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EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE
Quis magistros ipsos docebit? . |
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31 October, 2023
Vigilance Is Not Optional: Be Wary of Your Local Public Schools
Parents once looked forward to having their children reach the age of five. At that time, children enter kindergarten, usually a half-day session either in the morning or in the afternoon.
At age six, children enter the first grade with school hours, something on the order of 8:00 a.m. to 2:15 or 2:30 p.m. Parents did their business while ensuring that the children were dropped off and picked up at appointed times.
There was little or no concern about what transpired during the school day as long as nothing happened out of the ordinary. Every now and then, somebody skinned a knee during recess. Or someone got ill during the day and had to go home. Most days, however, were uneventful. Your little ones were learning the ABCs, simple arithmetic, American history, and a few things about society in general.
Vigilance is Mandatory
Today, obviously, everything portrayed above represents a bygone era. Depending on your school jurisdiction, county, and state, you have to be vigilant about your child's education. Dropping your child off for kindergarten can be a potentially hazardous event. The indoctrination that takes place, even in subtle ways, has an accumulative effect.
In first grade, second grade, and so on, there's no telling what the orientation of the teacher happens to be. Are they present to help children grow, think, and be curious about the world? Or are they in place to indoctrinate? Many in the teaching ranks today feel justified in what they do and that it is their mission.
A parent sending his or her child to public school doesn't equate to that parent losing their fundamental right to know what the child is being taught and to have a say in the curriculum. Indeed, throughout American history, parents have maintained some semblance of control via PTA's, attendance at school board meetings, and direct parent-teacher conferences.
Courts and legislative bodies have recognized the rights of parents to maintain control over their children's education and to have a vital input as to what takes place on a daily basis. Even in the face of that, progressive activists have targeted schools, starting with elementary schools, as incubation labs where social change will occur as a result of indoctrinating young minds.
The Key to Our Future
Activists and parents alike know that our country’s children represent our national future. The values children adopt at an early age directly impact how our culture evolves and what kind of society we will pass on to succeeding generations.
Protecting our children from the curriculum designed to brainwash them in largely Socialist ways has become an everyday battle across the country. Those on the Left have no qualms about seeking to replace your influence and your rights as a parent with their viewpoints and what they regard as their collective, sacrosanct mission.
It's not enough to simply fight against these zealots; they must be defeated. There can be no compromise with those who will pull out all the stops to turn your sweet little child into one of their Marxist Socialist soldiers.
Combat Readiness
How do you prepare for such a battle? Long before your student is ready for kindergarten, visit the classroom. What do the charts, posters, and graphics on the wall tell you? Attend PTA meetings. Search for websites, podcasts, forums, zines, and any other online sources of information maintained by or for parents who recognize the importance of staying vigilant.
Determine in advance if your school district, board of education, school administrators, and principal represent a system and an administration that you can trust. If you have any doubts, then perhaps it's time to take significant action. Consider homeschooling. If you have the means, consider private school. If you can relocate to a more palatable school jurisdiction, that could be your best alternative.
Affiliate with other parents who see the same dangers that you do. Become vocal at school board meetings. Generate momentum by having three or four parents in a row speak up who are aghast at the Leftist techniques in vogue. This is a battle that you must win, that we all must win, and from which we cannot shirk. Most parents feel the same as you do. That, in itself, is comforting.
As Certain as Death and Taxes
Give your child a decent chance to grow up healthy and happy because this is for sure: The Left zealots will not quit; it is their objective to brainwash every child in America forevermore, and they regard you as the enemy.
To let down your guard is to imperil the child's future.
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Columbia University Postpones Fundraiser After Staff, Students Take Pro-Hamas Stance
Columbia University has canceled a major fundraising event after some of its staff and students engaged in anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activities on campus.
Columbia Giving Day is a 24-hour online fundraising event held annually that was scheduled to take place on Oct. 25 this year.
