four current or former Ivy League presidents (courtesy of the staff of Sen. J.D. Vance):
Christopher Eisgruber (Princeton University) vowed to pursue “diversity ... with energy, persistence, and a determination to succeed.”
Peter Salovey (Yale University) said he was “deeply troubled.... Yale’s core values will not change.”
Lee Bollinger (Columbia University), after saying the Supreme Court decision was a “tragedy,” added, “Diversity is central to our identity.”
Elizabeth Magil (University of Pennsylvania) said, “We remain firm in our belief that our academic community is at its best when it is diverse,” and, “Our values and beliefs will not change.”
It is, as my friend, Samford University law professor (and Yale Law grad) Mike DeBow, described it, “a nice collection of ‘massive resistance’ statements.”
I find the reaction of many schools to the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard decision to be appalling on at least six grounds. First and most fundamentally, the university presidents imply that the university itself takes positions on controversial public policy issues. Contrast this to the perspective expressed at the University of Chicago over a half-century ago in its Kalven Report and, more recently, in its Chicago Principles. To quote from the 1967 Kalven Report:
The university ... is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent by which it thrives.
When Magill says, “We remain firm in our belief,” and, “Our values ... will not change,” she sounds more like King Louis XIV (with the use of the royal “we”) than like an administrator overseeing a campus where a vigorous, although civil, debate occurs in a “marketplace of ideas.” Perhaps this is not unexpected from a university that is putting one of its more eminent professors (Amy Wax) through disciplinary hell simply because she has views differing from the woke majority at Penn.
Second, the outcry over the suppression of “diversity” is clearly completely related to the fact that “diversity” in the minds of many in the university community is mainly about race. The Kalven Report spoke positively of “diversity” —equating it to an environment where differing ideas flourish. Making decisions based on the race of the individuals used to be called “racist” because that is what it is. Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard continues a constitutional tradition going back to the 13th and 14th amendments, which forbid and condemn the most virulent forms of racism.
Third, the collegiate presidential reaction shows contempt and overt hostility toward public opinion. Opinion polls show that most Americans favor race-blind policies, opposing affirmative action efforts to incorporate race into decision-making. The decidedly liberal voters of California have twice said, “There will be no race-based affirmative action at California state universities,” as have others in blue states, such as in Washington and Michigan. The university presidents are effectively saying, “The public be damned,” or, “Us Philosopher Kings know more than the Little People who vote.” The hysterical reaction to the Supreme Court decision by our so-called educational leaders (and many of their followers as well) will further the decline in the proportion of Americans attending college.
Fourth, the objections of Ivy League leaders are breathtakingly hypocritical. These schools create the perception that they are “great” institutions precisely because they primarily serve a wealthy, mostly white clientele. Most have legacy admission policies favoring the mostly white children of alumni (along with a smaller number of nonwhite applicants whose parents are doctors, lawyers, academics, or business executives).
Fifth, the presidents seem to be advocating resistance to the rule of law—of having big decisions made through a two-century-old constitutionally created process that has served the nation extremely well. They seem to suggest, “We are going to continue to make decisions based on the race of applicants, even though we will have to be more circuitous about how we do it.”
Sixth, the reaction among influential thinkers in other nations is negative regarding the racial fanaticism of the elite schools. For example, the following pieces appeared in two of the most respected English magazines: “Why affirmative action in American universities had to go” (the Economist—on the cover!); “The Moral Bankruptcy of Ivy League America” (Financial Times). As for the French, they even outlaw the collection of data based on racial classifications, an idea deserving serious consideration in the United States.
As someone involved with universities over parts or all of eight decades, from the 1950s through this one, I love them. But I am sadly coming to the view that Milton Friedman seemed to be reaching shortly before his death: Rather than subsidize universities to accommodate their positive spillover impact on society, perhaps we should tax them to help pay for the damages arising from the “negative externalities” that they create.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14620
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Australia: End of ‘a 40-year-old fad’ as NSW shuts door on open-plan classrooms
The construction of open learning classrooms in NSW public schools will cease after repeated complaints from students, parents and teachers about a “40-year-old fad” they say created noisy environments unsuitable for learning.
Some new public schools built over the past decade were designed with flexible or open-plan classrooms. The large spaces intended to combine multiple classes in one room to facilitate collaboration and group work, while students were supervised by numerous teachers.
Research published this year found children who learn in open-plan classrooms have slower reading development and spend more time disengaged from educational activities because higher noise levels mean students find it difficult to focus.
The department wrote to the NSW Teachers Federation in May saying the classrooms would no longer be built.
“Current and future new and upgraded school projects will not include the construction of open-plan classrooms that cannot function as an individual space for a single class group,” the letter to the union said.
NSW Teachers Federation vice president Henry Rajendra said they had been fielding complaints about the unsuitability of the classrooms since about 2018.
“The department at the time did not engage with the profession [and] the union about its usefulness, that it would lead to lower student engagement in the classroom,” he said.
“We had a lot of complaints from teachers and parents and students that it was a very difficult environment to learn.”
Rajendra said it was a misnomer to describe many open-plan learning classrooms as “flexible learning spaces” because they had not been built with sound-absorbent walls which could be moved to create smaller spaces.
“The layout of our schools was in the hands of architects, and not teachers, and the result of that for many was that it didn’t work ... it is a 40-year-old fad, they introduced it as something new and innovative,” he said.
Open-plan classrooms originally proliferated when “team teaching” became fashionable in the 1970s. That practice of two teachers working together with a larger group of students dwindled in popularity over the following decades.
The rise of “student-led” and “21st-century learning” put an increased emphasis on doing work in groups, collaborative projects and fewer lecture-style lessons.
Education academics from Latrobe University in 2013 noted flexible learning spaces promoted flexibility, visibility and scrutiny and were a reaction against the “industrial-era enclosed and authoritarian classroom”.
By 2016, the Department of Education had established its Futures Learning Unit which was focused on rethinking and redesigning the way teaching and learning was conducted.
It said flexible learning spaces reflected the environments students may encounter in the workforce where there is an enhanced focus on self-direction, self-reflection, evaluation and collaboration.
A University of Melbourne study published this year said students found it more difficult to learn in open-plan classrooms because of the high noise levels.
“This increased cognitive effort to suppress the distraction, in turn, creates additional working memory load and thereby impacts on the learning occurring,” it said.
Students with poorer attention skills were also “found to be at increased risk of either spending more time disengaged from educational activities in the open-plan environment or requiring more cognitive resources to maintain attention, leaving fewer to facilitate their learning”.
Plans for new public schools use “learning hub layouts”, which are used as a starting point for school designs. They include learning spaces which allow for movement and collaboration across classes.
A Department of Education spokeswoman could not say how many open-plan classrooms had been built over the past decade, but work was being done to identify them in schools.
“The vast majority of recently completed new and upgraded schools have traditional classroom spaces that include breakout areas,” she said.
“The department is identifying the number of schools with open-plan classrooms. If schools have concerns that these spaces are impacting student learning, the department will work with each school.”
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19 July, 2023
The UFT’s cynical war on charters
Friday’s court hearing on the United Federation of Teachers lawsuit to block the co-location of two Success Academy charters was packed — thanks to parents outraged that their kids’ interests weren’t being represented.
That’s because Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank refuses to let Success have any voice in the case, even though the UFT’s goal is to prevent its use of space in a Far Rockaway middle school and the Sheepshead Bay HS campus.
The UFT claims the Department of Education’s building-use analysis overlooked the impact of the new law requiring smaller class sizes.
Bull: Class sizes in the schools now operating at these sites at the two schools are already under the new cap, and their overall enrollments have been falling.
That’s why there’s plenty of room now, and will be for the foreseeable future.
And since the class-size law kicks in gradually, while each Success school will only expand slowly by adding new grades, there’s ample time to adjust if long-term trends suddenly reverse.
At the very best, the UFT might have some technical claim that some form wasn’t filled out properly.
More likely, this is just one more nonsense suit in the union’s decades-long “lawfare” on Success (and other succesful charters, too).
SA has beaten over a dozen such suits in the past, which is probably why the union got the judge to prevent the charter network from presenting its case as a party to the suit — even though it’s plainly the real target.
The city Department of Education, meanwhile, manages to lose to the UFT all too often.
Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks worked though the legally-mandated process to get these co-locations approved, respecting the needs of all students and families, SA and DOE alike.
Heck, the UFT’s needs aren’t even threatened here, only its wishes: It wants to crush every charter it can.
It doesn’t care that SA has a decade-long track record of providing excellent educations to its scholars — overwhelmingly black and Latino kids from low-income families.
Actually, the UFT resents that record, because it shows what’s possible for a well-run public school to acheive.
That’s right: Charters are public schools; any NYC family can enter the lottery for entry into any NYC charter.
But these public schools operate outside the UFT’s power, and the main DOE bureaucracy (which is all too vulnerable to UFT influence).
That’s key to their success.
The one thing the lawsuit is achieving for sure is to leave Success parents of kids destined for the newly co-located schools fearing that their children won’t have a place to go if the case prospers.
With Judge Frank not expected to issue a decision until the fall, they’ll be on edge all summer.
“It’s outrageous, ridiculous. The UFT is working against the parents and the students,” said Chanee Mitchell, whose daughter, Monay Bradley, is a fifth grader at the Success Academy Far Rockaway MS.
And as the schools it largely runs continue to fail for their students, while charter kids prosper, expect the bullying to grow ever more outrageous — and more naked.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/14/the-ufts-cynical-war-on-charters/
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Vanderbilt Receives $17 Million for Diversity Hiring
Vanderbilt University and its Medical Center recently received a $17 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a new program to increase diversity in its biomedical research staff, according to The Nashville Post.
The money will go toward Vanderbilt’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation Program to strengthen hiring, promotion, and retention of minority biomedical researchers.
Consuelo Wilkins, senior associate dean for health equity and inclusive excellence, who leads the program, said in a statement, “Vanderbilt is foundationally committed to inclusive excellence, and the V-FIRST Program puts us on a fast-track to being an example of how to evolve into a diverse, self-sustaining research community.”
It is unclear exactly how the money will be used. It is difficult to imagine how hiring, promoting, and retaining employees would cost $17 million, but Vanderbilt will doubtless find a way.
Especially in the medical and research fields, hiring should be on merit, not a pre-determined set of race, gender, or sexual orientation criteria.
The NIH funds many grant programs to further diversity and equity in medical fields. Many of them are worth millions, and do not require any clinical trials to be performed to prove the efficacy or reliability of their research or initiatives.
The NIH has a core mission to use tax dollars to further medical research, and it must remain vigilant to ensure its spending them in a way that maximizes scientific advancement.
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Australian Left announces racist plan for Indigenous Australians, help for failing students and push for more Aussies to get degrees
Anthony Albanese's Government today announced a massive shake-up of the higher education sector, unveiling an affirmative action plan to double the number of Indigenous students at university over the next decade.
A raft of recommendations the Government will adopt includes universities guaranteeing funding for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who achieve the grades required, help for failing students and a push for more young people to get degrees.
'More and more jobs require a university degree,' said Education Minister Jason Clare.
'That means we will need more people with university qualifications in the years ahead.'
At the moment, only Indigenous students in rural and remote areas are guaranteed funded spots, which the Government says disadvantages those living in urban areas.
Mr Clare estimated the measure will cost $34 million over the next four years, representing a 'pretty good investment'.
'If you're a young Indigenous person today you are more likely to go to jail than you are to university,' Mr Clare told ABC Radio.
'The cost of having somebody in jail every year is about $120,000. The cost of a university place is $11,000.'
He added: 'This is not about lowering standards: you need to get the marks and qualify for the course.
'If you do qualify for the course, you're guaranteed to get access to a Commonwealth-supported place.'
Nearly 50 per cent of people under 25 are enrolled in a bachelor degree in Australia, while only about seven per cent of Indigenous people in their 20s and 30s have a university degree, according to Productivity Commission data.
The new affirmative action scheme could double the number of Indigenous students entering university by 2034 – from 5,000 to 10,000.
The Universities Accord, which will make more than 70 interim recommendations later on Wednesday, will also see the Albanese Government invest $66.9 million to double the number of university study hubs across the country.
This is designed to tackle a major barrier to study for many young Australians: the cost of moving closer to a campus or a long and expensive commute.
The report calls for greater certainty in university funding by extending the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, guaranteed to December 2023, into 2024.
It will also extend tertiary education access to rural and regional students and abolish the 50 per cent pass funding rule, which sees students lose government funding if they failed more than half of their subjects.
The rule was introduced as part of the Morrison government's job-ready graduates scheme and requires students to pass at least 50 per cent of total attempted units to remain eligible for fee assistance.
It's estimated more than 13,000 students had been forced to quit due to the rule - the majority of whom were from poorer backgrounds.
Mr Clare said he would look to introduce legislation to abolish the 50 per cent pass rate rule when parliament resumes.
'We shouldn't be forcing students to quit we should be helping them to pass and universities should be putting those supports in to help students who need that assistance,' he said.
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18 July, 2023
Documents Provide Rare Glimpse Into How Arabella Advisors Exerts Centralized Control Over a Vast Left-Wing Advocacy Network
The Student Experience Research Network sounds innocuous enough. The organization says it exists to "advance the research, relationships, and capacity necessary to build an education system in which every student experiences respect as a valued person and thinker."
In reality, the group funds research with the goal of promoting DEI practices in education and partners with other left-wing organizations to promote "inclusive mathematics environments" and push universities to abandon standardized tests. Earlier this month, the Student Experience Research Network took a victory lap after the University of California system said it would toss out the SAT in its admissions process.
The Student Experience Research Network and hundreds of other left-wing activist groups like it are controlled from the top down by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consultancy that plays an integral role in Democratic causes, fueled by donations from billionaires including George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The company, which distributes billions to Democratic pet projects, has established five tax-exempt nonprofit groups that pay Arabella a hefty fee—ostensibly for back-office work—and in turn operate a vast array of left-wing advocacy groups including the Student Experience Research Network.
In fact, the Student Experience Research Network’s ostensible employees don’t even work there. They are employees of an Arabella offshoot, the New Venture Fund. The average citizen would have no idea who’s pulling the strings.
This is the first of two reports based on internal Arabella documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They provide a rare window into the inner workings of the Left’s dark-money network, revealing just how centrally controlled a vast swath of activist organizations are by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital—as well as the lengths to which Arabella’s leaders go to disguise that control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.
This is hardly the sort of relationship that Arabella and two of its offshoots, New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, described to the IRS when seeking tax-exempt status.
The agency challenged New Venture Fund when it first applied for that status in 2006, over its obvious conflicts of interest with Arabella. At the time, Arabella founder and sole owner Eric Kessler served as both New Venture Fund’s chairman and president, and the New Venture Fund proposed paying Arabella a 5 percent overhead fee to handle administrative tasks. Arabella’s current ownership is unclear: It is owned by a Delaware business called Arabella Acquisition, LLC, which doesn’t disclose its ownership.
The IRS had concerns that New Venture Fund didn’t seek competing bids for the contract and that Kessler would reap illegal profits from his own charity. But the feds ultimately relented, granting the fund nonprofit status after Kessler claimed New Venture Fund’s contract with Arabella would last only a year, or until New Venture Fund could run its own human resources department.
"The Advisors are providing management and administrative support services until such time as the Organization has sufficient financial resources to make the operation of its own back office cost-efficient," New Venture Fund told the IRS. "Further, the Agreement is anticipated to be temporary and, indeed, only has a one-year term. As soon after this period as the Organization has adequate funding, it would no longer require the services of the Advisors."
Suffice it to say, the services are still flowing. What is true for the Student Experience Research Network is also true for hundreds of other activist groups, including Stop Deficit Squawks, Americans for Tax Fairness, the Institute for Responsive Government, Defend American Democracy, Fix our Senate, the Voter Engagement Fund, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and hundreds of other groups—they are controlled by the Democratic elites who staff Arabella Advisors.
"If the New Venture Fund anticipated their agreement with Arabella Advisors to only be temporary when seeking a tax exemption, why has this arrangement continued for nearly two decades?" said Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland. "For Arabella to collect over $200 million in fees for a ‘temporary’ agreement warrants a second look from the IRS."
Arabella’s five funds serve as fiscal sponsors of the network’s pop-up groups, organizations that exist for a brief period and then disband, often rallying support for or opposition to a particular political objective. Fiscal sponsorship is a unique arrangement that allows the initiatives to operate as nonprofit entities without disclosing their board members and obfuscates the sources of their revenue, expenses, or to whom they distribute grants. From protest movements to lobbying, if there is a new liberal pet cause, there is usually an Arabella group to advocate on its behalf.
Some of Arabella’s more prominent pop-up groups, such as Demand Justice, end up breaking away from the network and establish themselves as independent nonprofits. Others, such as Kansans for Secure Elections, SoCal Healthcare Coalition, and Justice March exist for a brief period and then disband.
Arabella’s former CEO, Sampriti Ganguli, has described the company as a humble business that provides human resources, accounting, and legal guidance to clients. However, the New Venture Fund’s employee handbook, obtained by the Free Beacon, paints a different picture of centralized control.
It reveals that Arabella controls New Venture Fund and its various pop-up groups with management teams of Arabella employees.
"NVF’s board of directors has hired Arabella Advisors, to provide staffing and management services," the handbook states. "Arabella Advisors provides support to NVF projects via dedicated oversight by a managing director (MD), an account manager (AM), accounting and financial services, and human resources support."
The account manager serves as the "first point of contact at NVF for all transactions and inquiries related to the project," according to the handbook. In some cases the manager has a team of Arabella employees assisting in the operations of a pop-up group.
Those teams, including the manager, are considered contractors. Therefore they are hidden from IRS disclosure forms and not listed as staff members of New Venture Fund or its pop-up groups.
New Venture Fund’s pop-up groups do not operate within typical nonprofit parameters outlined by federal law. They are effectively departments of the New Venture Fund and each of their employees are on the fund’s payroll. That means a group like the Student Experience Research Network or the Institute for Responsive Government doesn’t have its own employees, but rather, New Venture Fund employees under the guise of the Institute for Responsive Government. The same goes for the Compassion Project, the Alaska Venture Fund, the Healthy Voting Project, and countless other New Venture Fund "pop-up" groups.
IRS does not require New Venture Fund to report how many pop-up groups operate under its wings, let alone the names of the groups or how many of its employees work at each initiative. The fund employed 986 people in 2021, according to its tax return that year.
And the staff of New Venture Fund’s pop-up groups are prohibited from discussing their ties to the broader network, according to the fund’s employee handbook, which, according to the document’s metadata, was prepared in April 2019 by Arabella senior director Gideon Steinberg.
"In general, only staff with designated authority may represent NVF or its projects externally," the handbook states. "NVF staff should always clearly state the project they are representing and not imply that they are representing all of NVF unless explicitly authorized to do so."
New Venture Fund does not hide the ball from its employees. The handbook refers to itself as well as the network’s other funds—the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Windward Fund—as "managed organizations," each of which is overseen by a team of Arabella staffers.
The benefits of Arabella’s centralized control over the network are made clear to New Venture Fund employees. With Arabella in control, it can "coordinate collaborative initiatives between donors" and gain access to "expert philanthropic strategy development, execution, and evaluation support services."
In practice, this means Arabella can shuffle around big money between its funds, and it does: The network’s five funds passed a combined $189 million between themselves those two years, according to their tax returns.
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Acquitted Yale student can sue rape accuser for defamation: court
A former Yale University student who beat back rape accusations can sue his accuser for defamation, the State of Connecticut Supreme Court ruled recently.
Saifullah Khan’s lawsuit can proceed after the court ruled on June 27 that the former Yalie, who was expelled, can sue his accuser because the university’s sexual assault proceedings did not resemble actual judicial procedures.
The ruling comes after the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asked the Connecticut judiciary to weigh in on Khan’s claims and the applicability of the state’s “absolute immunity doctrine,” which generally protects witnesses and accusers from civil action for statements made during judicial proceedings.
Khan defeated the criminal charges. At the time, juror Diane Urbano told The New York Times that there was “sufficient doubt on every charge,” therefore, “we came to the verdict we did,” as The College Fix previously reported.
“Khan asserts that, if absolute immunity is afforded to testimony provided in proceedings such as that conducted by the UWC, individuals who are falsely accused will be left with no recourse or protection against malicious and defamatory allegations,” the court wrote of the accusations Khan faced in 2018, following “consensual sexual intercourse” in 2016.