“After careful consideration and consultation with University and alumni leadership, we decided that this is not the appropriate time to move forward with Columbia Giving Day,” Columbia spokesperson Samantha Slater said in a statement, according to CNN. “It is postponed for the time being, and a decision on rescheduling will be made in the near future.”
According to a notice by Barnard College at Columbia University, a rescheduled date “during this calendar year is not anticipated.” Last year’s Columbia Giving Day raised close to $30 million.
Columbia’s decision to cancel the fundraising comes after it and other universities such as Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) faced severe backlash from powerful donors for allowing anti-Israel, pro-Hamas statements and demonstrations by students and some faculty.
On Oct. 8, the first day after Hamas attacked Israel, Joseph Massad, a tenured professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University, published an article at the pro-Palestine blog The Electronic Intifida, hailing the “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” against the “cruel colonizers.” He called the storming of Israeli checkpoints by “resistance fighters”' from Palestine “astounding”
On Oct. 13, a petition at Change.org called for Mr. Massad's “immediate removal” from Columbia’s faculty.
“Massad’s decision to praise the abhorrent attack encourages violence and misinformation in and outside of campus, particularly putting many Jewish and Israeli students on campus at risk,” it said.
“Moreover, many students have expressed that they feel unsafe in the presence of a professor who supports the horrific murders of civilians," it said. The petition has so far gathered over 59,000 signatures.
Earlier this month, university officials shut down the campus to the public after an Israeli student was attacked while hanging up posters of Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas.
University President Under Criticism
In an Oct. 18 statement, Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, urged staff and students to “avoid language that vilifies, threatens, or stereotypes entire groups of people,” warning that such speech “will not be tolerated.”
In a recent speech, Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School, sharply criticized Ms. Shafik for not controlling pro-terror groups on the campus.
“President Minouche Shafik of Columbia University, you are a coward,” he said. “We are waiting for you to eradicate all pro-terror student organizations from campus.”
“Last week we had thousands of students chanting pro-terror songs that are sung right now in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, in Afghanistan. … They were celebrating the rape of teenage girls in a music festival in the name of resistance. They were celebrating this. And the president of the university is allowing the pro-terror student organizations to march on our campuses.”
“If my amazing 2-year-old daughter was now 18 years old, I would never, never send her to Colombia. Not because it's not a great institution—it's an amazing institution—but because I know that she will not be protected there because the president of the university allows pro-terrorists to march on campus.”
At Harvard, multiple student organizations co-signed a letter insisting that the Israeli government is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence," including Hamas massacring over 1,400 Israelis. This led to backlash from alumni members and donors.
The Wexner Foundation, a nonprofit founded by billionaire Les Wexner and his wife, Abigail, broke ties with the university. A building at the Harvard Kennedy School is named after Mr. Wexner, who donated funds to construct it.
In September, UPenn allowed a literary event to be held on campus that its leaders admitted would feature “several speakers who have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.”
UPenn defended its hosting of the event, stating that “as a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
After the Hamas attack earlier this month, the event came under spotlight and many donors were furious that the university allowed the program to take place.
In an Oct. 15 open letter to UPenn President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok, venture capitalist David Magerman announced that he refuses “to donate another dollar to Penn” and that he is “deeply ashamed” about his association with the university.
Other UPenn donors such as private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, hedge fund billionaire Cliff Asness, and former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman have also vowed to stop donating to the university.
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‘Pure hate’: Jewish academics quit Australia's National Tertiary Education Union
A growing number of Jewish academics are quitting Australia’s major tertiary education union in protest at the union’s anti-Israel stance, while dozens of others have demanded the union withdraw what they describe as anti-Semitic statements.
In a resignation letter to the National Tertiary Education Union, one member wrote: ‘This decision by the union is unacceptable and shameful. It is a pure hate against Israelis and Jews. I am immediately withdrawing my membership from this anti-Semitic union.”
In a separate letter to the union sent on Tuesday, 18 Jewish academics from all of Australia’s major universities told the NTEU that it will “lose any moral authority” to speak on human rights if it does not address the crimes of Hamas.