As The Fix previously reported:
On Halloween 2015, Khan met up with a female student who had been drinking. The two made their way back to her room, where she testified she passed out, only to allegedly find Khan having intercourse with her when she awoke. Arguing she was too drunk to consent, she said she was surprised to wake up in the morning naked with used condoms on the floor.
Khan said that the woman had taken her own clothes off and initiated sexual activity. In court, his attorneys provided a security camera video of the two walking to the room together, arm-in-arm, which one juror said convinced him that the accuser may not have been as drunk as she later claimed.
The court wrote in its opinion:
Those accused of sexual assault in the higher education context often face life altering and stigmatizing consequences, including suspension or expulsion, criminal referrals, lack or revocation of employment offers, loss of future academic opportunity, and deportation. In the face of these consequences, we must acknowledge that the accused’s right to fundamental fairness is no less important than the right of the accuser or the larger community to achieve justice.
The University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct “did not meet the conditions necessary to be considered quasi-judicial. Consequently, Doe is not entitled to absolute immunity.”
Khan also won on his argument that his accuser is not entitled to “qualified privilege.”
The court opinion stated:
In this case, Khan alleged in his complaint that Doe made false accusations for the sake of trying to expel Khan as part of a larger political movement and personal vendetta. Khan asserts that Doe made romantic advances toward him. He further alleges that, at first, she told a campus health care worker that she had engaged in consensual unprotected sex. Khan contends that Doe reported rape to her friends and, ultimately, to the Title IX coordinator only because she was ashamed of her sexual advances and encouraged by the larger political movement waged against Khan. Specifically, Khan cites in his complaint how, despite a jury’s dismissing Doe’s allegation and finding Khan not guilty of criminal sexual assault charges, more than 77,000 people signed a petition protesting Khan’s readmission to Yale.
“On the basis of these assertions, which must be accepted as true for the purpose of reviewing Doe’s motion to dismiss, a reasonable inference could be drawn that Doe knowingly fabricated claims of sexual assault,” the justices wrote.
“Khan has alleged sufficient facts in his complaint to defeat Doe’s qualified privilege at the motion to dismiss stage,” the justices concluded.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/acquitted-yale-student-can-sue-rape-accuser-for-defamation-court/
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Australian universities are failing: James Allan, in conversation with Will Kingston
James Allan is an academic unicorn – an openly conservative professor at a prestigious Australian university. In this wide-ranging conversation, James paints a picture of a tertiary sector that simply isn’t making the grade.
Will Kingston: James, imagine a bright kid has just finished high school and comes to you for advice. He doesn’t want to do anything that legally requires him to get a university degree. Would you nonetheless recommend that he goes to university?
James Allan: It’s a hard question. We live in a world of credentials and Australia is about the worst of the ‘credentialed places’ so, in a sense, going to university is providing you with a credential that opens doors. But I do think people who went to university 20 years ago have no clue what they are like today. Whilst it’s very difficult to get to the top of any career without going to university (entrepreneurs being a notable exception), you must go in with your eyes open.
WK: What exactly should that student have his or her eyes open for?
JA: Viewpoint diversity, or the number of conservative academics in universities, is collapsing. We know this from looking at the donations to political parties – it’s public information in the US. Just look at places like Yale Law School or Harvard, and the numbers are getting more and more skewed. Outside of the Ivy League it’s even worse.
And it’s just as bad in Australia. There are whole departments [that are exclusively left-leaning]! Do you think there are many supporters of Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton or the Coalition more generally in a Women’s Studies department, or an Aboriginal Studies department, or a Sociology department? Even Law is massively skewed. You’ll find the odd tax lawyer who sits in the closet and votes Coalition, and that’s largely it. Heck, you can count the number of law professors in this country who teach constitutional law and are against the Voice on one machine operator’s hand. And we have over three dozen universities.
WK: Is this really a problem? What’s the ‘first principles’ argument ideological diversity amongst academics?
JA: The old-fashioned idea was, you go to university and you get exposed to ideas that you don’t agree with and that you’ve never encountered before. This is the John Stuart Mill view of free speech – you get closer to the truth via a cauldron of competing ideas. Today, many people on the left just do not accept that. They think some views have to be ruled out because people are weak and stupid, and if they hear those ideas they’ll inevitably be seduced by them. Mill thought that through hearing views you don’t agree with, you will strengthen your own arguments even when you conclude you were correct all along.
The other reason is that the so-called ‘expert-class’ has shown itself to be completely useless of late. They’re getting everything wrong. I was a huge ‘lockdown-skeptic’, and the results coming out of Sweden have demonstrated that the expert doctors were to a large extent useless. But even worse, whilst they were being useless, they were simultaneously trying to shut down the views of genuinely credible people like Sunetra Gupta or Jay Bhattacharya. Just look at Sweden’s cumulative excess death tally since the start of the pandemic till now. Better than ours and the gap is widening by the day. And Sweden did not close any small businesses or schools or weaponise the police or censor unfashionable sceptical views.
WK: Does the grants process exacerbate this problem?
JA: Absolutely. You have this big machinery in universities. If you’re a historian or if you’re a political scientist, you are judged by grants. Now think about how crazy this is! You wouldn’t buy a car based on which car manufacturer got the most government money. You would think, ‘My God this car manufacturer needs huge dollops of taxpayer aid!’
And the only people who get promoted are people who are good at getting grants. So if you want to write in favour of traditional marriage, say, or in any sort of conservatively leaning way, you have virtually zero chance of getting a grant. This allows universities to say to a conservative that they’re not promoting you because you aren’t being awarded grants, not because you are conservative. The roadblock is indirect, not direct. One of the things we need to do outside of the ‘hard sciences’ is just end all grants. They are inefficient, deliver near-worthless results and hurt only one side of the political divide. You could save a fortune and it wouldn’t affect the quality of universities at all.
WK: A further problem appears to be that most universities aren’t just ambivalent towards hiring lecturers who have had ‘real world experience’, they are actively hostile to the practice. Fair?
JA: In law, I’ve always thought you want some people with ‘practitioner experience’ and that’s what law schools used to be like. They’re still like that in a lot of the top US and Canadian schools. The problem here is the ‘one-size-fits-all’ on steroids approach. Australia is terrible in this regard. Everything has to run on the ‘science model’, and in the science model, all the people who are at the top have doctorates. It doesn’t matter to university administrators that law is different and that you have the smartest law students going off to clerk at the High Court or become top barristers or win Rhodes Scholarships. If any of these people want to come back and teach law they still have to get a doctorate. Not true in North America. True here. This is credentialism gone mad. Australia is crazy in this way in how they expect a law school to run the way a physics department does.
WK: This ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is driven by administrators, so let’s examine them. You once said that a moderately numerate Year 11 student could do the job almost as well as most of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors. Expand.
JA: I stand by that! Australia has the highest-paid university Vice-Chancellors in the world. VCs at the top-eight Australian Unis are making upwards of $1.4 or $1.5 million. The army of DVCs make over half of that again. Don’t you think it’s weird that our VCs are making double or triple what the President of Harvard is making? We have these enormous bureaucracies that are incredibly highly paid and they enforce this rigid bureaucratic and for that matter political orthodoxy. For example, I think ‘welcome to and acknowledgement of country’ rituals are patronising, condescending virtue-signalling. Full stop! No one ever says, ‘I stole your land so come and take my house!’ But, you simply couldn’t get a uni administration job unless you’re prepared to mouth those words on a daily basis. But hey, if you don’t stand up for the national anthem, you’ll probably be applauded for taking a stand… Well not literally. You get my point!
WK: You’ve been teaching university students since 1989. How have they changed over that time?
JA: I’ve taught all over the world, and something which we often forget is how different university life in Australia is compared to other parts of the Anglosphere. In the US, Britain, Canada, and even New Zealand, the vast majority of people send their kids to a university away from their home. In Canada, if you grow up in Toronto, odds are you go to university somewhere else. In Britain, you leave high school and you move into residence somewhere and receive the benefit of learning what it’s like to be an independent person. In Australia, if you’re from Sydney and you’re a top student, you go to a certain university, and if you’re not quite top you go to another, and then work your way down the hierarchy from there.
So, in addition to not giving students that broader life experience, it means there’s no competition between say, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland for the best students. That’s a real problem.
However, an indirect benefit of this is that the sort of radicalisation of the student body that has taken place overseas is not nearly as bad in Australia because all the students are living at home and just commuting in and out. They commute in for a couple of hours each day and then go home. It’s just harder to radicalise students who are rarely on campus! But by and large, I think it’s a shame. There is no campus life. If any of my students go on exchange for six months to North America or Britain they come back and say how much fun they had, and how different that it was to Australia. It doesn’t need to be this way.
WK: And I imagine Covid has just made this phenomenon even worse?
JA: Well, yes, the thuggish and illiberal governmental response to Covid made near on everything worse, including life on universities. It’s very clear from studies and surveys that students don’t like online learning and they don’t learn anything. They won’t turn their microphones on half the time. Zoom is a disaster for universities. It’s accelerated grade inflation, cheating, and lot more negative trends. And a separate but related point is students are no longer interested in learning, they are interested in the marks. And in a way, I don’t blame them. We put a lot more pressure on kids regarding jobs, and specifically the need for a job or internship whilst they are still studying.
I speak to kids on their first day of university who are already worried about what internship to get, or what grad role to get. It’s a prerequisite to a lot of the grad schemes now [an internship], but I think it would be better for students if we encouraged them to put less time into outside jobs and work and put more time into their studies. But that’s a hard message to sell when law firms are hiring students in their first year of university. And the funny thing is that a lot of the time these firms are getting students who aren’t terribly well-educated – in Australia (not Canada or Britain or the US) we cover noticeably less content because so many students have near-on full-time jobs on the side and so expectations of what they can read have to go down. And then the law firms complain about the quality of graduates. Look, it’s partly their fault!
WK: How would you fix the tertiary sector in Australia?
JA: Well the first thing I would do is get rid of grants for everything but the hard sciences. Do this and you completely defund research exercises that cost tens and tens of millions of dollars and just produce often meaningless information. A grant is an input. It’s money you get to produce something. What matters is the output! In Australia, we measure the input, not the output. Then I’d eliminate or defund the entire ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ bureaucracies from universities as some US States now are. These are ‘bullsh*t’ jobs that make universities worse, not better, and that deal in group rights and equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
Once I had sorted out that ‘low hanging fruit’, I’d send my entire fictional Liberal party room to Florida and tell them to copy what Ron DeSantis is doing in terms of standing up in the battle of ideas against illiberal Woke types. We need more courageous leaders like that in Australia, both inside and outside of universities.
WK: James, thanks for speaking to The Spectator Australia.
JA: Thanks Will.
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17 July, 2023
A woke watchdog organization is questioning the ethics of a divisive curriculum proclaiming students as inherently racist
Do No Harm (DNH) has published a July report (pdf) on the Ohio State University College of Medicine (OSUCM) outlining the college’s adoption of discriminatory concepts taught to students.
“Do No Harm’s new comprehensive report on The Ohio State University College of Medicine raises critical questions about the school’s fixation on the divisive concept of anti-racism and its impact on the integrity of future physicians,” DNH’s Program Manager, Laura Morgan, told The Epoch Times.
OSUCM students are urged to view the practice of medicine through a racial lens, relying on social justice theories to produce not only health professionals but “agents of social change,” the report states.
“At The Ohio State University College of Medicine, we strive to be a national leader of inclusive excellence by delivering on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging among all faculty, staff and learners,” OSUCM states on its website. “To that end, we are committed to [ensuring] that our students experience learning environments and curricula that are antiracist and free of bias.”
Distorting the practice of medicine, the OSUCM focuses its attention on how to treat racial groups of people instead of individuals, DNH says, employing what it calls “changemakers” to carry out a health equity agenda.
“The term health equity sounds harmless, but it is actually an attack on core principles that medical practitioners have traditionally observed,” DNH’s report states. “Under health equity, medical personnel must evaluate everything through the lens of race or identity rather than using their assessment and analysis skills to promote each particular patient’s well-being.”
OSUMC’s “Diversity and Inclusion” brochure (pdf) describes its criteria for selecting future medical students based on “a holistic review and selection process in which student background, experience and other personal characteristics and attributes are considered in addition to his or her quantitative measures, such as GPA and MCAT scores.”
“We know that future physicians need to be prepared to serve a diverse patient population and that diverse communities benefit when physicians come from diverse backgrounds,” said Dr. Demicha Rankin, associate dean for admissions, in the brochure.
The brochure lists programs providing financial assistance to non-white students, which DNH says goes against the school’s own College of Medicine Anti-Discrimination Policy and is an “obvious violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” for which DNH has filed a federal civil rights complaint to challenge the college’s policy.
‘Bold New Curriculum’
The university’s fixation on race expands into support for social justice, LGBTQ+ inclusion, climate change, and COVID-19 vaccination initiatives.
It also encourages a “21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge” (pdf) that prompts students to take actions that the challenge says will help them comprehend the structure of power, privilege, supremacy, systematic racism, oppression, and equity.
OSUMC uses the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure what it calls “unconscious bias,” a test that DNH says doesn’t align with legitimate scientific standards.
“For example, the IAT’s test-retest reliability (the extent to which it produces similar results when taken more than once) is well below the normal academic standards for real-world applications,” DNH writes. “This metric is one that psychologists particularly look for when evaluating the reliability of a test that is taken in a single sitting.”
Divisive literature, podcasts, and other media are promoted, such as the recommended reading of “The 1619 Project,” “White Fragility,” and “How to be an Anti-Racist,” each of which isn’t medical literature but allegations of systematic racism in society and throughout history.
According to its “bold new curriculum,” medical students contribute to the problem of health inequities with their “unexamined beliefs.”
These students are instructed to confront their own implicit bias and given guidelines on how to speak to black people, what to ask them, and what not to ask them.
“By presenting information to medical students based on an ideology that calls for ongoing discrimination, the OSU College of Medicine risks compromising the quality of medical education and, ultimately, patient care,” Ms. Morgan said. “Considering the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on affirmative action, OSUCOM and other leading institutions must closely examine their priorities in making their admissions processes align with meritocracy and equality, not radical identity politics like anti-racism.”
Social Justice Activists or Physicians?
According to the DNH report, the medical university has engaged in a campaign to indoctrinate its students, investing in “countess resources” to bombard students with radical ideologies, leaving future patients with even more dwindling options.
“Patients will need to decide if they want social justice changemakers or if they’d prefer doctors trained in medical sciences who can heal the sick or injured,” DNH writes in its conclusion.
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Revealed: How Church of England schools are teaching 'Pyramid of White Supremacy' theory in schools which tells children that 'not confronting racism' can lead to genocide
The graphic features in a document titled 'responding to racism'
Children in Church of England schools are being taught a 'pyramid of white supremacy' anti-racism theory that tells them that 'avoiding confrontation' can lead to genocide.
The theory is displayed in a graphic put together by the US-based Equality Institute, which describes itself as a 'global feminist agency working to advance gender equality and end violence against women and girls.'
The graphic features in a document titled 'responding to racism' that was compiled by the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and uncovered by campaigning group Don't Divide Us.
The diocese, which is headed up by Bishop The Right Reverend Martin Seeley, controls 87 schools in the region, all but two of which are primaries. The document was uploaded to the diocese's website for teachers to look at.
It explicitly tells them to use 'visuals' including the pyramid to 'help pupils understand how bias, stereotypes and prejudice can lead to racist words and actions, leading to physical harm and death.'
Reacting to the document, high-profile Church of England priest Father Marcus Walker, the Rector at historic London church St Bartholomew The Great, told MailOnline: 'The enthusiasm with which some in the Church of England are diving into the culture war is profoundly depressing. Children are not there to be indoctrinated.'
Former CofE priest Gavin Ashenden, who converted to Catholicism after resigning from his position as Chaplain to the late Queen Elizabeth in 2017, added his voice to the criticism.
The 69-year-old told MailOnline: 'The problems stack up badly here. Thought crime, of which the accusation of "racism" is a subset, should play no part in Christian ethics.
'Christians by definition are committed to "Loving their neighbour", a powerful antidote to racism.
'Beyond that the Church does not believe in making children (or adults) feel guilty for collective social failures.
'Guilt is restricted to personal choices only. A Church school should not be indoctrinating children in political and racial guilt they are innocent of.
'It should be teaching the powerful and renewing ethics of love and personal forgiveness found in the teaching of Jesus.'
The pyramid has the word 'mass murder' at the top of a scale of worsening actions.
On the bottom is the word 'indifference', above a series of excuses allegedly uttered by white people.
They read: '''There are two sides to every story", apolitical beliefs, avoiding confrontation, "politics don't affect me"'.
The pyramid then moves up to 'minimisation', under which are terms including, 'White saviour complex', ''not all white people'', and 'denial of white privilege'.
Above that is 'veiled racism', which is said to include: 'Victim blaming, racist jokes, Euro-centric curriculum, tokenism, cultural appropriation, racist icons.'
'Discrimination' then comes next and includes actions including 'racial profiling', 'mass incarceration' and even 'anti-immigration policies'.
Third from top is 'calls for violence', under which it says: 'KKK, Neo-Nazis, burning crosses'.
The initials KKK stand for the infamous American white supremacist organisation the Ku Klux Klan.
Second from top is 'violence', which is exampled with 'lynching, hate crimes, police brutality'.
Along the side of the pyramid is an arrow leading up from 'normalisation' to 'genocide'.
The wider document is titled 'Responding to Racism' and gives staff guidance on 'what to teach pupils'.
Also there is an instruction to 'teach pupils about what white privilege is and how they can become more aware of it.'
White privilege is the premise that Western societies are defined by racism and that white people enjoy advantages because of their skin colour.
Critics say it is overly simplistic and ignores the achievements of people from diverse backgrounds, such as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose parents are of Indian descent.
An illustration in the document to depict the concept shows white people and 'people of colour' on an imbalanced scale, with the former higher than the latter.
Under a heading titled 'what schools can do', teachers are asked if they are 'celebrating Black lives' and 'educating pupils about Black history and the British slave trade.'
Elsewhere in the document, teachers are urged to: 'Try not to simplify the message to 'we are all equal', as if racism were a thing of the past and fully resolved.
'This can lead children and young people to conclude that the inequalities they do see are earned or justified in some way.
'Without adults, children often fill in these 'data gaps' themselves and they don't always use reliable sources.'
Another illustration in the document shows an airport-style travellator with a red arrow moving forwards that is titled 'Active racism, using their privilege'.
A green arrow going the other way reads: 'Anti-racist, walking away in other direction at pace.'
A third orange arrow coming from the right says: 'Passive racism, going with the system.'
Campaign group Don't Divide Us mentioned the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich's guidance in its bombshell investigation into how schools are being taken over by organisations teaching controversial 'anti-racism' theories.
It said in its report that the guidance showed how the Church's board of education 'is highly partisan and has a strong activist orientation.'
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Australia: Nazi salutes, memes and assaults: Jewish students say state schools unsafe
The article below is careful not to mention it but this would almost certainly be the Muslim influence at work. "Mein Kampf" still sells well in Turkey and such places. The problem is exacerbated in Melbourbne because Melbourne has a substantial Jewish population. Unlike Europe, Antisemitism is not a part of traditional Australian culture
Every day for five weeks at school, a 13-year-old boy says he was greeted with abuse, including heil Hitlers and being called a “dirty Jew” – a reminder that members of his family were murdered by Nazis.
He’s one of three students at three separate Melbourne public schools who say they have experienced antisemitic bullying that was so extreme their parents are pulling them out. They encountered swastikas, Nazi salutes and even physical assaults and were called “Jewboy” or “dirty Jew” and sent memes involving Hitler.
Two of the students became withdrawn, refused to go to school and couldn’t get out of bed. Another said he no longer told people about his Jewish background.
Their families say the response from both the schools and Education Department did not go far enough to stamp out the behaviour, or treat the matters as seriously as they should have. One family decided to go to the police because they felt the school was not responding quickly enough.
Adi Rozen, the mother of 14-year-old Jewish student Jackie, who went to Brighton Secondary College and was in its Select Entry Accelerated Learning program, said the bullying was so bad her daughter sometimes would not get out of bed.