The signatories, one of whom was lawyer and Canberra University professor Kim Rubenstein, pointed out that some individuals they had contacted to sign the letter explained they had already resigned their longstanding memberships of the NTEU “due to feeling disenfranchised by the NTEU’s position over the years on Israel and Palestine”.
Professor Rubenstein told The Australian she had not yet resigned from the union because it did valuable work in its core function, “but that’s an option for me going forward if I feel this is something that’s not resolvable”.
Last week, Sydney University academic Fiona Gill, a senior lecturer in social sciences, quit as branch secretary of the union because of its “refusal to publicly condemn war crimes”, understood to be a reference to the Hamas attack of 7 October.
“The seeping of external political factionalism and arguments into the branch has resulted in an increasingly dysfunctional, divided and conflictual environment which is detrimental to the achievement of the base goals of our union,” Dr Gill wrote in her resignation letter.
Dr Gill’s resignation came as the union’s Sydney University branch president Nick Riemer promoted anti-Israel material on X and condemned “our gutless political ‘leaders’ cowering behind Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’”.
Dr Riemer, a linguistics academic, is a leading member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to isolate Israel who has been active in recent pro-Palestinian protests in Sydney.
The signatories to Tuesday’s letter expressed dismay that the union leadership was advocating members attend protests that were “likely to agree with only one group of members’ perceptions and views (especially with chants of ‘free Palestine from the river to the sea’ – ie, the destruction of Israel”.
They asked that any further statements by the union should unequivocally condemn the massacre of civilians within Israel by Hamas. The signatories expressed their desire to meet NTEU national president Alison Barnes and ACT secretary Lachlan Clohesy via Zoom to discuss the issue, but Mr Clohesy wrote back saying Dr Barnes was at an overseas conference “and will not be available until 9 November 2023 – at that point, I will be able to discuss your letter with Alison”. Mr Clohesy did not respond to questions from The Australian about why Dr Barnes was unavailable for two weeks to discuss the issue.
A spokesman for the NTEU referred The Australian to the union’s official statement but declined to answer questions, including how many members had resigned over the union’s stance.
The Australian understands that at least four members of the Victoria University branch of the NTEU alone resigned from the union after it passed a motion expressing “unwavering solidarity with Palestine and … an immediate end to occupation and apartheid”. The same motion was passed by the RMIT and La Trobe NTEU branches. The union had also urged members to attend a Rally for Palestine event.
One Jewish academic wrote to the union submitting his resignation, saying: “A targeted murder of over 1000 civilians, the beheading of babies, the killing of babies, children, women, men and older people is terrorism, it is not fighting for freedom.”
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30 October, 2023
York University, Student Groups Face $15 Million Class Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Antisemitism Going Back Decades
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Toronto’s York University and the York Federation of Students, claiming Jewish students faced decades of antisemitism and some felt forced to hide their heritage while no action was taken to ensure their safety.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of current students, alumni, and attendees from 1998–2021, says a news release from the law firm Diamond and Diamond, which filed the statement of claim.
According to the release, the plaintiffs said they felt unsafe on campus, silenced, harassed, threatened with physical violence, and even forced to hide their Jewish identity.
The lawsuit says the university and the union failed to address antisemitic incidents, violating its own non-discrimination policies. It also says that staff were provided “insufficient” training on handling harassment.
“Our position is that York University and the Student Union has fostered an environment of hate and anti-Semitism specifically against Jewish students,” managing partner of the firm Sandra Zisckind said in a social media video.
“Our position is that the university and the union knew about all of these actions and it failed to take action. This is not a new thing. Their failure to have taken action in the past and to currently take action has fostered an environment where students do not feel safe to learn in their own institution,” Ms. Zisckind said.
The release also said the university was "legally obligated to demonstrate accountability."
York University told The Epoch Times that the university was aware of the lawsuit.
“The University would like to affirm that we unequivocally condemn all forms of discrimination and hate, including antisemitism and Islamophobia,” the university's emailed statement said.