Jackie was in a STEM class with five girls and 15 boys and had planned to do the International Baccalaureate program earlier this year.
Rozen said Jackie had a swastika drawn on her desk, had a note thrown at her that said “Jewish Rat” and was sent memes showing Hitler as the shark in Jaws.
A copy of Anne Frank’s novel, The Diary of a Young Girl, which documents the life of a young Jewish girl in hiding under Nazi persecution, was held aloft in the school library by a girl asking when the Nazis were comings.
Rozen was also concerned that other students were passive bystanders and wanted the school to show a zero tolerance to antisemitism.
“ I wanted the kids to know it happened, not names, but something that happened to the point a child has felt compelled to leave the school and seriously and emotionally damaged.”
When contacted for a response, the three schools referred The Sunday Age to the Education Department, which was sent a list of questions about its responses, including what policies were in place to combat antisemitism and what support was in place for the targets of such bullying.
A Department of Education spokesperson said any antisemitic behaviour in schools was “distressing and disturbing and taken extremely seriously”.
“We work closely with the Victorian Jewish community to strengthen our zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism,” he said.
Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abromovich said he heard concerns “almost daily” about incidents of antisemitic harassment and abuse in Victorian schools.
“These cases are just the tip of the iceberg and are symptomatic of something very troubling that is taking place in Victoria,” he said.
“For too many Jewish students, attending a public school is nothing short of a nightmare, as lives have been ruined because schools have failed us all.”
In unrelated incidents, Brighton Secondary College and the Education Department are awaiting a Federal Court judgment on a case against the state in which five former students alleged the school did not protect them from antisemitic discrimination and bullying.
A former Brunswick Secondary College student, 13, who asked not to be identified to avoid further harassment, claims he was subject to a five-week “campaign” of antisemitic bullying.
The year 7 student said the bullying began just three weeks into the first term this year after a group discussion about cultural backgrounds during which he said he had Jewish heritage.
He said he was confronted with heil Hitlers, a student drawing swastikas on a desk and at one point was held down, hit and kicked while another student tried to draw a swastika on his leg. The boy, who can speak German, said a student used Google to translate “all Jews should be exterminated” and “go back to the camps” into that language.
Most of it happened in the classroom, he said, but he would also get “sly tackled” on the sports field.
“It was constant every day, he was drawing the same thing [swastikas] on the table ... saluting me [the heil Hitler] the entire time,” he said.
“They never said my normal name. My nickname was ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewboy’. ”
The student was worried that going to the teachers about the bullying would make him a stronger target, but after five weeks his parents found out.
The boy’s father John, who asked not to include his surname to avoid his son being bullied again, said the boy’s great-grandmother and great-grandfather were murdered by Nazis during World War II. John’s own father escaped the Holocaust in 1938. He still has his father’s star-shaped Jewish badge.
After contacting the school and not getting a response for 24 hours, John decided to go to the police.
“Then the dialogue with the school just started after we sort of had to approach the police. It wasn’t just verbal or punchy and so on. It was physical. And it was abusive.”
The school set up a safety plan, but John said it was too late.
John decided not to go through with police charges to spare his son the trauma of the process.
“I did actually say to them in 35 years of experiencing schools in three different countries, this is the worst case of antisemitism I’ve come across,” he said.
Another student, 12, who attends Rowville Secondary Sports Academy, said antisemitic attacks began on the third week of February this year.
The boy’s father, who asked not to be named to protect his son’s identity – said his son was called a “filthy Jew” and told “all of you were supposed to die standing in a line and raising your hands up” and saw students doing the heil Hitler.
“It’s almost every day, every day it would have been something else,” he said.
The boy’s father said one teacher was aware of it from the first week and told the students to stop, which he believes had no impact. He claims he called the school for weeks before he had a response and felt the consequences and educative responses were not strong enough.
“Look this is racism. This is the worst. It’s not bullying,” he said.
“One time is one time too many. I don’t want other students to have deal with this the way my son did.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive officer Peter Wertheim said he did not think there were strong enough policies in Victorian state schools to support Jewish students. The number of antisemitic incidents reported across Australia in 2022 was the highest in a decade, with 478 incidents – a 6.9 per cent increase from 2021.
In June last year, Victoria became the first state to ban the public display of the Nazi symbol. Under proposed federal laws, people who display or trade Nazi hate symbols would also face up to 12 months in jail.
It is mandatory for Victorian government schools to teach students about the Holocaust as part of the level 9/10 history curriculum.
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16 July, 2023
Michigan school district to retire Chiefs mascot, arrowhead logo after complaints of cultural appropriation
A Michigan school district is getting rid of its Chief mascot and arrowhead logo after complaints of cultural appropriation and racism.
The Plymouth-Canton Community Schools Board of Education on Tuesday voted 6-1 to retire Canton High School's "Chief" mascot and logo despite pushback from the community.
Tensions were heated at the school board meeting when community members spoke during the public comment period with people expressing a desire to change the mascot and those who wished to keep it.
One student, who identified as Native American, supported the change because it was a symbol of "colonialism."
"I, unfortunately, had to compete under the arrowhead mascot, which I always took to be a symbol of colonialism," the student said. He went on to say, "There were very few other non-white folks in the entire community, and it was incredibly horrifying to have to compete under that every day."
The student added how he "encountered racism and other difficulties" as a student at Salem High School.
"It is incredibly distracting to have this mascot," he said. "I completely support the student initiative to change this. They have a right to be free from distraction."
However, another speaker who identified as a "full-blooded Navaho" pushed back on the proposition to retire the logo.
Gabriel Jim, a father of two, said that the logo and mascot were "very honorable and respectful."
"I don’t agree with the decision to retire the chief and the arrowhead logo," Jim said. "As a native person, I find them very honorable and respectful. It’s not like the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo caricature or anything like that."
One parent, Shannon Balog, spoke about parents losing money from paying for sporting equipment with the logo and mascot embedded in it.
"Canton hockey team is funded by parents," she said. "The cost for them to replace their uniforms and gear will be a big cost to these families."
"Where's all the money coming from for rebranding? How much do you anticipate this costing?"
Even after a majority of speakers wanted to keep the logo, the board ultimately decided to retire it.
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California Approves Math Curriculum Promoting ‘Social Justice’ Over Standard Skills
The California State Board of Education approved a new math framework on July 12 that has generated controversy. Critics argue that the framework promotes teaching political activism to children instead of focusing on math skills and standards.
The framework, outlined in a 1,000-page guidance document, underwent four years of revision and three drafts based on public feedback.
The critics claim that the framework incorporates concepts of social justice, political activism, and environmental justice into the math curriculum. They argue that the emphasis on these topics detracts from the mastery of math skills.
On the other hand, proponents, such as Mary Nicely, the state’s chief deputy superintendent of public instruction, believe that the framework provides equitable access to math instruction.
“The framework has struck a great balance in new ways to engage students in developing a love for math while supporting those on an accelerated path,” Ms. Nicely said in a statement. “Our State Superintendent is a champion of equity and excellence, and it is our core mission that every child—regardless of race, ZIP code, or background—has access to a quality education.”
The guidance outlines key strategies such as structuring math instruction around integrated “big ideas,” emphasizing problem-solving and critical thinking, connecting math to real-world applications, incorporating culturally relevant content, fostering inquiry-based learning, and promoting fluency in math concepts and algorithms.
Opponents of the framework, represented by SaveMath.net, founded by private math tutor and former teacher Michael Malione, raise concerns about the lack of vetting for the concept of “big ideas” and the limited involvement of individuals with advanced math degrees in its development.
Mr. Malione argues on his website that the framework’s focus on “social justice” will harm students and that it devotes too little attention to math content standards.
“Typically, a curriculum framework would orient around the content standards regarding when and how they should be taught—to provide guidance to educators, parents, and textbook publishers. The SFR draft framework does not,” he states on his website.
Mr. Malione points out that the framework promotes the use of math to explore concepts of fairness in relation to various social issues and encourages student political activism. It also emphasizes racial justice, equity, gender inclusivity, and trauma-informed pedagogy in math education.
“One would think the proposed math framework would focus on describing how to convey the required math subject content in detail, but unfortunately, it does not,” his website states. The state’s framework from 2013, by contrast, devotes 66 percent “of its total text (approximately 7,200/10,900 lines of text) to implementing math content standards.”
The California State Board of Education states that the framework aims to align math concepts across grade levels, ensure equal access to high school math pathways, provide multiple approaches to support student progress, expand course options, and develop data literacy skills.
Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education, praised the framework for its focus on excellence with equity. Change is imperative, she believes, as the United States has been ineffective and inequitable in teaching math.
“We are one of the lower-achieving countries—and California is below the national average in its achievement in mathematics,” Ms. Darling-Hammon said, adding that this is an “area of great need, and change is imperative.”
“The same old, same old will not get us to a new place,” Ms. Darling-Hammond added.
On July 13, 2021, more than 1,000 people, including math and science professors, business professionals, and venture capitalists, signed an open letter from the Independent Institute to Gov. Gavin Newsom expressing concerns about certain elements of an earlier version of the framework. That letter appeared to force revisions to parts of the framework.
Although revisions have been made to the framework, critics argue that it still maintains an emphasis on social justice principles, which they believe introduces political agendas into math teaching and may have detrimental effects. They claim that the framework replaces the traditional focus on math with a politicized approach.
“It replaces a focus on ‘math class’ with something more akin to a sociology class, adopting a politicized stance of learning and applying math in a one-sided interpretation,” Mr. Malione states on his website.
According to Bill Evers, director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute, the framework remained highly politicized after an earlier version was revised.
In a previous statement to The Epoch Times, Mr. Evers said he believes that the curriculum emphasizes political and teaching dogma, with math problems still framed within social and environmental contexts.
“They still want the teachers to be social justice warriors themselves, and they want them to turn out new social justice warriors and environmental activists,” he said.
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How to fix Australian schools: A new report identifies what needs to be cut
In 1992, during one of my early book launches in Melbourne, a chance comment made me question the state of Australia’s education systems. The book, titled So I Headed West, was a collection of written material left by my grandfather, W.G. Manners, whom I never had the chance to know. A reader who had delved into the book remarked that my grandfather appeared to be a well-educated person. Before I could respond, Professor Geoffrey Blainey AC interjected, stating, ‘They were all better educated in those days.’
It is a vice of the old to look back on their upbringing with rose-coloured glasses. Criticising younger generations is a recreational sport more popular than golf or bingo among older demographics. However, that event which took place 31 years ago, has never left me, and it sparked a growing concern within me regarding Australia’s educational standards.
In recent times I’ve noticed a dramatic escalation of this worrying trend. The Covid lockdowns shed light on the materials being served to students, as parents had the opportunity to witness first-hand what was being taught. Many would likely agree that much of this curriculum seemed far removed from what could be considered core educational material.
I am not alone in expressing concern over our education system and seeking ways to improve what transpires in our classrooms. At this year’s Sir John Downer oration in April held in Adelaide, Opposition leader Peter Dutton also highlighted Australia’s failing education system. He argued that,
ideologically driven advocates have too much influence over what is being taught to our children. We want our children to be educated, not indoctrinated. Our kids are being taught ‘what to think,’ not ‘how to think’.
Over the years, I have accumulated a vast collection of articles addressing the slipping educational standards in our country. Faced with this mountain of material, I realised that I would never be able to tackle this task alone. Thus I sought the assistance of two esteemed academics from Perth, who have fearlessly waded through this material and provided their insightful observations for a recently published discussion paper, ‘The Education Crisis in Australia’.
Dr. Rocco Loiacono, one of the authors of the paper, said,
We need to acknowledge the negative impact of an overloaded curriculum on teachers’ well-being and the overall education system. To improve academic standards, we must focus on teaching fewer topics with greater depth and curriculum integrity.
Furthermore, the research paper reveals the overwhelming administrative burden placed on teachers, hindering their ability to focus on lesson planning and effective teaching. Excessive documentation requirements and unnecessary reporting divert valuable teaching time, contributing to the rising costs of education while academic standards continue to decline.
Co-author of the discussion paper, Professor Matthew Ogilvie, writes of this administrative bloat in the university system,
If we look to the United Kingdom as an example that Australia seems to be following, most universities employ more administrative and professional staff than academic staff.
Let us collectively address the pressing issue of declining educational standards in Australia. By acknowledging the problem and engaging in constructive dialogue, we can work towards ensuring a brighter future for our children and the generations to come.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/how-to-fix-our-schools-without-spending-more/
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13 July, 2023
Fed-up parent slams ‘dysfunctional’ NYC School amid outrage over its trans acceptance policy
A furious parent and board member at the prestigious Browning School resigned and trashed the all-boys institution as “dysfunctional” just prior to the school planning it would accept transgender students.
The anonymous parent — who claims to have spent $1.5 million in tuition and donations at the historic institution — accused the progressive administration of trying to bilk him of thousands of dollars and unfairly punishing their children.
“Browning has degenerated into a morass of dysfunction, misfeasance, and unfairness,” the seven-year board of trustees member said in an email leaked to nycprivateschoolwatch.
“Those are serious words, and I use them carefully — as a parent and a fiduciary.”
The fed-up parent claimed he committed to a $1 million donation for the Upper East Side school in 2022 and attempted to make the payment out in two massive sums.
In October, after initially gifting a $348,600 payment, the board member tried to pay out the remaining $651,400 balance, but the K-12 school allegedly told the parent they owed even more.
“Because of discrepancies in Browning’s poor bookkeeping, the Chief Advancement Officer took the bizarre position I somehow ‘owed’ $710,000” — nearly $60,000 more than the parent had committed to, they claimed in the email.
The school allegedly gave the parent the run-around for two months until the frustrated parent took back the entire hefty donation.
“Almost immediately, the administration turned against our sons,” the board member claimed.
The parent accused the school of handing down disproportionately heavy punishments to their sons on at least three different occasions throughout the rest of the school year.
The boys — who reportedly had not been the subject of disciplinary action before the revoked donation — were not afforded “even the most basic due process” in any case, the parent said.
Browning allegedly only backed down when the boys’ parents sicked their lawyers on the school — which cost them thousands of dollars in legal action and a week of classes for their targeted son.
Throughout the ordeal, Browning’s Head of School John Botti allegedly refused to meet with the parents.
“With the administration in an ivory tower, Browning is no longer a school run for its students — and it is behind time for accountability,” the former board member said.
“Browning has put our sons, and undoubtedly many other students, through a massive amount of stress and anguish. This conduct is, put simply, cruel — the antithesis of the lofty rhetoric the administrators extol in their speeches and blogs but betray in their (in)actions.”
A representative for Browning did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The email was sent prior to the school making its announcement on trans policy.
However, nycprivateschoolwatch shared the email just hours after Browning announced it would begin accepting students who identify as male as part of a new gender policy and would work to accommodate current students who no longer identify as a boy.
The academy said in its letter to parents that the school had been evaluating its admissions policy during years of public discourse over gender and diversity.
“Like many schools around the world in recent years, we have witnessed changing cultural concepts, vocabulary and identities with regard to gender,” the letter said.
“As a single-gender school that educates boys starting in kindergarten, we are engaging with how gender is viewed today, particularly by the students whom we serve.”
The decision has left multiple parents fuming, with some claiming it defeats the purpose of sending children to a single-sex school.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/12/browning-school-board-member-slams-school-as-dysfunctional/
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College Racism
The Left is angry because the Supreme Court ruled race-based affirmative action unconstitutional. President Joe Biden says he "strongly disagrees."
But Chief Justice John Roberts was right to say, "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."
It's a victory for Students for Fair Admissions, the group that sued, thereby forcing Harvard to admit that Asians had to score 22 points higher on the SAT than whites, 63 points higher than Blacks.
How did Harvard justify that? They said Americans of Asian descent score lower in personal attributes, like "likability."
"Asian Americans are boring little grade grubbers," complains the Asian American Legal Foundation's Lee Cheng, in my video on race-based admissions. "That's bulls--t," he adds.
Economist Harry Holzer, who defended Harvard, says the school did the right thing.
"Asians are not interesting?" I ask. "They don't have interesting qualities?"
"Personal ratings reflect a wide range of characteristics," Holzer responds. "It's possible that some of that is anti-Asian bias, but you certainly can't prove that. ... When you have a long history of discrimination based on race, you have to take race into account."
"There are many, many, different ways to achieve diversity without discriminating against Asian Americans," Cheng responds. "Race-focused affirmative action helps rich people. Seventy percent of the students of every ethnic group at Harvard come from the top 20 percent of family income."
But Asians already do well in America, earning more money, on average, than other ethnic groups. Blacks have faced more discrimination. "Isn't it Harvard's job to try to make up for some of that?" I ask Cheng.
"The right path out of the history of discrimination based on race is not more discrimination," he replies.
Cheng is right. Affirmative action is racist, and therefore wrong.
I once tried to make that point by holding a racist bake sale. I called it an "affirmative action bake sale." I sold cupcakes at a mall. My sign read:
Asians -- $1.50
Whites -- $1.00
Blacks/Latinos -- 50 cents
People stared. Some got angry. One yelled, "What is funny to you about people who are less privileged?" A Black woman called my sign "very offensive, very demeaning!" "You got to be out of your gosh darn mind, boy!" said another. One man accused me of poisoning the cupcakes.
But after the initial anger, when people let me explain the reasoning behind my racist sign, many expressed second thoughts about affirmative action. "I guess it is unfair," said one Black student.
I modeled my bake sale on what a student group at Bucknell University did to call attention to the racism of affirmative action. Bucknell officials shut down the students' experiment. Schools that practice affirmative action don't like to be confronted with the reality of affirmative action.
Now that affirmative action is illegal, universities will still discriminate by race. They'll just hide it better. One tactic is to become "test-optional." Over 1,800 schools, including Harvard, no longer require students to submit SAT scores.
Already, schools practice legacy admissions, meaning that they favor the children of alumni. That's clearly unfair. It helps mostly rich people, who are mostly white people.
The problem with both "test-optional" schools and affirmative action is that ultimately, it harms Black students. Those admitted with lower standards often struggle or drop out. Had they attended other schools, they might have done well.
And of course some people look at even the smartest Black students and wonder, is she really smart? Or did she just get in because of her race?
If activists want to help young people, they should start before college. Promote school choice. It allows all kids to escape bad public schools.
That will help more kids than rigging college admissions.
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/07/12/college-racism-n2625584
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University at Center of SCOTUS Affirmative Action Case Will Give Free Tuition to Specific Students
Late last month, the United States Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admissions policies, known as "affirmative action," at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.
As Spencer reported, the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett stated that "Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today."
Following the Court’s decision, the UNC will offer free tuition to some undergraduate students now that it is not allowed to use race-conscious in its admissions process.
Beginning in 2024, the school will provide free tuition and required fees for incoming in-state students whose families make less than $80,000 per year, UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a statement published Friday (via UNC-Chapel Hill):
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held that universities across the country can no longer consider race when making admissions decisions, marking a fundamental change in the law that governs our admissions process, and that of thousands of other universities.
We will follow the Supreme Court’s decision in all respects. That means race will not be a factor in admissions decisions at the University. It also means we will comply with the Court’s ruling that an applicant’s lived racial experience cannot be credited as “race for race’s sake,” but instead under some circumstances may illuminate an individual’s character and contributions.
[...]
First, Carolina will provide free tuition and required fees for incoming undergraduates from North Carolina whose families make less than $80,000 per year. Beginning with the incoming class in 2024, we will expand the University’s long-standing commitment to access and affordability for North Carolina families.
[...]
Second, as part of our commitment to reach future Tar Heels throughout the state, we have hired additional outreach officers as part of our admissions team. They are serving in under-resourced communities to spread awareness of our affordability and recruit students from across the state. We want the best students to know that a UNC-Chapel Hill education is a possibility for them.
Our responsibility to comply with the law does not mean we will abandon our fundamental values as a university.
According to The Hill, the average cost of tuition at UNC for in-state students is $9,000.
“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the opinion. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Last week, Townhall reported how Harvard is now facing a legal challenge over its legacy-based admissions policies. The organizations behind the lawsuits claim that this kind of policy benefits white students.
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12 July, 2023
NYU hosts anti-racism workshop open only to white public school parents: report
New York University hosted a months-long anti-racism workshop geared toward white public school parents that allegedly barred people of color from joining in what legal experts claim was a violation of civil rights law, according to a report.
The six-month-long workshop was “designed specifically for white public school parents in New York City committed to becoming anti-racist and to collaboratively building equitable, powerful, multiracial parents communities in their schools” and began in February, a listing states.
The series cost $360 per person and was hosted by the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative at NYU Metro Center.
While the now-delisted workshop description and sign-up sheet say it was designed for white parents, it doesn’t expressly state that people of color were forbidden from joining.
Still, organizers distributed a handout to participants days before the first workshop titled “Why a White Space” which lists the reasons for hosting white-only group discussions, according to a copy obtained by the conservative publication, the Washington Free Beacon.
“For many, it sounds contradictory: ‘It’s racist if just white people get together. Isn’t that segregation?'” reads the document produced by Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles, before listing seven reasons.
Some of the reasons include the suggestion that the responsibility of educating white people about racism shouldn’t be on the shoulders of people of color. Another reason listed was that white people need to have a safe space where they can make mistakes without having to subject people of color to further undue trauma or pain.
The workshop instructors reiterated the apparent need for a white-only space in the first workshop discussion, according to audio and video obtained by the Free Beacon.
A parent said it seemed “a little counterintuitive” to exclude people of color from the anti-racism series, to which instructor Barbara Gross said it was necessary, according to the outlet.
“People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross reportedly said. “Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”
Despite organizers’ intentions, five lawyers told the right-wing publication that the workshop “almost certainly” violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which governs recipients of federal funding such as non-profit colleges like NYU.
One lawyer — Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project — also told the outlet that the seminars went against laws banning discrimination in contracting since participants were charged a fee.
“It’s quintessentially illegal,” Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told the Free Beacon. “This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘Woke or KKK?’”
“They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice,” Samantha Harris, an attorney who litigates campus speech and civil rights issues, told the publication. “I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony.”
NYU told the Free Beacon that it was “reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards.”
The workshop began four years ago, Gross said, according to the outlet. It grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Interest in learning how to be anti-racist was reportedly at an all-time high during the months following his killing.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/11/nyu-hosts-anti-racism-workshop-open-only-to-white-parents-report/
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‘You’re not allowed to just talk about women any more’
Honi Soit [The student newspaper of the University of Sydney] records that in June 1973 a small group of feminists and leftist activists kicked off a historic battle to offer students the first women’s studies course at the University of Sydney – and only the second in the country. Two PhD students, Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka, wanted to teach a course called Philosophical Aspects of Feminist Thought.
The university professorial board’s rejection of the course led to a month-long strike by staff and students, supported by the Builders Labourers Federation and other unions. The Philosophy Strike, as it came to be called, was the precursor to the arrival of intellectual feminism on campus.
Fifty years later, philosopher and feminist academic Holly Lawford-Smith has had a security guard stationed outside her tutorial room at the University of Melbourne to protect students from disruption during her feminism course. At times the guard also has escorted Lawford-Smith as she walks the short distance from the Old Arts building, across a path called the Professors Walk, back to her office in the Arts West building. Feminism is not so welcome these days on campus.
What has gone wrong? Before women had rights, imparting feminist thoughts may have been dangerous. But now? In 2023? This is nuts. Ferret around the wondrous English language all you want. There is no other word. Has feminist philosophy so lost its way that it no longer deserves a place on campus? Or is there something seriously wrong with those forces that have led to a security guard being posted outside a feminism tutorial room?
To answer these questions, we should start with what Lawford-Smith teaches. Her intensive course of 24 online lectures and 12 in-person tutorials for PHIL20046: Feminism covers topics one would expect: “Are women oppressed?” and “Patriarchy”, “The sex industry” and “Beauty norms and women’s revolution”. Given the security guard stationed outside Lawford-Smith’s tute room, maybe the trouble stems from lectures 21 and 22 on “sex/gender identity”.
Yet it would be remiss of an associate professor in political philosophy not to discuss in a feminism course the difference between sex – a woman’s biology – on the one hand, and gender, where a man self-identifies as a woman. And it would be entirely ridiculous to expect all academics to agree that gender identity is a sufficient reason to up-end feminist teaching about issues confronting women that are rooted in women’s biology.
In an interview with Inquirer this week, Lawford-Smith describes the first time she faced intense hostility for believing that a woman’s biology is central to the teaching of feminist philosophy.
In March 2019, the philosopher was interviewed for cultish literary and philosophy magazine 3:AM. After discussing mostly ethical and collective responsibilities about climate issues, she was asked about the trans issue and her gender-critical beliefs.
“It really has become toxic,” Lawford-Smith told interviewer Richard Marshall. “I’ve been surprised by the levels of vitriol that have been directed at me and other radical and gender-critical feminists within the profession. My stance is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that ‘gender identity’ has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.”
“Some trans women inside the magazine complained to the editor to get the piece taken down,” Lawford-Smith tells Inquirer. Her interview was pulled. Marshall quit the magazine in protest against the censorship.
It started escalating from there. There were threats of protests and attempts to deplatform Lawford-Smith and another gender-critical academic at the University of Reading in Britain a few months later. “But they (university administrators) stood their ground and let the public event go ahead rather than give in to the protesters.”
Lawford-Smith mentions the Australian Association of Philosophy conference in Sydney in July 2019. Her conference abstract about women-only spaces led student organisations and other groups to organise protests. “I walked into this big conference, maybe 300 or 500 people go, and there was security everywhere and I was thinking, ‘Oh, did something happen?’ And then I realised that they were there for me,” Lawford-Smith says, matter of factly.
“I just remember it so vividly. My heart was racing. I felt like, ‘Oh god, everyone must be staring at me. I’ve caused all this fuss.’ ”
Though the online threats were extreme, protests didn’t eventuate that day. In June 2019, Lawford-Smith’s Twitter account was permanently suspended – it was pre-Elon Musk.
In September 2019, student activists tried to cancel her talk called Deplatforming is a Feminist Issue at RMIT.
“I’m sure the irony was lost on them,” she writes on her online Censorship timeline.
That the philosopher can fill five pages about censorship attempts against her is evidence of the level of abuse and hatred she has endured. “It felt really intense being a person who was hated that much by a small sector of society,” she says.
After a few more extreme online hate fests against her failed to translate into physical protests, Lawford-Smith says she realised that the numbers were small.
“That just took some experience to learn that the numbers (of trans activists) are puny,” she says.
I come back to why is there a security guard being posted outside a Melbourne Uni tute room to protect students who want to learn about Lawford-Smith’s feminism? The university, she says, has overreacted on many fronts, bestowing more power on a small group of trans extremists than they deserve.
Lawford-Smith is known as a “radical” feminist because her focus is on women and their biology. Radical? How times change. Her new book, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, was not an easy project, either.
Publication was halted by Oxford University Press last year. Matters were resolved and the book is out this week. Originally classified as a book for a general retail audience, it has been reclassified by OUP as an academic book.
Nothing is easy if you believe feminism is for women. Does that make Lawford-Smith a TERF? The term trans-exclusionary radical feminist is thrown around a lot these days.
“TERF is a slur. I’m trans women exclusionary from feminism,” Lawford-Smith explains. Not from society, note. From feminism. “It is indispensable to our form of feminism to have the concept of femaleness because women are the people to whom subordination, marginalisation has been done over centuries.”
Can’t feminism include trans women?
“It’s hard to see how it would be coherent. You could say we have this constituency of female people who, by their biology, have been mistreated over the centuries. Oh. And there are also trans women.”
But she says these two groups – biological women and trans women – “have nothing in common; there’s not a shared constituency. There’s not much at all of an overlap between the groups.”
Lawford-Smith says including trans issues in feminism has changed the focus, away from issues facing women and feminist politics to those facing trans women who claim to be the most marginalised.
Is the trans movement trying to take over feminist politics?
“Absolutely. That’s my impression,” she says. “Somehow – and I can’t fully account for the hostility and aggression of it – but somehow you’re not allowed to just talk about women any more.
“There’s a sense now that feminism has kind of accomplished its goals and there isn’t really a problem any more. So why would you want to talk about women when you could be talking about trans people? The gender studies approach has assumed cultural dominance. That’s the big project that cares about everyone and everything. And it’s wrong to take the women’s studies approach, which is the approach that I’m taking.”
If issues facing women and trans women differ historically and intellectually, why not a separate university course for students who want to explore trans issues?
“I ask myself that question all the time.” Instead, “feminism is being devalued”, Lawford-Smith says.
This is not just an intellectual debate. It’s about women-only spaces, and sport, and our language where a woman’s essential biology is being erased. Tampons are for “people who menstruate”, breastfeeding has become “chest-feeding”, untethered from a woman’s biology, and new laws allow gender self-identification.
In short, modernity’s diversity- and-inclusion project is excluding large parts of what it means to be a woman, and necessarily undermining women’s rights, to accommodate a tiny group of biological men who identify, in gender terms, as women.
The irony of an inclusion movement excluding women and their biology is not lost on Lawford-Smith, let alone millions of people off-campus who wonder whether trans extremism has peaked.
Certainly, in some sports there is a reckoning with reality about male physiology up-ending an equal playing field. Business is not immune either, with the manufacturer of Bud Light beer in the US learning that tagging on to the trans issues was a dumb idea for business. Former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon learned the hard way about overreaching on gender self-identification laws and what that meant for female prisons.
Meanwhile, in Britain last week, tax expert and feminist campaigner Maya Forstater was awarded more than £100,000 ($190,600) after she was discriminated against, losing her work contract, because she expressed her view that “male people are not women”.
Though there are signs of trans extremism causing the first major chink in the woke movement’s armour, academia is proving to be more obscurant.
Lawford-Smith says it drives her crazy that the university has had ample opportunity to see that this is not actually a sizeable threat yet they keep pandering. She points to policies that have turned university bathrooms into shared spaces.
“The policy has invited (into female-only bathrooms) any male who decides that he would prefer to use them,” she says. “This tiny proportion of trans students is prioritised over the interests that any female students of any religion or culture might have to having single-sex bathrooms.”
The university’s new LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Action Plan allows students to lodge grievances against course curriculum, putting Lawford-Smith’s course in the direct line of fire from trans activists. She notes that none of her students has complained about her course; complaints have come from students who have not done her course. But this could change, she says, if trans activists take her course simply to try to shut it down.
More broadly, the philosopher feminist is concerned that policies about the “safety and wellbeing” of students could be weaponised to stop important debates.
Whereas once it was about hurt feelings, the new battleground is over “wellbeing”. It’s easy to see how this equally slippery term could be exploited by trans activists to censor a feminism course that focuses on women and their biology.
Lawford-Smith, who has lodged a complaint against her employer for not protecting her from spurious attacks, is disappointed at the lack of support.
“I don’t think the (university) leadership have shown that they understand that you cannot serve two masters,” she says. “They constantly make statements that they’re trying to balance academic freedom against diversity and inclusion. I just think that’s not true.
“These two objectives pull in really different directions.”
The contemporary corporate diversity and inclusion mantra on campus of creating a safe place where everyone’s comfortable, where everyone feels celebrated, is not consistent with rigorously challenging orthodoxies, she says.
Some discussions that prise open our minds to new ideas may be uncomfortable and potentially even distressing.
“A lot of students today just uncritically swallow gender identity ideology and don’t see any kind of conflict with feminism. I can perfectly imagine going into a first-year subject and trying to teach something slightly critical about reifying gender as identity and having most of the class against me and think I’m transphobic.
“We want to be able to challenge orthodoxies. That’s the really important thing. If there’s something where that’s just what we progressives do now, you want to be able to challenge that and make sure it’s a view held for good reason.
“How do you gain new knowledge? How do you overthrow old paradigms? How do you really pursue the truth at all costs and also keep everyone really comfortable?”
We have no law of physics to help a cultural pendulum settle somewhere more sensible. Only a healthy marketplace of ideas can do that. And that requires people such as Lawford-Smith to keep teaching what is now deemed “radical” feminism.
But back to that security guard. Is there room for feminism on campus? The philosopher pauses. She’s not sure.
“It seems nuts if the answer is no, right? It’s absolutely nuts.”
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Long march of the Marxists
Instead of 'I think therefore I am', the credo is ‘I feel therefore I’m right’
‘The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ wrote L P Hartley. What schools and universities teach and don’t teach about Western civilisation and Australia’s development as a nation illustrates the truth of Hartley’s observation.
Remember when government schools had a picture of the Queen in the foyer outside the principal’s office, and Monday morning assembly began with raising the flag and taking the oath of allegiance: ‘I love God and my country, I will honour the flag, I will serve the Queen and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.’
The history curriculum adopted a grand narrative centred on Western civilisation, starting in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving on to Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia from the time of the First Fleet. Students were taught to acknowledge the debt owed to a Westminster government and a common law system inherited from the United Kingdom.
Fast forward, and it’s obvious how much has changed. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ has replaced ‘God Save the Queen’, and ‘Welcome to Country’ has replaced the ‘Oath of Allegiance’. The national curriculum has jettisoned a balanced approach to history, civics, and citizenship. It embraces the ‘black armband’ view of history. The arrival of the First Fleet is described as an invasion leading to genocide. It ignores the arrival of the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that arrived with Captain Phillip and underpins our freedoms and liberty.
The way civics and citizenship is taught highlights the success of the cultural left in its long march through the institutions. Students learn that: ‘Citizenship means different things to people at different times depending on personal perspectives, their social situation, and where they live’. Based on postmodern relativism, they are taught citizenship involves multiple perspectives that ‘reflect personal, social, spatial and temporal dimensions of citizenship’.
Instead of acknowledging our British heritage, Australia is described as a ‘secular democracy and pluralist, multi-faith society (that) draws upon diverse cultural origins’. Forget about nation-building. The focus is on diversity and difference instead of promoting social cohesion and stability.
Under both Labor and Coalition governments in Canberra, the curriculum undermines a sense of pride in Australia. So, it’s hardly surprising that when millennials were asked in a poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs whether they would defend Australia if it was invaded, 38 per cent answered ‘No’.
Although the most recent iteration of the curriculum mentions Magna Carta, Westminster government, common law, and our constitutional monarchy, it is not compulsory to teach students about them. Indeed, it is more than likely that schools will continue to teach the ’Black armband’ view of the nation’s political and legal systems because the cultural left dominates tertiary education and teacher training.
In her chapter on universities in Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, Jennifer Oriel writes that universities have long since forsaken the concept of a liberal education defined by Matthew Arnold as the ‘best that has been thought and said’. Instead of the pursuit of what T S Eliot called wisdom and truth, universities are dominated by a rainbow alliance of nihilistic theories, including radical feminism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, and LGBTQI+ gender and sexuality. In line with the Black Lives Matter movement and post-colonial theory, students are taught that Western societies are structurally racist, Eurocentric, and riven with white supremacism.
And it’s not just happening in Australian universities, across the Anglosphere, academics are purging curricula of ‘whiteness’, and even science and mathematics are not immune. In the UK, students and academics associate Enlightenment thinking with capitalism and imperialism. Such oppressive thinking is condemned as ‘the knowledge and standpoint of wealthy white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men occupying positions of objective superiority. Dismantling the white curriculum thus requires the dismantling of the multiple spheres of power that reproduce the dominant system of thought.’
The origins of Woke ideology and cancel culture can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s. In Celsius 7/7, British conservative Michael Gove argues this was a time when the Left concluded that the most effective way to overthrow capitalism was to take a long march through the institutions. Instead of inciting a revolution as occurred in Russia and China, leftists infiltrated and took control of schools, universities, and churches, and undermined the family. The cultural revolution of the 60s, epitomised by the student riots at the Sorbonne and the rise of postmodernism and deconstructionism, has also had a profound effect on education.
As a result of the dominance of cultural Marxism, we live in a world where identity politics prevails, and disadvantaged individuals and groups are presented as powerless victims of an oppressive, Eurocentric, capitalist system while Eurocentric, heteronormative men are guilty of being male, pale and stale. Rather than relying on reason and rationality, arguments are subjective and emotional, leading, in the end, to either epistemological suicide or violence. Instead of the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality and reason, generations of young people espouse the belief ‘I feel therefore I’m right’. Free and open discussion and debate are replaced by what Camille Paglia calls, ‘An ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance, and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.’
What is to be done?
Conservatives and those committed to rationality and reason must be willing to call out the true nature of cultural left ideology and have the courage to be true to their beliefs and convictions. Cultural warriors must reassert the importance of the Anglosphere and the debt we owe to the UK and Western civilisation that can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. As Augusto Zimmermann argues, ‘Our political and legal systems are underpinned by the New Testament and the admonition to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, and the importance of Christianity must be asserted. Like the cultural left, we must call on like-minded individuals and associations to be active in the public sphere and take a medium to long-term view of the struggle against nihilism and neo-Marxist ideology.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-long-march-of-the-left
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11 July, 2023
The National Education Association’s summer reading selections aim to indoctrinate kids, not educate
Why did the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, put porn on its recommended-reading list?
The NEA presumably listed Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir” in its “Great Summer Reads for Educators” under “banned” books because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, correctly, got it out of his state’s school libraries.
The book is aimed at teens but was found in several elementary schools. It contains truly shocking, explicit descriptions and drawings of sexual acts.
The NEA pretends the book’s LGBT characters got it removed from school libraries, writing on its website: “Twilight used to be at the top of banned-book lists for its racy content. Today, those lists are much more likely to feature LGBTQ+ people or People of Color.”
This is true only because organizations like the NEA are using books with LGBT characters to put inappropriate sexual material in front of children.
“Twilight” had some kissing.
“Gender Queer” has oral sex.
It’s not at all the same.
More than ever, the teachers unions are on the opposite side of moms and dads.
What parent wants his or her kid to stumble onto a book about dildos and sexting, both concepts included in “Gender Queer,” at school?
In fact, when DeSantis wanted to show the images from the books he was pulling from school libraries, local news outlets had to cut out of his press conference because the pictures were so graphic.
Yet the NEA wants this book in your kid’s school.
Left’s hollow defense
The defense from the left seems to be that there’s no point in barring these books from a school library when a child can access far worse material on a phone or home computer.
By this theory, parents should have been buying teenage boys copies of Playboy to read behind the Piggly Wiggly — otherwise parents were committing censorship.
Just because kids, unfortunately, have access to inappropriate material doesn’t mean their school should supply it and their teachers encourage it.
NEA’s inclusion of the book on its list is meant to do just that.
In addition to being inappropriate and gross, “Gender Queer” is of poor literary quality.
Out of all the books in the world, classics as well as books written recently, it simply doesn’t rank as literature our kids need to read.
Our country has seen a sharp decline in reading scores, at many grade levels, in the last year.
An unexplored reason might be that schools are supplying nonsense books like “Gender Queer” and kids never learn to read and comprehend actual literary works.
But the NEA doesn’t care about your kid reading. It cares about activism, not education.
Another book on its “banned” list is “Ready Player One,” which, again, was not banned but taken out of Florida middle schools for profanity and plot lines including a sex robot.
School libraries can’t contain every book in the world. Why should they contain this one?
Best they have to offer?
Another book on the list, presumably not banned, is “Milo and Marcos at the End of the World” by Kevin Christopher Snipes.
In it, a boy is convinced God is punishing him for being gay. Religious people are weird and awkward. The book is also poorly written. So perfect for NEA teachers to read over the summer!
Also listed is Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” a book used to scam pathetic white liberals into paying for white DiAngelo’s pricey seminars to make sure they parrot the correct language on racism.
The NEA has an agenda and that agenda is far-left and child-last.
The union displayed it during the pandemic, by ensuring schools stayed closed even if that meant the poorest kids in the country would be hardest hit.
Now it’s moved on to fighting a culture war that is specifically a war against families.
It’s not interested in educating children, only indoctrinating them.
The NEA isn’t trying to hide its goal.
Parents just need to believe the union. And stop it.
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Nearly 40% of students at Brown University identify as LGBTQ+ — doubling what it was in 2010
About 38% of students at the Ivy League school identified as either homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other — more than five times the national rate for adults not identifying as straight.
A similar poll conducted at the school just over 10 years ago found that 14% of the student body identified as being part of the LGBTQ+ community.
The poll was conducted by The Brown Daily Herald, an independent student newspaper at the Rhode Island school, and released in June as a part of a Pride Month special issue.
It is unclear how many students were polled in the survey. As of fall 2022, Brown had an undergraduate enrollment of 7,222 students and another 3,515 in its graduate and medical programs.