“York is committed to providing inclusive campus environments where community members feel safe and welcomed without fear of intimidation or harassment.”
The lawsuit says the school has failed to remove an anti-Israel mural on the campus at the entrance to the student centre. The mural, titled "Palestinian Roots," shows a bulldozer and a tree along with a figure holding rocks and wearing a scarf. The scarf the figure is wearing has a Palestinian flag and a map showing the area of Israel and Palestine without borders.
“Historically and symbolically, rocks have been used to perpetuate violence against Israelis,” the court documents say.
The lawsuit also notes an incident in 2009 where Jewish students were forced to hide in the Hillel student organization office because of a protest. It began with a meeting about a teachers’ assistant strike.
“In the hallway of the student center where the meeting was held, students attempting to exit the meeting room were greeted with screams of 'Zionism equals racism' and 'Racists off campus,'” the court documents said.
“During the clash in the hallway, Jewish students were singled out and pursued by a mob of more than 100 students. Approximately 15 to 20 Jewish students escaped upstairs to Hillel's offices, where the situation worsened.”
Protesters made their way to the Hillel office and banged on the glass doors, the documents said. It adds that campus security arrived shortly after and told the Jewish students to stay inside the office, and that about an hour later police arrived and gave the students an escort out of the area.
The court documents also say students were forced out of student organizations, were not given a safe space to voice their opinions, were unable to “meaningfully participate” in university cultural events, and had their opinions minimized or dismissed in classroom settings.
"Any behaviour that promotes hate, violence, discrimination, or disrupts the educational environment, as outlined in the 'Code of Students Rights and Responsibilities,' indicates a failure in the University's duty of care and contradicts its foundational values of respect, equity, and civility," said Darryl Singer, head of class actions at Diamond and Diamond Lawyers.
York Groups Unite Over Israel–Hamas War
The lawsuit comes after several York University student unions issued a joint statement following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel to express their "solidarity with the Palestinian people, within Palestine and the global diaspora, and their ongoing fight against settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.
"Recently, in a strong act of resistance, the Palestinian people tore down and crossed the illegitimate border fence erected by the settler-colonial apartheid state of so-called Israel," said the statement, signed by the York Federation of Students, York University Graduate Students Association, and Glendon College Student Union.
The University said it condemned the statement and called on the groups to “clarify” their position and “reaffirm their commitment to non-violence and the safety of all of their members.”
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Here's Why One School District Cancelled Its Halloween Activities
A school district in New Jersey reportedly banned all Halloween activities this year over “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” known as “DEI,” according to a report from the New York Post.
Earlier this month, Dr. Ronald G. Taylor, the superintendent of the South Orange-Maplewood School District, sent a letter to parents informing them that Halloween would not be celebrated in schools this year. This decision was made to be “inclusive” to students who do not celebrate the holiday or cannot afford costumes.
"As you know, SOMSD is committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion meaningfully - not just saying the words but also promoting an inclusive school... Our aim is to build a consistent approach across the District as to how our schools observe and celebrate holidays and special events," Taylor wrote to parents.
"Each year, questions arise from families, students, and staff about what SOMSD schools will be doing regarding Halloween,” Taylor continued. "Is promoting school-sponsored Halloween activities creating indirect and unintentional financial hardships for students and families? Do school-sponsored Halloween activities violate the dignity of some of our students and families, either culturally or religiously? Does the promotion of school-sponsored Halloween activities create tensions with the equity and access values of SOMSD?"
He concluded that the decision to ban Halloween “[aligns] with SOMSD’s commitment to to building equity.”
This week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) responded to the news. “Seriously? We can’t let kids celebrate Halloween? Give me a break,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Taylor wrote in a follow-up news release that the decision was made after school principles were surveyed and said they felt “overwhelmingly in favor of discontinuing Halloween celebrations in school.”
The school district’s assistant superintendent of “access and equity” doubled down on the decision.