The Herald could not be reached for comment, and the university declined to comment citing the paper’s independence from the school.
About 7.2% of American adults identified as being non-heterosexual, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, up from 3.5% in 2012.
Since The Herald first conducted a survey of sexual orientation on campus in 2010, Brown students identifying as lesbian and gay dropped by more than half from 46 to 22%. About 19% of that group were college-aged members of Generation Z.
The number of students identifying with other groups, however, soared: bisexual students increased by 232%, and other LGBTQ+ groups rose by a collective 793%, The Herald found.
Of the LGBTQ+ respondents, the most common orientation was bisexual at 53.7%.
Josephine Kovecses, a member of the class of ’25, told The Herald she thought those numbers were driven by broadening social norms in recent years.
“Queer people haven’t been able to be open in their identifications for that long. So it’s exciting that the numbers are growing and that queer people are able to be open in particular at Brown,” Kovecses said.
The Herald’s own poll question options over the years mirrored that viewpoint.
In 2010, students were given only heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and other as orientations to choose from. It wasn’t until spring 2022 that queer, pansexual, asexual, and questioning, were added to the survey.
Some have argued that the soaring number of LGBTQ+ students at Brown is an example of a “social contagion” at a famously left-leaning school.
“There are two theories, that greater tolerance is allowing more to come out of the closet, or Bill Maher’s assertion that LGBT is trendy among some youth,” professor of political science at the University of London Eric Kauffman told The Fix in June.
“I think the second theory better fits the data and explains more of why the rise occurred.”
Citing data from the right-leaning Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Kauffman said LGBTQ+ identification has increased much more than sexual activity in those groups.
“If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together,” he said.
“What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT.”
Others, including Sharita Gruberg of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project with the Center for American Progress, agree with Kovecses that the environment of greater awareness that Gen-Z was raised in has driven the numbers.
“Gen Z has grown up at a time when stigma around LGBTQ identities is on the decline and rights are expanding,” Grunberg said in 2022 after Gallup released its findings, according to CNN.
“As greater awareness about the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities grows, and as stigma surrounding LGBTQ identity lessens, we’re likely to see more people self-identify as LGBTQ.”
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‘Adversity scores’ meant to boost medical school diversity would ‘ignore’ patients’ best interests, expert says
After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that it is unconstitutional for educational institutions to use race as a factor for college admissions, some medical schools reportedly are looking into other ways to try to bring in a diverse study body.
One so-called idea is the notion of considering adversity when weighing applicants.
President Biden himself said after the Supreme Court ruling, “What I propose for consideration is a new standard where colleges take into account the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that both Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs unlawfully discriminated against Asian Americans by considering race as a specific factor in admissions.
“Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points,” he noted.
The ruling still allows colleges and universities to consider race in the overall context of an applicant’s life experiences. “In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts added, in his majority opinion.
Diverse medical class at UC Davis
One medical school, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), has gained national attention for having one of the most diverse medical school classes in the nation, although its own state banned affirmative action in 1996.
The medical school became well-known for its controversial affirmative action policies after a contentious 5-4 Supreme Court decision on June 28, 1978, when the court ruled its quota system was unconstitutional.
Allan Bakke, a White student, sued the school after he was twice denied admission when he learned the school reserved slots for students of color, according to the school’s website.
Although the court ruled in his favor, it decided the school still could allow race as one of many factors to achieve a diverse class — but it could not have specific quotas.
The most recently admitted UC Davis medical class contains 133 students, with 84% coming from “disadvantaged” backgrounds — 14% are Black and 30% are Hispanic or Latinx, according to the school’s matriculant data.
“Word has gotten out,” noted a recent New York Times article, “about the U.C. Davis scale.”
Some 20 schools reportedly “recently requested more information” about the process, the Times piece noted, quoting Dr. Mark Henderson, head of admissions at UC Davis.
Fox News Digital reached out to UC Davis to learn more details about how it boosts diversity. The school declined to comment.
‘Race-neutral’ score
Multiple reports highlight the UC Davis socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D, to help increase the number of students of color, especially those who come from unrepresented backgrounds.
Every applicant is rated from 0 to 99 based on socio-economic characteristics, such as family income or education of parents, yet admissions decisions are still based on a complete evaluation combined with the “race-neutral” score.
But if the student is a child of doctors, then that student receives a score of zero, per a recent report.
“We are familiar with this particular program and have followed its progress, but were not participants in its design or implementation,” said Geoffrey Young, PhD, senior director of Transforming the Health Care Workforce at AAMC in Washington, D.C.
“What we do know is that the [recent] court’s decision allows admissions committees to strengthen or implement holistic review in admissions to consider the whole individual, including their academic metrics and personal, lived experiences,” he added.
“Holistic admissions programs can help increase diversity even when race or ethnicity are not factors that can be considered,” he also said.
Critics of adversity scores say this minimizes individuals by crunching their life circumstances into a single score.
In 2019, The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT, piloted a program to measure a student’s “adversity” from 0 to 100 — but after receiving immense backlash later that year, the board scrapped the score.
Even so, medical schools around the country have tried for years to increase the number of underrepresented minorities to better reflect the population they serve.
Still, only about 6% of practicing doctors are Black, although there are roughly twice the number who identify as such in the country, according to a 2022 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) report.
Also, only 0.1% practicing doctors identify as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, while only 0.3% are American Indian or Alaska Native.
‘Flawed notion’ for producing ‘better health care outcomes’
Others argue “adversity scoring” does not usher in the best and brightest physicians.
“Medical school does not exist to ameliorate society’s problems. It exists to create competent physicians,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, told Fox News Digital.
Do No Harm fights for patients and physicians against discriminatory ideology in medicine, according to its website.
“The notion that adversity scores should be a component of medical school admissions depends on the flawed notion that physicians who have overcome some adversity will produce better health care outcomes,” he added.
“To feel that individuals who have overcome some prior difficulties in their life have a unique right to become physicians simply ignores the best interest of patients.”
Despite its drawbacks, though, some experts say that adversity scores are not unconstitutional.
“The recent Supreme Court decision targeted the explicit consideration of race in college admissions,” Jerry Kang, UCLA distinguished professor of law and Asian American studies, who is based in Los Angeles, told Fox News Digital.
“It does not prevent taking socioeconomic class into account,” added Kang, who is also UCLA’s founding vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion.
“Any good faith measure of an individual’s overcoming adversity, whether it be qualitative or quantitative, may be considered in the admissions process.”
https://nypost.com/2023/07/10/adversity-scores-hurt-more-than-help-perspective-medical-students/
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10 July, 2023
I got into medical school by pretending to be black: We must enforce Supremes’ ruling
The Supreme Court’s decision banning college-admission based on race was a good first step, but the challenge now is to see that schools abide by it.
Indeed, no sooner did the court rule than President Joe Biden vowed not to let the decision “be the last word.”
I know first-hand why Americans should make sure it is.
Back in 1998, I knew my odds of getting into medical school, as an Indian-American, would be better if I were black. So, being dark-skinned, I pretended I was black — and got accepted, despite a mediocre 3.1 GPA.
Once there, though, I found the going rough and dropped out. That made me realize that affirmative action really doesn’t really do anyone any favors.
And it’s unfair to those who are excluded even though they were more deserving than those admitted on the basis of race.
Outside the courthouse in October, during deliberations in the recently decided case, I asked Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions (the plaintiff), about the potential consequences of a victory.
He replied with a twist on Winston Churchill’s famous words: It would be “the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.”
After the decision, colleges and universities displayed a range of reactions — from reluctant acceptance to outright defiance.
More than a 100 colleges and universities, including the entire Ivy League, had filed amicus briefs backing Harvard and University of North Carolina’s admission practices, which the court now deemed discriminatory.
These schools have collected tens of billions in taxpayer dollars and sent millions of rejection letters to applicants whose only fault may have been their race.
In the case against Harvard, SFFA’s attorneys unearthed the school’s use of “positive personality traits” as a guise for Harvard’s affirmative-action admission practices.
Theoretically, schools that had endorsed affirmative action could continue to cloak such discriminatory practices in defiance of the court.
They could employ stealthy, complex admissions algorithms that make it hard to identify their illegal scheme.
Gauging the sincerity of commitments to comply and scrap these practices will indeed be a formidable task.
Anyone hoping for colorblind admissions will need to support individual and class-action lawsuits against institutions that refuse to adopt race-neutral admission policies.
This means identifying victims of such biases, gathering expert testimony, subpoenaing relevant admissions data and enduring lengthy legal battles.
They should not be afraid to threaten stiff financial penalties — via legal settlements or awards or new legislation — for defiance.
Former President Donald Trump has suggested consequences large enough to erode endowments. Though legislation or court settlements might not go as far he’d like, he’s got the right idea.
The local, state and federal government must all be involved: Scores of congressmen and virtually every major Republican presidential candidate publicly supported SFFA’s cause.
With the court’s ruling, these leaders can now move to withhold federal funding from the Department of Education, Department of Justice and the universities themselves if they fail to enforce the court’s ruling.
Officials might also look to devise additional punishments as well, for school officials and the schools themselves, including loss of accreditation, a powerful weapon.
Recall that, years ago, Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status due to its discriminatory policies.
Further back, Washington dispatched federal marshals to see that black students were allowed into schools like the University of Alabama.
Surely officials can come up with other ways, too, to enforce compliance and design a routine for regularly examining, supervising and auditing these institutions until this scourge is truly behind us.
I am hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of affirmative action.
I’m desperately crossing my fingers that we’re entering a new era, with nationwide lawsuits and civil-rights campaigns dedicated to upholding race-neutral admissions policies when universities refuse to comply.
I’m encouraged not only by the Supreme Court’s ruling, but by the successful 2020 effort (in which I participated) to defeat California’s Prop. 16, which sought to allow affirmative action at California state institutions, including my beloved alma mater, UCLA.
Despite our staggering financial disadvantage, our efforts yielded a remarkable triumph, as 57% of voters sided with us.
These recent successes show that the nation is on the right track.
Americans will be better off when we no longer have to worry about legally sanctioned discrimination — against people of any race.
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Interfaith parents demand Maryland schools allow students to opt out of LGBTQ curriculum
Parents of all faiths joined together to oppose a Maryland school district’s gender ideology instruction, saying they will not be silenced.
Shaykh El Hadji Sall, a Muslim immigrant from Africa, joined the demonstration and spoke out against Montgomery County Public Schools’ decision to no longer allow students to opt-out of lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation.
In a Fox News op-ed, Sall explained that the instruction conflicts with his religious beliefs.
“Our simple request to restore the most basic of our rights — the right to opt out — received a surprising backlash. The opposing side lacks an argument as to why they should deny us our basic freedoms and parental rights, and so they have smeared us as bigots,” he wrote. “Yet none of these smears are going to silence me or other parents in Montgomery County from the Muslim and other faith communities. The stakes are too high, and our children are paramount.”
MCPS announced last year efforts to include an LGBTQ-inclusive reading list as part of its English language arts curriculum for the 2023 to 2024 academic year.
Sall told “Fox & Friends” Friday that it is parents’ right not to adhere to the curriculum, which is “completely against” their theological principles.
He said the school is trying to change his children’s values to something that is considered “sinful” in his religion.
“We are just not being treated properly because these are a small group of liberals in the Board of Education [who] just want to do what they want to do against all of us, which is not right,” he told host Brian Kilmeade.
Ismail Royer, a member of the Coalition of Virtue, serves as an advocate for the concerned parents. He said parents don’t want to be put in a position to choose between having their children indoctrinated or being punished by the school district.
“People of faith and people who share a moral consensus have to get together and pay attention to who’s getting elected to these school boards,” Royer explained.
“Voting has to be done by a case-by-case basis, but in this situation it would be suicidal for Muslims to vote for a Democrat unfortunately, just the way that Democrats line up on this issue.”
Montgomery County Public Schools issued a statement following the outrage from parents: “Maryland law permits students and families to opt out of ‘Family Life and Human Sexuality Unit of Instruction’ but not other curriculum such as the English language arts curriculum.”
Sall, however, said he is not satisfied by the school district’s statement.
He argued the push for gender ideology and sexual orientation in schools is an attempt to erase his culture and religious heritage.
“We’re not going to accept it,” he said. “We just want to opt out completely to this curriculum they want to impose to our children to indoctrinate them.”
He predicted this issue in education will impact the next election in a big way.
“Our God teaches to obey him, to obey the prophet, but also to obey the authority among us, meaning to be a good citizen,” he said. “And to be a good citizen is definitely to vote and to vote properly.”
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UK: I was hauled before a court because I challenged my sons' 'woke' school for removing urinals in the boys' toilets
A father-of-four says he was hauled before the courts for challenging what he believes are 'woke practices' in his sons' fee-paying boarding school and now faces a criminal conviction.
Martin Howard, 39, says urinals were removed from all boys toilets at Sexey's School in Bruton, Somerset, last summer leaving just four cubicles for 300 boys which he believes is a move to creating gender free toilets.
Mr Howard - whose sons aged 15 and 12 are pupils - wrote to the headteacher repeatedly to complain about the toilets and what he terms other 'extremist actions' which he says include rainbow flags in classrooms, inappropriate questionnaires on Year 7 pupils' sexual activity and an assembly likening all men to controversial influencer Andrew Tate.
It comes as the Government's long-awaited guidance to schools is set to be published imminently amid the growing debate around transgender issues. It is expected to say pupils shouldn't be allowed to use facilities designed for the opposite sex, but advice on 'gender neutral' toilets is still unclear.
After believing that his requests for clarification on why urinals and exterior toilet doors were removed weren't adequately addressed, Mr Howard went into the school to gather evidence last November.
Video recorded on Mr Howard's phone shows him visiting four toilets after school and being told to leave by teachers - several months later two cops arrived at his home and ordered him to come to the police station for questioning where he was later charged with causing nuisance or disturbance on school premises.
Mr Howard, from Shepton Mallet, Somerset, says he was banned from the school grounds for three months.
Appearing before Taunton Magistrates Court on Wednesday to represent himself, he pleaded not guilty and described the entire process as a 'waste of mine and the court's time'.
He added: 'As a parent I have an implied right of access to the school.'
But Magistrate Angela Brereton said: 'The only issue is whether or not you were being a nuisance or creating a disturbance. 'I am not sure you're allowed to video in toilets - what if there had been pupils present?'
He was released on unconditional bail but faces a trial in November, If he is convicted then will result in a criminal record and a fine of up to £500.
His case comes as women’s rights campaigners, including author JK Rowling, desperately try to stop public bodies and businesses replacing separate male and female toilets with gender neutral ones in an attempt to be more welcoming to trans people.
From the National Trust to UK theatres and even the Houses of Parliament, proposals to install gender neutral toilets have been blasted as woke and dangerous.
In May, parents at Walsall Academy, near Wolverhampton, were left fearful that new gender neutral toilets would leave 11-year-olds sharing lavatories with 18-year-olds of the opposite gender.
There were reports of pupils recording each other in the toilets, while teenage girls were refusing to drink water because they were forced to wait until they were back home before relieving themselves.
Meanwhile late last month, The Telegraph reported that a teenage boy was reportedly arrested over allegations that female pupils were sexually assaulted in the gender-neutral toilets at another secondary school in Essex.
The Essex school reportedly has a number of gendered toilets to be used by boys or girls as well as a set of 'open suite' cubicles that can be used by either sex.
Speaking after his court case, Mr Howard said: 'I am shocked it has gone this far. 'The school don't want parents finding out what they have done or challenging their woke policies.
'I tried to raise my concerns but the headteacher ignored these concerns as she continues to politicise her educational policies and the environment towards her extreme left ideologies.
'It is not a nice experience being charged and I will be writing to the school demanding compensation.'
Section 547 of the Education Act 1996 makes it a criminal offence for a person who is on school premises without legal permission to cause or permit a nuisance or disturbance. Trespassing itself does not constitute a criminal offence.
To have committed a criminal offence, an abusive individual must have been barred from the premises or have exceeded their 'implied licence', then also have caused a nuisance or disturbance.
Earlier this year Ofsted rated Sexey's school 'good' in all areas of an inspection - four years after it was judged 'inadequate'. Inspectors found pupils are 'happy and safe', 'polite' and 'thrive' there.
Sexey's - a state-run boarding school for boys and girls aged 11-18 which charges fees of up to £13,000 per year - has been contacted for comment.
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9 July, 2023
University rescinds reprimand for professor who failed student for using term ‘biological woman’
I guess it's very wrong of me but I see this as a case of an ugly b*tch of a professr trying to hurt a good-looking student
The University of Cincinnati [UC] on Thursday reversed its reprimand for a professor who failed a student for using the term “biological woman.”
The reprimand was issued on June 14 by the head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UC, to penalize gender studies professor Melanie Nipper after she failed student Olivia Krolczyk’s assignment for citing biological science.
According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Nipper’s reprimand will be removed from her personnel file. Nipper is still required to complete training about the university’s free speech policy and submit a syllabus to her department head.
Per the Cincinnati Enquirer, Nipper filed an appeal request and met on-campus with administrators. After the appeal request was filed, the UC decided that the reprimand was “issued in error.”
Nipper argued that failing the student was not in violation of UC’s free speech policy.
Krolczyk sent a statement to the Cincinnati Enquirer about UC rescinding the reprimand.
“UC is affirming that professors will have no consequences for failing students with dissenting opinions… they will not uphold a student’s rights to free speech and will take no action to ensure that the educators hired are acting in a professional manner,” Krolczyk said.
Fox News Digital previously reported on Krolczyk posting a TikTok video last month explaining that she received a zero on her project proposal about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports because she used the term “biological women.”
The gender studies professor, Nipper, had told her that “the terms ‘biological women’ are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity. Please reassess your topic and edit it to focus on women’s rights (not just “females”) and I’ll regrade.”
“How am I supposed to do my project if I can’t use the term ‘biological women?’” Krolczyk asked in her TikTok video.
Nipper was ordered to complete free speech training after she penalized a student for citing biological science.
Since then, Krolczyk has received a new grade and finished her class with an A, but her former professor has faced a less flattering fate.
The Cincinnati Enquirer obtained a copy of a formal reprimand from UC informing Nipper that she violated school policy. According to the paper, “The reprimand directs adjunct instructor Melanie Nipper to complete training about UC’s free speech policy and submit her syllabi for the coming school year to her department head.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer obtained a copy of a formal reprimand from UC informing Nipper that she violated school policy. According to the paper, “The reprimand directs adjunct instructor Melanie Nipper to complete training about UC’s free speech policy and submit her syllabi for the coming school year to her department head.”
The letter also demanded that “you must complete training on the requirements of the Campus Free Speech Policy” and that she “submit all syllabi” for review and approval “at least two weeks prior to the beginning of classes.”
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School principal leaves job to home-school her children, says education system suffering 'deep rooted' issues
A former private school principal, Mandy Davis, shared her concerns about the exodus of well-qualified teachers leading to unfit educators in public schools.
Parents should worry that the ongoing exodus of experienced teachers will harm their kids' education since under-qualified applicants could start filling vacancies, a former private school principal told Fox News.
"Every time one of those amazing, qualified and caring educators leaves the field, it just it gets you a little bit because you know how many kids they were serving," Mandy Davis, a private school principal turned home-school mom, told Fox News. "If our solution is 'let's just bring in somebody,' I'm not sure that's an environment we want our children staying in."
School districts nationwide have struggled with teachers fleeing the profession since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 45% of public schools operating without a full teaching staff in October 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some states have amended or considered amending state laws to relax teacher certification requirements to alleviate the shortage.
"There are teachers that are burning out and are saying ‘the classroom is not a safe place for me, the classroom is not somewhere where I can do what I set out to do and teach and have accountability over my classroom,’" Davis said. "Those are concerning."
Davis began teaching in 2008 and advanced her education career all the way to becoming a private school principal in Central Oregon. But the former principal quit in June 2022 to home-school her three kids.
"Initially, that's what got me into education, was wanting to be a change for as many students as I could," Davis said. "Coming to the realization that there are just these deeper rooted issues throughout the system that can prevent even teachers still today from doing their job and doing what they set out to do, it ultimately did lead me to leave."
Former school principal responds to teacher shortage
Davis says many factors led to her decision to home-school her kids, including a lack of child-led learning and concerns over well-qualified teachers exiting the workforce among other reasons. (Fox News Digital)
The former educator told Fox News that declining student behavior and the inability to change outdated curricula and policies were some of the many reasons she left the traditional school system. For her own kids, she said the exodus of well-qualified teachers, one-on-one instruction and political bias in classroom discussions also played roles in her decision to home-school.
Davis first switched her two oldest kids to private school in 2019 before moving them to home education. Her youngest is only 18 months old but will join his siblings when he's old enough.
"I saw a lot of gaps in our school system and the direction that the schools are moving, both with student behavior and teacher shortages and what's happening inside the classroom," Davis said. "It was not an environment that I thought promoted learning and promoted the life that I wanted my children to experience."
Between February 2020 and May 2022, 300,000 public school teachers and other staff left the field, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Even after a hiring spree, there's still 165,000 fewer staff than at the onset of the pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The majority of vacancies reported in March 2022 were a result of resignations rather than layoffs or retirement, according to the National Center of Education Statistics. Meanwhile, more than one-third of teachers said they’re likely to quit in the next two years, according to the Merrimack College Teacher Survey, which polled 1,200 teachers in January 2023.
"I’m not surprised by that number at all, especially the way that we're trending," Davis said. "I think it's important for parents to not only see it as a concern of why are all these teachers leaving, but to ask who is going to come in, and what's the solution going to be."
In Oregon, where Davis worked, the state allows for emergency licensed teachers to step in during urgent circumstances, leading to 438 such hires statewide during the 2021-2022 school year, up from 181 the year prior, according to the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission. The emergency licensed teachers aren't required to have prior teaching experience or training and can work in a full-time teaching position at a school for up to one year.
"Is that the best environment for our children's education?" Davis said. "For me, that was enough to make that school choice."
"If there are other educators wondering what they should do, I would just say to lean into your family first and think through what your children need," she said. "And if that's being met, then it just becomes more of a personal decision."
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JD Vance Putting Universities on Notice When It Comes to Complying With Affirmative Action Ruling
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action with a series of decisions out of Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC). To say that the left is not pleased would be putting it politely.
In case any college or university gets the idea to not comply, though, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) is putting them on notice with a letter he sent on Thursday to the presidents of elite schools, including those in Vance's state of Ohio. Not only did Vance write to "express concern," he also called on those presidents to preserve documents after they expressed "openly defiant and potentially unlawful reaction" to the Harvard decision.
Despite the ruling being as clear as it was, Vance's letter pointed out that "within hours of the decision's pronouncement, you and your institutions expressed open hostility to the decision and seemed to announce an intention to circumvent it."
His letter includes examples from 10 university presidents, including from Princeton, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Harvard. Cornell, Kenyon, Yale, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia.
A Fox News report summarized some of the reactions included in Vance's letter:
"Princeton President [Christopher] Eisgruber complained that the Court’s decision was ‘unwelcome and disappointing’ and vowed to pursue ‘diversity . . . with energy, persistence, and a determination to succeed despite the restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court in its regrettable decision today,’" Vance recounted.
"Oberlin President [Twillie] Ambar felt ‘deeply saddened and concerned for the future of higher education’ when the Supreme Court’s ruling was announced," he continued. "She assured her students and faculty that, rather than dampening her enthusiasm for affirmative action policies, the decision ‘only strengthens our determination to be a welcoming place where diversity is celebrated.’"
"Harvard President [Lawrence] Bacow boasted that ‘[f]or almost a decade, Harvard has vigorously defended an admissions system’ that the Supreme Court ruled unlawful and then ‘reaffirm[ed] the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences[.]’"
Vance's letter makes note of colleagues who "have assured me that they share my concern that colleges and universities, and particularly the elite institutions to whom this letter is addressed, do not respect the Court's judgment and will covertly. defy a landmark civil rights decision with which they disagree."
Speaking of another landmark decision, Vance reminded the presidents of the painful consequences of schools refusing to abide by the Brown v. Board of Education decision from 1954. "In one infamous case" regarding reaction to that case, as Vance pointed to, "Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley responded to the decision... by pledging to show 'the rest of the country [that] racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South' and by vowing to organize 'massive resistance' in the Southern States. Violence and racial animosity ensued."
As the senator's letter indicates, his authority is not just limited to strong words. "The United States Senate is prepared to use its full investigative powers to uncover circumvention, covert or otherwise, of the Supreme Court’s ruling. You are advised to retain admissions documents in anticipation of future congressional investigations, including digital communications between admissions officers, any demographic or other data compiled during future admissions cycles, and other relevant materials. As you are aware, a number of federal criminal statutes regulate the destruction of records connected to federal investigations, some of which apply prior to the formal commencement of any inquiry," he pointed out.
The letter concludes by asking several questions of the university presidents to indicate compliance, including:
What procedures will your institution implement to ensure that records are retained in accordance with this letter?
What instructions are you giving staff about their obligations to preserve records in anticipation of a potential investigation? Please inform me of the date and nature of such instructions?
Has your staff ever been advised not to preserve records or to communicate internally in ways that could circumvent future inquiries? If so, please discuss the date and nature of such advisements.
How will your institutions ensure that new admissions practices do not "simply establish ... the regime" that the Supreme Court has held unlawful?
What admissions practices previously employed by your institutions will now be forbidden?
If you have publicly committed to an interest in "diversity," how will you ensure that your commitment to that value does not entail direct or indirect race-based preferences?
Vance expects answers by July 21.
Fox News noted that they reached out to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Oberlin College and Kenyon College about the letter. While a spokesperson for Harvard pointed to a statement that said the university "will certainly comply with the Court’s decision," no other schools had responded.
A report from Cleveland.com, however, did include a statement from Oberlin spokesperson Andrea Simakis who indicated the school is reviewing the decision. "Oberlin will comply with the law," she said in part.
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7 July, 2023
New Book Details Teachers Union Internal Document Pushing Critical Race Theory in K-12 Schools
Aaron Withe’s “Freedom is the Foundation” explains why every American should be concerned about government unions using our tax dollars and union dues to push their radical ideology on the nation. This particular excerpt focuses on how teachers unions are an integral part of the Left’s agenda.
Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, which works to end the undue influence of government unions through aggressive outreach campaigns that help members leave their unions and litigation to hold unions accountable when they flagrantly disregard the law.
Teachers unions are writing the playbook of the hard Left. The Freedom Foundation obtained “Racial Justice in Education,” an internal document published in 2018 by the National Education Association. It illustrates, in shocking detail, the degree to which the nation’s largest teachers union embraces the tenets of critical race theory and shows how this neo-Marxist ideology serves as the fountainhead of the union’s support of a host of radical policies, from defunding the police to banning voter ID requirements.
This guidebook, which remained almost invisible outside union circles, was produced well before these noxious trends became widely known. But their discovery shows that the NEA was critical in laying the groundwork for the movements that nearly tore our country apart in 2020–21.
A mere two years after the NEA published “Racial Justice in Education,” the union’s evil plan came to fruition, as Portland and other cities starved law enforcement and CRT was shoved down children’s throats all over America.
A full reading of the eighty-page “Racial Justice in Education” leaves one stupefied. It also reveals that the NEA holds views on race that many, if not most, Americans and most teachers would find troubling or even repellent.
***
Like a tornado from Hell, the NEA’s preferred policies swept over America in 2020 and 2021. Woke mobs toppled statues of everyone from George Washington to abolitionists, police departments were defunded and police officers assaulted, businesses were destroyed and the streets ran red with blood, illegal immigration reached record levels, schoolchildren were taught to hate their country’s past and to judge each other on the basis of skin color. … It was the realization of the NEA’s dream.
Unfortunately, it was a nightmare for the rest of us.
Union officials are careful not to talk like this in public—but “Racial Justice in Education” reveals their real agenda.
At the height of the insanity, the NEA’s 2021 Representative Assembly adopted several New Business Items (NBIs) endorsing critical race theory. When it became apparent that these would cause serious blowback, the union scrubbed them from its website—but as our [the Freedom Foundation’s] Max Nelsen reported, the internet’s Wayback Machine has a way of keeping embarrassing items from disappearing down the memory hole. These included:
—NBI A committed the NEA to eradicating ‘institutional racism in our public school system’ by, among other things, ‘increasing the implementation of … critical race theory’ and opposing ‘racist laws, policies, and practices; the over-criminalization of communities, students, and families of Native people and people of color; as well as the criminalization of poverty.’
—NBI 2 directed the NEA to conduct opposition research on—in other words, dig up dirt and smear—’organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work,’ i.e., promoting critical race theory. If you’re critical of CRT, the NEA is going to hunt you down.
—NBI 39 directed the NEA to ‘fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric’ and to ‘oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.’
This was an NEA project, but the AFT [the American Federation of Teachers, another teachers union], under Randi Weingarten, has also put leftist social and cultural projects in the forefront. The Government Accountability Project notes, “Rather than focus on pension issues and protection against mistreatment, Randi Weingarten’s agenda has emphasized radical changes in education that do not serve students or teachers.”
As for serving parents … Hah! The teachers union big shots have come to regard parents as the enemy. They stand in the way of indoctrination. Those parents who aren’t on board with CRT or expanding the number of genders beyond male and female must be vanquished. Thus, the NEA’s EdJustice website encourages teachers to avail themselves of resources that urge them to establish “a private, virtual connection with an LGBTQ student that is not supported at home, so you can check in with them about their family dynamic and brainstorm self-care strategies.” This is an example of what the Government Accountability Project calls the effort by teachers unions to expand “the role of the school in the community and interrup[t] the traditional role of parents as the heads of the nuclear family.”
But parents, as we are seeing, aren’t going to stand for this displacement any longer.
Critical race theory tells us that the public education system, like all of America, was conceived in vile racism and remains inherently racist. You’d think this line of argument might cause the teachers unions some discomfort—after all, they’ve been effectively controlling the system for decades—but it doesn’t seem to have cost them any lost sleep. Their main concern isn’t raising the next generation of informed citizens; it’s indoctrinating the next generation of liberal voters.
***
Many, many teachers disapprove of CRT and all its associated nonsense. But unions like the NEA and the AFT have fully embraced racial Marxism and an ideology that denies individuality and objective truth and views America’s founding values and constitutional government as obstacles to be subverted and thrown into the trash heap.
If parents object, these unions first ignore them, then slander them, and then demand that they be silenced.
The recent election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Virginia shows the power of parents when they refuse to be silenced. Promising signs indicate that their example may be followed many times, in many places, and with equal or greater success.
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Ohioans Declare Independence From the District School Monopoly
Just in time for Independence Day, Ohio families can finally declare independence from the district school monopoly.
Over the weekend, Ohio lawmakers passed a state budget that expands eligibility for the state’s EdChoice Scholarships to all K-12 students. Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law on Monday, making Ohio the eighth state in the nation to pass a universal school choice policy and the sixth state to do so this year, following Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Utah.
Universal school choice is when education choice is offered to all students in a state, not just those who are low income or who have special needs.
Several other states also expanded their education choice policies already this year, including Alabama, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Starting this fall, children from Ohio families earning up to 450% of the federal poverty line ($135,000 for a family of four) will be eligible for full scholarships worth about $8,400 (up from about $6,150 last year). Children from families earning above that threshold will be eligible for partial scholarships that will be adjusted based on income.
The dramatic expansion of education choice policies throughout the country has been an underreported story. Just two years ago, West Virginia became the first state to enact a publicly funded education choice policy for all K-12 students, allowing students to take some share of the money that would have been spent on their public school education and apply it toward private schools, homeschooling, or other alternatives.
Arizona followed suit last year when it expanded its K-12 education savings accounts policy to all students.
With the six additional universal policies this year plus expansions of more modest programs in several other states, more than 1 in 5 (more than 10 million) K-12 students are now eligible for education choice nationwide.
If North Carolina also expands its education choice policy to all students (currently, only 40% of North Carolina students are eligible), as it is expected to do, then nearly 1 in 4 students across America will be eligible for school choice. And if Texas finally enacts an education choice policy in a special session later this year, it would bump that national number up to 35% of students, or nearly 18 million of America’s 52 million K-12 students.
Moreover, these figures do not even include students eligible for privately funded tax-credit scholarships or publicly funded scholarships for students with special needs. Including them could yield an eligibility rate north of 40%.
Back in May, an article in The Hill asked whether the school choice movement is “about to hit a wall.” The article’s author seemingly consulted a diverse group of policy wonks and advocates ranging from school choice skeptics to school choice opponents, and the “consensus” was that “school choice advocates are quickly running out of states welcoming to their policies.” Apparently, no actual school choice advocates were available to ask their thoughts on the matter.
Meanwhile, policymakers in multiple states were busy moving legislation that would dramatically expand school choice while GOP primary voters in Virginia were busy voting for candidates who support school choice to replace ones who had not.
To paraphrase Aragorn from “The Lord of the Rings”: A day may come when the school choice movement hits the proverbial wall. But it is not this day.
Parents are still hungry for schools that align with their values and best meet the needs of their children—including those who live in the dwindling number of states lacking a school choice policy.
Policymakers in those states might soon find that the school choice successes outside their borders have served to whet parents’ appetites and created a demand that they ultimately no longer will be able to ignore.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/05/ohioans-declare-independence-district-school-monopoly
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Australia: Old-school skills for new teachers as education ministers take control
Good if it happens
Ministers from every state and territory have signed off on 14 old-school reforms, championed by federal Education Minister Jason Clare, to ensure that new teachers are taught how to be “confident and capable’’ in classrooms.
Imposing a tight six-month deadline, ministers agreed to develop practical teaching guidelines and amend accreditation standards for university teaching degrees by the end of this year.
From 2025, pre-service teachers will be banned from graduating until they have mastered the core teaching skills mandated by education ministers.
A new watchdog for teaching standards will check that universities have provided practical training for all graduates to teach reading and mathematics, regardless of whether they plan to teach in primary or high school.
Mr Clare said the reforms would make new teachers “better prepared from day one’’.
“A lot of teachers tell me they did not feel like they were prepared for the classroom when they finished university,’’ he said after his state and federal counterparts endorsed the teaching reforms on Thursday.
“Their university course didn’t prepare them well enough to teach things like literacy and numeracy and manage classroom behaviour, and that prac (practical placements in schools) wasn’t up to scratch.
“If we get this right, more student teachers will complete their degrees and more teachers will stay in the profession.’’
All ministers endorsed every recommendation from their Teacher Education Expert Panel, chaired by University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who began his career as a teacher.
South Australia's Education Minister Blair Boyer says workload issues are “number one” for teachers in Australian…
One in three final-year teaching undergraduates surveyed for the Scott Report complained that their degree had been “too theoretical and focused on teaching philosophies’’.
Some 60 per cent of trainee primary school teachers said they had not been given many opportunities to practise the explicit teaching of phonics in classrooms – essential for children to learn to read and write.
Only half said their degree had given them opportunities to evaluate students’ progress, adjust instruction and provide targeted feedback.
One graduate called for “less information on learning philosophers and more information on practical activities/lessons to teach curriculum areas”.
“More hands-on experience would have been more beneficial than constantly writing essays,’’ another trainee teacher said.
“I would have liked more instruction on behaviour management and how to build my skill set when dealing with children with defiant or destructive behaviours,” they added.
Universities will be given until the end of 2025 to rewrite their 300 existing teaching courses to include the core content mandated by the ministers.
The reforms will also force universities to reveal publicly the proportion of graduates with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank above 80 – in the top 20 per cent of academic achievement.
Core content, to be compulsory for all teaching degrees, will include detailed explanations of how children learn; lesson planning; step-by-step “explicit instruction”; student assessment; and the provision of “specific, honest, constructive and clear’’ feedback to students and parents.
Phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension will be the basis of reading instruction. And all teachers must learn the six strands of mathematics – numbers, algebra, geometry, measurement, statistics, and probability.
Universities will have to teach graduates to identify “common neuromyths’’, which the Scott Report cites as the theories that there are multiple types of intelligence, and that children’s learning can be influenced by the left or right side of the brain.
Education degrees will teach how a student’s brain develops from early childhood through to adulthood, and the limits of working memory and “cognitive overload’’ for children.
Young teachers will learn the old-school skill of explicit instruction” by clearly explaining to children what they are expected to learn, chunked into small and manageable tasks.
Teachers will be taught to plan a sequence of lessons that include repetition and practice, so that children can retrieve their past learning and consolidate it into long-term memory.
Universities must ensure that teachers can provide worked examples for lessons, and wait until children are proficient before expecting them to solve problems on their own.
“Practices should include the use of structured lessons, clear and explicit instruction, effective questioning that encourages participation, reducing cognitive load and use of specific and positive feedback that acknowledges student effort,’’ the new standards state.
To be able to keep classes under control, teachers must be taught to “effectively model desired behaviour, such as respectful interactions, being organised, and being on time, to prompt positive behaviour by setting and reinforcing expectations”.
Acknowledging the increasing complexity of modern classrooms, all teaching degrees must include Aboriginal and Torres Strait history and culture, cultural diversity, and teaching methods tailored to children with common disabilities, such as autism.
The education ministers also agreed to establish an Initial Teacher Education Quality Assurance board that will report back to them every year on the quality and consistency of every teaching degree.
Each university will have to report publicly on the proportion students in teaching degrees from First Nations, remote area, migrant or low-income backgrounds – as well as course drop-out rates and employment outcomes for graduates.
State governments will be able to slap conditions on the accreditation of university courses that fail to comply with the guidelines – a move that could render graduates unemployable.
But universities will be able to apply for $5m in grants to get their teaching degrees up to scratch, with a $2.5m bonus for top-performing institutions to share their expertise.
The ministers agreed to provide more classroom training for undergraduates, to be mentored by experienced teachers who could count the time spent supervising towards their hours of professional development.
They also agreed to a national ban on mobile phones in class.
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6 July, 2023
The Decline (and Fall?) of College
“A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin in late March. That revelation was inspired by the results of a survey of over 1,000 adults by the highly respected research organization NORC (formerly National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with WSJ.
Worse yet for colleges, the proportion of Americans with unfavorable assessments of an undergraduate degree’s worth has been rising steadily and rather considerably over the past decade and probably longer. A decade ago, an already worrisome 40 percent thought colleges were “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” Now that proportion has risen to 56 percent.
At one time, public dissatisfaction with college was far stronger among Republicans, rural citizens, and males than among Democrats, urban dwellers, and females. But even here the data are discouraging for universities, with significant upticks in negative reactions from previously supportive groups. To colleges, the most frightening trend should be that younger (near college-age) adults have become markedly less fervent believers in the positive economic advantages of a college degree.
To be sure, the operational impact of this negative attitudinal change no doubt varies considerably across the higher-education landscape. I doubt the administration and faculty at Harvard or Stanford are worrying much, but employees at mid- or lower-reputation schools should be concerned, as should present and prospective students and those marketing the bonds with which universities finance capital improvements and other needs. On the latter point, in December, Fitch Ratings indicated it “anticipates a deteriorating credit environment for U.S. Public Finance Higher Education in 2023 relative to 2022.”
Edward Gibbon took a couple of decades and six volumes to depict the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, most of which occurred over 300 or so years in the Christian era. The modern history of American higher education suggests its own decline may be far shorter and, optimistically, could even be a transitory phenomenon. The erosion of American higher education might soon reverse itself and lead to ever greater growth and human accomplishment, not to mention prosperity for the advanced learning communities that dot the American landscape.
Yet, as a sometime teacher of the economic history of the ancient world, I see certain similarities between American higher ed and the fall of Rome. For example, the Roman Empire overextended militarily, while colleges have overextended educationally, reaching out to marginal students without the aptitude or the desire for higher learning.
The Roman Empire’s decline occurred in a fiscally precarious era, which featured an early version of deficit financing (debasing its currency, the denarius) not too dissimilar to America’s massive debt issuances to finance today’s bread and circuses.
Gibbon believed that the rise of a new theology, Christianity, was a disrupting influence that weakened Rome, just as the rise of wokeness in the universities is arguably destroying whole learning environments arising from the free but peacefully disputed expression of ideas.
It is not inevitable or even probable that American higher education will disappear like the Roman Empire. After all, America is a geographic entity not likely to vanish anytime soon, and organized higher learning has existed through war, peace, and famine for hundreds of years, maybe thousands if one reaches back to Socrates or his student Plato.
That’s enough history. What explains the deteriorating public perception of American higher education, and what are its consequences? Executive summary: The costs of higher education have risen, while the perceived benefits have declined as higher education has become a very risky investment.
Let me give a personal example. When I began teaching in 1965 at my very typical state institution, Ohio University, the in-state tuition fee was $450 a year, or $4,298 in February 2023 dollars (using the Consumer Price Index-U). The tuition today is $13,352, a more than tripling after adjusting for inflation.
For elite private schools, the numbers are even worse. The undergraduate tuition the year I entered Northwestern University in 1958 was $795, or $8,276 in current dollars. The current listed fee is $62,391, nearly eight times as much (and that excludes some additional mandatory fees to finance student government, attendance at athletic events, and “student health”).
While it is at least plausible that the quality of the educational product has grown enormously over time, my sense is that this has, in fact, not happened. Indeed, maybe just the opposite has occurred given the watering down of the curriculum and the prevalence of grade inflation.
To be sure, tuition discounting, known by most Americans as “scholarships,” has grown over time, as well. But, on balance, the real cost of attending college has soared for most Americans, growing even more than their incomes. While nearly everything else in life has become less burdensome to purchase in modern times because of rising incomes, higher education is an exception.
The American public is becoming increasingly aware that college is a risky investment. Roughly 36 percent of entering full-time students at baccalaureate colleges do not earn a degree within six years. Moreover, of those who do, about 40 percent of them become what the New York Federal Reserve Bank appropriately calls “underemployed” for a meaningful time after college, taking jobs traditionally filled by those with lesser educations.
With very rare exceptions, American colleges and universities are financially dependent on third parties—individuals other than their immediate customers and producers. For some schools, alumni donors are important, but nearly every school, including so-called “private” ones, directly or indirectly derives much of its income from the public (some of it indirectly through tuition fees obscenely inflated by federal financial assistance programs).
Not only does public skepticism about college lead directly to fewer college applications, but it indirectly leads politicians and philanthropists to be less supportive, contributing importantly to continuing woes for America’s colleges and universities.
The way forward, it seems to me, is for American colleges and universities to regain the confidence of the people that they have lost. That can be done only by focusing once again on educational excellence. This will require colleges to stop worrying about how to maximize revenue by enrolling students who have little interest in college-level work. It will also require universities to jettison their obsession with “diversity,” which has done much to turn them away from worthwhile curricula and the hiring of the best possible faculty.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14597&omhide=true&trk=title
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Private school sicced FBI on us when we protested critical race theory, moms claim
Two mothers whose kids were expelled from an exclusive private school after they campaigned against critical race theory have filed suit against the school and its headmaster – accusing them of calling in the FBI against them.
Andrea Gross and Amy Gonzalez allege in their suit, filed June 12, that Columbus Academy, just outside Columbus, Ohio, bullied them and took retaliatory action after they pushed back teaching critical race theory teaching and questioned how the school, a non-profit like most private schools, was handling its finances.
The moms told The Post they were just doing their due diligence and watching out for their kids but the school “overreacted” to the point where administrators called the police and alerted the FBI.
Gross, an attorney, and Gonzalez, who is a pharmacist, said the saga, which began during the pandemic in 2021 – started with what they saw as irregularities in how the $35,000-a-year school handled its money.
They have now set up their own private school, Columbus Classical Academy, with the first students starting late summer.
Gonzalez, who served on the Columbus Academy’s parent association, said she noticed that money that she believed had been earmarked to pay a bill had instead been “misdirected” to fund a pandemic-related account for black families at the school.
Gonzalez, whose daughter is Latina, said the money was not made available to any other minority students at the school.
“Everyone wants to make this about DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion),” Gross said. “It’s much more than that. What we don’t accept is kids being hurt and the predatory alienation of parents for asking questions. It’s a pattern – a way to shut down parents, malign them and throw the kids out like they are trash.”
At the same time the mothers accused the school, under its head Melissa Soderberg, of developing an extreme left-wing bias in recent years.
“One teacher stated, on the first day of class, that he would not communicate with any student who supported President Trump,” the complaint said.
“Politically charged issues were regularly taught and discussed in the classroom without opposing viewpoints presented.”
Among other things, the mothers’ suit said that activities involving racial pride were skewed away from Latinos. There was only one Latino costume available during a historical dress-up project: Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Gonzalez’s daughter, who is Latina, was told she had to dress as Coretta Scott King.
The mothers said it was devastating for both them and their kids to be on the receiving end of calls to law enforcement agencies and to be made pariahs at the school after they spoke out.
“Columbus called the faculty – 863 people – in and said they had alerted the FBI,” Gonzalez said. “The takeaway was that we were dangerous. The headmaster even hired personal security for protection against us.”
The school, which includes pre-K through 12th-grade students, effectively expelled – or “denied re-enrollment” – to two of Gross’ children and one of Gonzalez’s.
“The school said we violated the ‘politeness agreement’ of our parent contract,” Gross said.
“They said we were violent and dangerous and it worked,” Gross said. “It destroyed our relationships with the school and our friends.”
Gross said it was particularly painful for her family, as her husband is a graduate of the school and credits it with being a formative part of his life.
They accuse the school of an attempt to “destroy their reputations in the community” in the suit, in a state court in Ohio. They are accusing the school of harassment and of breaking Ohio sales law by claiming to cater to diverse students but offering nothing to those with conservative viewpoints.
They seek unspecified compensation for damages in response, calling the actions of the head and the president of the board a “conspiracy.”
“This is a pattern across the country with private schools,” Gross said. “The boards of (non-profits) have responsibilities and they should be responsible for kids. Their finances are at the root. There is a pattern with the way they operate with their finances. It’s shockingly similar.”
Columbus Academy and its headmaster, Melissa Soderberg, did not respond to calls from The Post, but issued a statement through Werth PR, a crisis communications firm.
It said Gross and Gonzalez were motivated to sue by launching their own school, and called their case “lies,” saying that parts had been filed and withdrawn last year.
“These two individuals launched a national media attack against Columbus Academy two years ago,” the statement said.
“Columbus Academy will withstand this assault as we did the last one, and continue to stand for independence and excellence in the education of young scholars.”
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Charter Schools Are Outperforming Public Schools, New Study Shows
Townhall covered how California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told teachers unions in his 2018 gubernatorial campaign that “vouchers and for-profit charter schools have no place in this state.” Despite being adamantly opposed to charter schools, and school choice altogether, Newsom sent his children to a private school that reopened after lockdowns sooner than most public schools in the state.
A study released by the nonpartisan Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that students at charter schools are outperforming students in public schools in standardized tests on math and reading.
According to Fox News, the center has compared standardized state test scores from the two types of schools since 2009. The first four studies showed that public schools outperformed the charter schools. Four years later, the schools were tied. Now, charter schools are outperforming public schools.
"Students who are enrolled in charter schools get more learning in a year's time in both reading and mathematics than they would have gotten had they gone to their local district schools," Dr. Macke Raymond, an author of the report, told the outlet. "To have so many thousands of schools each getting a little bit better to create this trend line was really quite a revelation."
Reportedly, the test scores suggest that charter schools outperform public school students by 16 added days of learning in reading and 6 added days of learning in math.
"That is a huge move that translates to more than two extra weeks of school," Raymond explained. "Imagine having your child go to school two extra weeks every year, year in, year out. That accumulates."
In the study, network charter schools did better, with their students gaining 27 extra days of reading and 23 in math.
“Gains are especially strong for low income, black and Hispanic students who 'advance more than their TPS(traditional public school) peers by large margins,’” Fox noted, adding that more than 1,000 schools have eliminated learning disparities and moved past their state’s average performance. And, charter schools enroll more students of color than their neighboring public schools.
Last year, a federal report showed that students suffered irreparable learning loss in the past two years due to pandemic lockdowns that kept children out of school. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores among 9-year-olds fell across all race and income levels in the past two years, though they were significantly worse among low-ranking students. Those in the 90th percentile showed a 3 percent drop in math scores, while students in the 10th percentile fell 12 points, which Leah covered. Average 9-year-old scores declined the most on record for math (seven points) and in reading since 1990 (five points).
This year’s report shows that 13-year-olds’ math and reading scores are the lowest in decades, according to The New York Times.
“More than ever before, educators and policymakers need reliable examples of strong student learning that they can emulate to make up for past shortfalls," Raymond said in a press release. "The results of this study, along with the longer story of improvement by charter schools, provide critical insights that can accelerate student learning in more communities.”
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5 July, 2023
Activist lawyers demand Harvard ENDS 'legacy admissions' as they argue they unfairly favor white students
There is a certain logic to this but it overlooks the link between legacy admissions and donations to Harvard from the legatee's family. Legacy admissions are to a significant extent paid for -- often handsomely. And Leftist morality seldom harms their own pockets
Harvard has been hit with a complaint over its legacy admission policies - days after the Supreme Court ruled to outlaw affirmative action in US schools.
Filed Monday by attorney activist group Lawyers for Civil Rights, the complaint claims the university's long-held practice of favoring descendants of alumni also unfairly favors white applicants, and thus discriminates against students of color.
It also implores feds to 'declare that Harvard's ongoing use of Donor and Legacy Preferences is discriminatory', and demands Harvard 'immediately cease considering an applicant's relationship' to alumni - or risk losing its federal funding.
The complaint was brought after three separate Boston-area groups requested the US' Education Department review the practice, all on the basis it gives an unfair boost to the children of alumni - most of whom are white.
'Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?' asked Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights representing the three parties.
'Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.'
The three groups represented by Espinoza-Madrigal include the woman of color-geared Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network.
It is not yet clear whether the complaint has been heard been heard by the Education Department - which was recently mentioned by President Biden in a statement that slammed the SCOTUS decision.
Meanwhile, a Harvard spokesperson, when asked Monday night, said the school had no comment on the complaint and its comments, while reiterating a statement aired last week.
'As we said, in the weeks and months ahead, the university will determine how to preserve our essential values, consistent with the court's new precedent,' rep Nicole Rura said.
Selective schools like Harvard face increasing pressure to eliminate special preferences for the children of alumni and donors in the wake last week's ruling.
As progressives seek to somehow reverse the decision - which was reached by a 6-3 conservative majority - Harvard's and others' legacy practices have come under renewed scrutiny, after already garnering some negative attention before the pandemic.
At the time, a 2019 study enacted by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were either recruited athletes, legacy students, children of staff, or on the dean's interest list - applicants whose relatives have donated to the school.
The organization further found that the number drops dramatically when looking at black, Latino and Asian American students - as Americans from the latter demographic continue to celebrate the ruling.
According to the study, less than 16 percent of all applicants the year prior came from those categories.
The study also found that roughly 75 percent of white students admitted from those four categories, 'would have been rejected if they had been treated' the same as non-whit applicants.
The report raised questions about the role of wealth, race and access in college admissions at prestigious universities.
That debate came to a head on Thursday, when the Supreme Court said race-conscious policies adopted by Harvard to ensure that more non-white students are admitted are unconstitutional.
The decision served a major blow to efforts to attract diverse student bodies and is expected to prompt new challenges to admission policies.
According National Bureau of Economic Research, almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.
On Monday, Lawyers for Civil Rights - a Boston-based nonprofit that works with 'communities of color and immigrants to fight discrimination', according to its website - cited several of these statistics, writing that nearly 70 percent of Harvard applicants with family ties to donors or alumni are white.
It further claimed that some 28 percent of Harvard's class of 2019 were legacies, meaning that those with family ties to the 386-year-old institution were roughly six times more likely to be admitted than other applicants.
Such has been the case in the years since - meaning fewer admissions slots for non-legacy applicants.
This directly affects black applicants, the agency argued, using the date to prove that those of that class are far less likely to have family ties to the school.
The groups are demanding the Department of Education investigate Harvard's admission practices, before ordering the school to abandon legacy preferences.
In Monday's complaint, they added the recent Supreme Court ruling had made it even more imperative to eliminate policies that disadvantage non-white applicants.
Harvard's acceptance rate for its class of 2023 was just 4.5 percent.
Over the past few days, many - such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC commentator Joy Reid - have called the college's admission practices into question,
The Bronx and Queens rep on Saturday tweeted that if the Supreme Court 'was serious about their ludicrous 'colorblindness' claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged.'
Similarly, Reid - a graduate of Harvard herself - claimed Thursday hours after the SCOTUS ruling 'the only reason' she was admitted to Harvard was because of affirmative action.
Others from more conservative schools of thought, such as Republican Senator Tim Scott, also agreed, saying last week that 'one of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs where they have preferential treatment for legacy kids.'
Others have maintained that doing away with the practice - which dates back to the 1920s - 'would make Harvard far less white, wealthy, and privileged.'
The complaint adds to accelerating pressure on Harvard and other selective colleges, and argue Harvard is violating a federal law banning race discrimination for programs that receive federal funds, as virtually all U.S. colleges and universities do.
It is currently making its way through the proper channels.
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Success Academy smashes Regents AND lefty lies on standardized testing
Yet more hard data disproves the Democrats’ line that standardized tests are somehow racist: Success Academy, fresh off the heels of a massive study proving how handily it smashed regular public schools in terms of actually teaching kids, has put up insane numbers on New York’s state Regent exams.
All Success 8th-graders took multiple Regents, tests meant for 11th- and 12th-graders. These charter kids — mostly low-income black and Hispanic students, i.e. the children the left claims simply can’t be expected to do well on standardized tests — knocked them out of the park.
Some 99.8% passed the algebra Regents; 47% scored a 5, the highest mark. In English, 94.6% passed; in biology, 96%.
And younger kids kicked butt too, with Success 7th graders taking the global history and geography Regents and 90% passing.
To put this in context, the pass rate for city high schoolers on the algebra test was 57% in 2022, 65% on bio, 73% on English and 74% on global history.
Meanwhile, the “systemic racism” lie (and pressure from teacher unions to hide the failings of public schools) has led the progressive-controlled state Board of Regents to wage war on the exams, with a series of outright cancellations plus waterings-down of what constitutes a pass.
The board now has a grand commission of “experts” prepping a report to justify axing the Regents Exams entirely, while much of the Legislature plots endlessly to strangle the entire charter-school sector.
Quality education is easily the most important social tool for helping the disadvantaged rise. So how did opposing good public schools (which is what charters like Success are) and high standards of academic achievement wind up as core elements of the New York “progressive” agenda?
https://nypost.com/2023/07/02/success-academy-excels-on-standardized-tests-despite-democrats-claims/
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Ivy League University Reveals It Will Use A.I. Chatbot to Teach Course This Fall
At the dawn of the upcoming academic year, the venerable halls of Harvard University will bear witness to an unprecedented event: an A.I. chatbot will be co-teaching a prominent coding class.
While this may be regarded as a testament to Harvard’s pioneering spirit, it also raises profound questions about the future of education.
The university’s decision, outlined by Professor David Malan, who will be responsible for overseeing the A.I. powered teaching, represents a marked departure from traditional teaching methods.
This foray into the realm of artificial intelligence in education may be indicative of Harvard’s commitment to staying abreast of technological advancements. Yet it simultaneously ushers us into largely uncharted territory, a domain that, while seemingly ripe with promise, is also riddled with potential pitfalls.
A word of caution comes from Martin Rand, co-founder and CEO of PactumAI, who stressed the inherent limitations of such an approach.
“I would say the dangers are that we have to consider that these are statistical models. These will come up with most probable answers and high probability can also mean mediocrity,” Rand warned.
“So professors need to be there to provide exceptionalism, and I think Harvard has taken the right approach in providing this only to introductory courses,” he said.
Despite this, Rand conceded that there may be some potential benefits, such as stimulating further innovation and education. Nonetheless, the overarching tone is one of skepticism.
According to the university’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, Professor Malan has argued that the chatbot will offer diverse functions — from troubleshooting students’ coding errors to providing immediate feedback and answering their questions. This, according to Malan, aligns with the course’s tradition of continually introducing novel software into its syllabus.
However, the effectiveness of such tools remains to be seen. “Our own hope is that, through AI, we can eventually approximate a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50, as by providing them with software-based tools that, 24/7, can support their learning at a pace and in a style that works best for them individually,” Malan told The Crimson.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/ivy-league-university-reveals-will-use-chatbot-teach-course-fall
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4 July, 2023
Supreme Court’s Decision on Harvard Misses the Most Consequential Problem on Campus
The Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions is a triumph for fairness and the quintessentially American belief that the best man or woman should win. Yet, it is largely an empty victory, and it misses the most consequential issue concerning diversity on college campuses today — political diversity.
The basis for the Court’s decision is that Harvard and University of North Carolina, failed to provide a “measurable and concrete” justification for exempting their race-based admissions policies from the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In essence, the defendants lost the case because their policies are too subjective and vague.
Yet the flip side is that, for the same reason, the decision cannot be enforced. A decision that cannot be enforced is no decision at all. Harvard and many other colleges have done away with the only truly objective — “measurable and concrete” — metric traditionally used in college admissions, namely standardized test scores, primarily SAT and ACT scores.
So now college admissions has become an entirely subjective process. A purely subjective process is inherently unfair. Within a few hours of the court’s decision, Harvard announced its defiance, saying in Delphic words that the “principle” that Harvard follows “is as true and important today as it was yesterday.”
If Harvard thinks that its “principle” is diversity, then Harvard suffers from clinical self-unawareness. For it is anything but diverse. It is exceedingly liberal. The student newspaper, the Crimson, in its most recent annual survey found that “More Than 80 Percent of Surveyed Harvard Faculty Identify as Liberal.” Just 1.5 percent of the faculty identifies as “conservative.”
When I attended my Harvard College reunion a year ago, I heard that the Crimson had surveyed the graduating class, finding that just seven percent identified as conservative. So I asked the president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, whether this represented an issue worthy of his attention and whether the College should do something about it.
“I will tell you,” he responded, “what I told Senator Cruz when he accused us of being an indoctrination factory. I told him there were 14 graduates of Harvard in the U.S. Senate, eight of whom were Republicans.” Mr. Bacow, apparently believing that was dispositive and, in any event, being uninterested in engaging on the point, turned his back and walked away.
His data, though, were inadequate, even inaccurate. In a 2020 article, the Crimson reported that, of the 40 Harvard graduates elected in 2020 to the House of Representatives, just six were Republicans. Harvard ousted from a Kennedy School advisory board the most famous of its GOP graduates in the House, Elise Stefanik, chairwoman of the Republican conference.
No sooner did the Supreme Court conclude that Harvard had been violating the Constitution than the university’s president-elect, Claudine Gay, said in a video that it was a “hard day.” She added that “a thriving, diverse intellectual community … is borne out in Harvard classrooms” where our students can “put their ideas into conversation with other points of view.”
Would that her aspirational statement were true. How can it be when students and faculty are overwhelmingly of one political persuasion. If the Crimson surveys are accurate, class discussions pit one conservative against 14 predominantly liberal classmates under the tutelage of a liberal professor or instructor — one student against 14 classmates and a discussion leader.
Inevitably, Harvard’s political uniformity affects virtually everything, undermining intellectual honesty, and leaving the institution and its students and faculty — and, in my experience, its president — defending ideological purity and rather than engaging in genuinely open discussion.
My own hope is that Harvard becomes more racially diverse based upon a race-blind, merit-based admissions process. And re-adopts the SAT and ACT in acknowledgement that there should be a “measurable and concrete” way to assess the fairness of its admission process. And addresses its extreme political conformity. Harvard’s admissions process would be a good place to start.
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I Had to Watch ‘White Teachers Are a Problem’ Video. Now I’m Suing My Employer
I’m a white writing professor, and apparently, that’s a problem. That was the unmistakable message sent to me at Pennsylvania State University—and that’s why I’m suing the school.
In November 2020, nearly half a year after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, I was subjected to a video titled “White Teachers Are a Problem” for a monthly professional development meeting for writing faculty.
The video’s featured speaker, Asao Inoue, is a self-described practitioner of anti-racism. Not an obscure one, either: About a year prior, Inoue gave the Chair’s Address at a prestigious writing studies research conference—the same field in which I earned my Ph.D.—and declared, “White people can perpetuate white supremacy by being present. … Your body perpetuates racism.”
At the heart of Inoue’s appalling comments is the baseless attribution of negative characteristics to a particular race.
Inside radical academic bubbles, that might be applauded; in the real world, that’s called discrimination. And it’s illegal. When discrimination enters the workplace, depending on its frequency and intensity, citizens can file a lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment against their employer.
At my Abington campus, my direct supervisor pushed an aggressive “anti-racism” campaign through private emails and monthly meetings. She laid the groundwork by echoing a colleague’s stance that “reverse racism isn’t racism,” thereby abandoning cherished human rights principles.
“[R]acist structures are quite real in assessment and elsewhere regardless of [anybody’s] good intentions,” she claimed. “Racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.”
Later, citing a resolution on “Black Linguistic Justice!” from an increasingly politicized research organization, my supervisor issued two directives: “Assure that black students can find success in our classrooms” and “Assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”
Translation: The English language is racist, teaching writing is racist, and grading black students by consistent standards is racist.
Tough spot if you’re a white writing instructor and one of your black students doesn’t submit a big paper. Even tougher if you work at a “majority minority” campus: Out of 20 undergraduate campuses across the Penn State system, to its credit, Abington is the only with a majority of minority students.
But the toughest position goes to every black student in this environment—an educator seems to believe they’re incapable of achieving academic success on their own merit.
Misguided as my supervisor was, she wasn’t just one rogue professor in the bunch. Anti-racism fever ran rampant through the school’s institutional culture.
To commemorate Juneteenth 2020, Abington’s DEI director told us: “Stop being afraid of your own internalized white supremacy” and “Hold other white people accountable.”
That same week, amid faculty panic over a masked-up return to campus, one colleague invoked “history and white male privilege” to forecast, without discernible evidence: “One can already see a mile away that there will be some who resist wearing masks, etc. Such resistance is also more likely to be led by white males and in classrooms taught by women and people of color.”
In September 2021, I complied with my state-mandated duty to report bias in these (and other) incidents. The Penn State Affirmative Action Office summoned me into a Zoom meeting, where its associate director informed me, “There is a problem with the white race,” and then directed me to continue attending anti-racist workshops “until you get it.”
The next anti-racist workshop was titled “The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege in Their Classrooms.” During this meeting, my supervisor provided this quote: “Without attending to issues of inequity and particularly the role race [plays] in constructing social inequities, we remain unaware of and thereby unwittingly reproduce racist discourses and practices in our classrooms.”
As the target audience for this message, I sensed that I’d soon get accused of racism for holding my students to reasonable (and necessary) standards. I could feel my $53,000-a-year, nontenured, and nonunion job hanging in the balance. So I asked for examples of how I could bring equity into my classroom and what this actually looked like in practice.
Rather than help me to “get it,” the Affirmative Action Office deemed my questions to be evidence of bullying and harassment. Yet, my supervisor’s yearslong actions were “in line with the Campus Strategic Plan.” Human Resources asked me to sign a performance reprimand, then Penn State inserted those charges into my annual performance review.
Now I’m fighting back.
With a right-to-sue letter from the Justice Department, it’s time for Penn State to account for real racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. I’ve got the support of Allen Harris Law and a nonpartisan civil rights group called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
“Anti-racism” isn’t quite the right term to describe the performative activism that’s happening across academia and corporate America. Let’s call this hustle what it is: plain and simple racism.
And just like racism, the so-called anti-racist movement threatens everything in its path: freedom of speech, due process, healthy workplace relationships, professional excellence, academic rigor, and the psychological welfare of teachers and students alike.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/29/im-a-white-professor-heres-why-im-suing-penn-state/
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University of Boston Students Encouraged to Seek Therapy After SCOTUS Decisions
This week saw the student body of Boston University School of Law being offered emotional support services following the Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action, religious liberty, and student loan forgiveness.
Late Friday afternoon, the law school’s Student Government Association (SGA) distributed a statement critiquing the Supreme Court’s rulings in the cases of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, and Biden v. Nebraska.
These cases, dealing with contentious topics, led to decisive outcomes that reverberated through the corridors of Boston University.
Fox News Digital obtained a leaked email where the SGA unabashedly criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in the Students for Fair Admissions case. This particular ruling determined that race-based affirmative action in college admissions is, indeed, unconstitutional.
The SGA stated, “[The assenting judges] went so far as to say that the race-based admission system uses race as a negative and operates it as a stereotype. They may couch their opinion in legal jargon, but we all know what this opinion aims to do: advocate for a ‘colorblind’ admission process.”
As a counter to this, they quoted Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting view: “ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”
In an absurd step, the students were reminded that the university has resources in case the SCOTUS decisions were just too much for the seemingly woke student population.
“As a reminder, BU also offers a number of wellness resources that are willing and able to help students navigate these times,” the memo said.
While the law school isn’t specifically providing specialized counseling, they did recommend existing resources for those students who felt they needed them.
Two of the resources named were BU Behavioral Medicine and BU Student Wellbeing. BU Behavioral Medicine, according to its website, offers therapy, on-call service for mental health emergencies, and mental health diagnoses, among other services.
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3 July, 2023
Education Spending Is Up, Achievement Is Down
Once again, academic achievement scores for American children are down. And once again spending is up.
The newly released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for 13-year-olds for the 2022-2023 school year show a four-point decline in reading ability and a nine-point decrease in mathematics skills since the previous assessment in 2019-2020. Those numbers on “The Nation’s Report Card” are respectively seven and 14 points below the scores U.S. children achieved 10 years ago—decreases of about 2.7 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively.
From 2020 to 2022, reading scores for 9-year-olds suffered the largest decline since the 1990s, and those for math scores decreased for the first time ever. The deterioration began before the COVID-19 school shutdowns, it is important to note. “Average scores for 13-year-olds in both reading and mathematics were lower in 2020 compared to the last LTT assessments in 2012,” the NAEP reported at the time, using pre-pandemic data. “Compared to the previous LTT assessments in 2012, the 2020 reading scores for both 9 and 13-year-olds performing at the 10th percentile were lower. In mathematics, scores were lower in 2020 for 9-year-olds at the 10th and 25th percentiles and lower for 13-year-olds performing at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles compared to scores in 2012.”
The current numbers confirm all those losses are continuing, in a long-term downward trend.
The response from the education establishment has been all too predictable: blaming the declines on the pandemic and calling for more money, usually euphemized as “resources,” “investment,” and other alluring terms.
President Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, scored a perfect 100 on the excuse meter, saying, “The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is further evidence of what the Biden-Harris administration recognized from Day One: that the pandemic would have a devastating impact on students’ learning across the country and that it would take years of effort and investment to reverse the damage as well as address the 11-year decline that preceded it.”
Similarly, Cheryl Bost, president of the Maryland State Education Association, told WBAL-TV in Baltimore, “We need resources, we need staffing, we need support, but most of all, we need respect for public education,” in response to the state’s academic failures.
Baltimore’s schools don’t provide much with what they already have. “Project Baltimore found, in 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math. Not a single student,” Fox 45 News reported earlier this year. “In a new study released by WalletHub, Baltimore City ranks 146 out of 149 for lowest high school graduation rates among major US cities in 2023,” another Fox 45 News story noted.
The problem is not a lack of money. “[T]his academic year city schools spent about $21,000 per student, which is more than most schools in the country,” Fox 45 reports.
The notion that the solution to poor academic performance is more money has been a teachers union talking point for decades. It’s dead wrong.
The average spending per pupil nationwide increased from $10,608 in 2012 to $14,347 in 2021 in inflation-adjusted dollars, a 14.3 percent rise. What did we get for that larger “investment” of “resources”? A 2.7 percent decrease in reading performance and a 4.9 percent drop in math ability.
Contrary to popular belief, teachers are far from underpaid. “All in all, with various perks included, a teacher makes on average $68.85 an hour, whereas a private sector worker makes about $36 per hour,” education analyst Larry Sand notes.
If student performance were dependent on teacher compensation, we would be living in a nation of young Einsteins.
As the numbers show, our education system is broken. Spending more money only compounds the losses.
Given this poor record, enrollment in government-run K-12 schools has been declining since 2020, with parents moving their children to charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. Only 36 percent of parents across the nation say they want to send their children to government-run public schools, yet 83 percent of American children attend such schools.
Fortunately, states are giving families greater opportunities to opt out of the broken government-run education system. Currently, 13 states have education savings account programs that allow families to use their state-assigned money on a variety of education services, according to EdChoice. There are 24 states with tax-credit scholarships or ESAs, and 14 states and Washington, D.C., have school voucher programs that help parents send their children to private schools, EdChoice reports.
The high costs and low performance of government-run schools are inspiring reforms across the nation. Lawmakers who refuse to recognize the hunger for reform may learn an important lesson in next year’s elections.
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University of Cincinnati gender studies professor, 28, who gave student ZERO grade for using phrase 'biological women' is slapped with formal warning and ordered to undergo free speech training
I am sure it is very wicked of me but what I see here is a frumpy woman picking on an attractive one
The University of Cincinnati has formally rebuked a gender studies professor who complained about a student using the term 'biological woman', and ordered the professor take a course on free speech.
Melanie Nipper, a 28 year-old adjunct professor of sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, took issue with student Olivia Krolczyk's use of the term in an essay about trans women in sport.
Nipper told her 'the terms 'biological women' are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity. 'Please reassess your topic and edit it to focus on women's rights (not just 'females') and I'll regrade.'
Krolczyk posted a TikTok on May 7 complaining about the incident. The clip has since been viewed more than a million times, and has attracted national media coverage: Krolczyk now has 10,000 Twitter followers and is using her social media accounts to campaign against trans women in sport and take a stance on LGBTQ controversies.
On Thursday, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Nipper had been reprimanded by the university.
She has been ordered to complete training, and submit her syllabi for the coming school year to her department head.
The university document, obtained by the paper, states: 'Please note that this is to be considered a formal reprimand for your actions.
'A copy of this letter will be placed in your permanent records. It is also understood that any other violations of UC policy may be subject to further disciplinary actions up to and including termination.
'You are reminded that as an unrepresented, unclassified 'at will' employee your employment may be terminated with or without cause.'
The letter also demanded that 'you must complete training on the requirements of the Campus Free Speech Policy' and that she 'submit all syllabi' for review and approval 'at least two weeks prior to the beginning of classes.'
Nipper remained defiant, insisting that she was correct in her marking of Krolczyk's paper
Meanwhile, Krolczyk told The Post this week the grades related to this specific project were worth half of her total grade for the class,
She told them that 'my restriction on harmful speech' was 'necessary to ensure a safe learning environment in the course discussions and for the pedagogical purpose of teaching introductory WGSS theory.'
She said she teaches from a 'intersectional, 4th wave, and transnational feminist perspective,' and argued that the student's chosen topic for her project was 'inappropriate as it targeted trans women as a source of oppression for cis women in sports.'
Nipper added: 'I felt it was necessary to educate her regarding inclusive language to ensure a safe learning environment for other students in the course discussion boards.'
Nipper had previously defended her marking to The Cincinnati Enquirer.
She said her support of free speech ends when 'you are, intentionally or unintentionally, participating in a systemic harm of some kind,' - including statements she deems transphobic or racist.
She said her marking of Krolczyk's paper was fair. 'Not a zero for the course, a zero for an assignment,' she explained.
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Uni of Melbourne VC slams balaclava-wearing transgender activists over campus vandalism
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell has slammed “disgraceful” campus vandalism by balaclava-wearing pro-transgender activists – who were apparently targeting outspoken feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith – and has referred the matter to police.
In a hard-hitting statement sent to the university’s staff on Friday afternoon, Mr Maskell warned: “The type of criminal behaviour seen last night has the potential to incite further physical and psychological harassment, endangering people’s well-being and safety, and it needs to stop right now.’’
The Australian understands that around midnight on Thursday, two activists smashed windows and sprayed graffiti with words to the effect “Trans – we are not safe’’ across the university’s Sidney Myer Asia Centre Building in Swanston Street in inner Melbourne.
Mr Maskell said: “Two individuals were caught on CCTV purposefully damaging university property and putting up graffiti pertaining to transgender issues. This activity follows the distribution of material on our campuses and social media platforms recently that seeks to vilify individual members of our community. This type of behaviour is completely unacceptable and stands in direct opposition to the values we hold as a university.
“Let me be unequivocally clear – such intentional acts of damage, violence or vilification against others will not be tolerated. Resorting to violence and causing damage on our campuses is disgraceful.’’
The vandalism occurred as the university prepares to post security guards outside feminist philosophy lectures by gender critical feminist and University of Melbourne associate professor, Holly Lawford-Smith, which start next week. Security guards were requested by Ms Lawford-Smith – who believes that biological sex is more important than gender identity – after she and her students were subjected to what she calls an “authoritarian” and “gross” boycott by self-described transphobia activists.
These activists urged students to boycott Ms Lawford-Smith’s lectures, and they put up posters around campus declaring, “Only a fascist takes feminism”, “Are you on the side of fascists?’’ and “Our demands: Transphobes and Nazis off campus”.
The attempted boycott, by an anonymous group called Fight Transphobia UniMelb, followed Ms Lawford-Smith’s attendance at the recent Melbourne Let Women Speak rally that was gate-crashed by neo-Nazis. After that rally, she was twice investigated by Melbourne University, and cleared both times.
“I hate it,’’ the academic said of the campaign targeting her students. “It’s really inappropriate. It should never have gone beyond me … It’s really unfair on them. They shouldn’t have to be fearful about ideas at any university. It’s just so authoritarian and gross.’’ She said “this is the first time they (activists) have targeted other students’’ and revealed that in 2021, activists targeted tutors teaching her courses.
The philosopher, who was overseas when the vandalism occurred, earlier lodged a formal complaint with WorkSafe Victoria, alleging that Melbourne University has failed to uphold academic freedom and provide her with a safe work environment.
She said her intensive feminism course, which runs for three weeks, mostly deals with disagreements within second-wave feminism over issues such as prostitution, beauty and “sex abolitionism versus gender abolitionism’’. “There is one lecture called trans/gender and that’s on whether gender identity should replace sex for all purposes,’’ she said. She said she looks at the question of gender identity “from both sides” in the course, adding: “In general you don’t ever teach from your perspective.’’
One of Ms Lawford-Smith’s students, who did not want to be named, said posters labelling those who take the feminist philosophy class as “fascists” were “certainly defamatory; a sort of targeted reputational attrition, or smear campaign’’. This student was both relieved and dumbfounded at “the sheer absurdity of this escapade having come to a point of a class teaching feminism requiring security’’.
Another feminism student said: “(It) strikes me as rather ironic that the group which advocates for respectfully addressing others according to the ways they identify … is so aggressive in labelling others (who presumably don’t identify as fascists).” When this student spoke to The Australian earlier this month, he said: “There are posters everywhere slandering Holly Lawford-Smith and her students … I think it’s great that the university is upholding its free speech value and not caving in to activist pressure. But I don’t think it’s done enough to defuse the hostility she’s faced.’’
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2 July, 2023
Reaction to Supreme Court Student Debt Cancellation Ruling
The Supreme Court ruled today that the Administration’s student debt cancellation plan is illegal and will not be allowed to go forward.
The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
The President’s unilateral student debt cancellation plan was expensive, inflationary, poorly targeted, and would have done nothing to improve the affordability of higher education. With today’s Supreme Court decision, it’s time to put these costly cancellation schemes behind us.
Today’s decision resolves nearly a year of legal ambiguity for borrowers, but with only a couple of months remaining before the three-year payment pause comes to an end. The Administration and Department of Education should focus their efforts on helping borrowers resume payments in an orderly manner. Too much time has been wasted on empty promises, and not enough time has been spent on making sure borrowers are prepared to begin making payments again.
The Administration should also work with Congress on a set of reforms to truly contain higher education costs and improve quality and accountability. We hope today’s decision will dissuade this and future Presidents from attempting such costly unilateral actions without Congressional input.
It’s important to note that from an accounting perspective today’s ruling will reduce the 2023 deficit by about $400 billion, just as the announcement increased the 2022 deficit by that amount. This accounting convention may mask the recent rise in structural deficits but does not much change the grim realities of our fiscal trajectory.
It is time for Congress and the President to come together on plans to reduce deficits and improve higher education affordability at the same time. We need real reforms, not empty promises.
info@crfb.org
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CNN host abruptly ends segment when guest whips out the facts about affirmative action's impact on Asian students
CNN host Abby Phillip ended a segment with a fair admissions advocate on Thursday when he used facts to demonstrate the downside of affirmative action.
Kenny Xu — a board member for Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case — told Phillip that academic excellence, not race, "should be prioritized" in college admissions.
"I think that admissions should be only based on merit," he said. "Why are we asking a university to calculate somebody's level of diversity? I think that sets a very bad precedent for anybody trying to get into college. We should be treated on the basis of our merits. We should be treated on the basis of how hard we work, or study, our SAT scores, our grades."
But Phillip pushed back. She asked why admissions boards should not consider "other factors" that students "bring to the table" like socio-economic background.
Xu argued you cannot do that fairly because, inevitably, admissions standards are changed for applicants from a disadvantaged socio-economic background versus applicants from a privileged background.
"We don't want that. We want black students to succeed. We want every student to succeed, low-income students to succeed," he pointed out. "But you have to put them in scenarios, in places where they are likely to succeed. And lowering your standard to admit somebody of a socio-economic status or race would not help you do that. In fact, you would harm their graduation rate and excellence."
Phillip responded that standards aren't lowered — but Xu held his ground, despite Phillip's attempts to interrupt him.
"The standard is lowered, as admissions data shows. Asians have to score 273 points higher in the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black person," he argued. "So, the standard is lowered for black Americans."
Phillip then abruptly ended the segment. "Kenny Xu, thank you for your perspective. Really appreciate you joining us today," she said.
The phenomenon that Xu described is well documented.
Five years ago when the case went to trial, the Harvard Crimson reported on the Ivy League school's admission data. The paper showed that Asian students who applied to Harvard produced the highest average standardized test scores among applicant demographics, yet had the lowest admission rate. Black applicants, on the other hand, had the lowest average standardized test scores, but enjoyed the highest admission rate.
As CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained, what the Supreme Court objected to was not diversity per se, but admission boards giving "specific numerical bump [in admissions] based on race."
"What I think is really interesting is there is a recognition here ... that racial diversity is a virtue, it is a value. They're not saying it's a bad thing or it's meaningless," Honig explained of the Supreme Court's decision. "The question is: What are the constitutional means to get there?"
The answer to that question, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested, is to honor the "colorblind" Constitution.
In his concurring opinion in the case, Thomas acknowledged that American society is not "colorblind." But that reality should not prevent our laws from being race-neutral, he argued.
"Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism," Thomas wrote.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/cnn-phillip-debates-kenny-xu-affirmative-action ?
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Forbes offers sympathetic portrayal of man with $177K in student loan debt for an anthropology degree, and both get roasted online
Forbes tried to draw up a sympathetic portrayal of a student loan recipient who ended up owing more than $177K in order to receive an anthropology degree, and many on social media responded with scorn and mockery.
The article documented the plight of 39-year-old Michael Kilman, a father of four children, who obtained a master's degree from Portland State University in 2014 but who has had to supplement his income as an adjunct professor and digital media creator by driving for DoorDash.
Although he initially borrowed $88K for his education, the deferred payments and interest spiraled the amount into more than twice the original amount.
“It affects everything, it affects even the things I do with my children and the fact that I may never be able to own a house,” said Kilman to Forbes. “Everybody you talk to who has significant student loans says the same thing, that these loans are kind of like this big weight that we carry around our necks that prevent us from actually doing well.”
The article is intended to make Americans sympathetic to those who may benefit from a student loan forgiveness program touted by President Joe Biden and under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But critics on social media lambasted the attempt to bolster Biden's policy goals.
"Why is it even possible to get loans for a Master's degree in Anthropology from Portland State University? Honestly, the universities should be on the hook for this to some extent. They know those degrees are not a ticket to a high paying job," replied Christina Pushaw of the DeSantis campaign.
"He should ask the university, the institution that said their education was worth the investment, to bail him out," read another response.
"His poor decision making is not my or my family's responsibility," said another critic.
"Don’t pick a major where your career maxes out on a salary that is less than your education costs," read one popular response. "Or man up and deal with the consequences of your choice, by either switching careers, working three jobs, and/or living below your means."
The student loan debt moratorium is scheduled to end in September and payments will resume in October, unless Congress acts to put it into law
https://www.theblaze.com/news/forbes-student-debt-article-roasted
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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