“All of us realize that this breaks with what the district has usually done, and that can be a difficult thing to do sometimes,” Dr. Kevin Gilbert said in a statement. “Often, working to instill greater equity in our district begins with recognizing that we cannot do what we have always done.”
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Outspoken Federal Judge Who Led Yale Boycott Calls Universities ‘Incubators of Bigotry’
An outspoken federal judge often viewed as a potential Supreme Court justice called the nation’s university campuses “incubators of bigotry” that discriminate against religious conservatives, during a speech on Oct. 25.
Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit was on former President Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential Supreme Court appointees; he could find his way onto that list again should President Trump return to office. One leftist critic said Judge Ho “wants to be the next Clarence Thomas,” a reference to the Supreme Court’s preeminent conservative justice.
The Taiwan-born judge’s latest comments came during a speech that was followed by a moderated conversation at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in the nation’s capital on Oct. 25. At the end of the discussion, he was presented with the foundation's Defender of the Constitution Award.
The current anti-intellectual environment on campus is “driving more and more of us to ask if our nation’s colleges and universities are institutions of higher education or incubators of bigotry,” he said.
“The state of higher education concerns me, and it’s not just because our nation’s law schools directly impact the work of the judiciary, and help constitute the future leadership of our country.
“It’s also because the same toxic discrimination that distorts discourse on college campuses also distorts discourse about the courts. It’s the same mindset that motivates the current campaign to undermine the third branch of government.”
Last year, Judge Ho and Judge Elizabeth Branch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, both of whom were appointed by President Trump, vowed not to hire judicial clerks from Yale Law because they say its campus is dominated by cancel culture.
Judge Ho was incensed by the treatment of Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) at a March 10, 2022, event at the law school.
ADF is disliked in left-wing activist circles because it has won several religious freedom cases, including 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. That's the famous case in which bakery owner Jack C. Phillips refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding because he had religious objections to same-sex marriage.
The same-sex couple brought charges under Colorado law, and the state civil rights commission issued a cease-and-desist order against the bakery. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled for the baker, finding that the state law violated his First Amendment freedoms of expression and religious exercise.
The controversial far-left Southern Poverty Law Center claims that the ADF is an “anti-LGBT hate group,” an accusation that ADF vigorously rejects.
At the Yale event, students physically threatened and shouted down Ms. Waggoner during a panel discussion about Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, in which the Supreme Court found that another college violated students’ right to religious free speech on campus. Ms. Waggoner was their lawyer.
In September 2022, Judge Ho said he wasn't engaging in cancel culture himself by boycotting Yale graduates.
“I don’t want to cancel Yale," he said, citing the protest action targeting Ms. Waggoner. "I want Yale to stop canceling people like me.”
He said that at Yale, “cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency,” according to the New York Post.
When Judges Apply Originalism
During the Heritage event, Judge Ho said that when judges apply originalism and it “happens to lead to results despised by the cultural elites who lead the national discourse ... originalists face a concerted campaign of condemnation.”
Popular among conservatives and those who support limited government, originalism calls for adhering to the Constitution’s meaning at the time it was written.
“Originalists are disparaged and destroyed,” he said.
Describing how originalists are characterized by their critics, he said: “We’re not merely wrong, as an intellectual matter. We’re not just disagreeing in good faith about the proper meaning of legal terms.
“We’re fundamentally bad people who are just too extreme for polite society, or mean-spirited, racist, sexist, homophobic, or just trolling, or auditioning or unethical, if not corrupt.”
These intimidation campaigns affect judges, he said
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29 October, 2023
Jewish students at Cooper Union, a private New York City college, were locked inside a library Wednesday as pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters beat their fists on the doors, screamed, and tried to gain entry.
New York police, however, told The Daily Signal that officers didn’t intervene because “no threats of physical violence were made.”
Videos shot by terrified students trapped in the library initially were shared first on social media Wednesday afternoon by Jake Novak, former media director at the Israeli Consulate in New York.
Novak reported that the New York Police Department was called “as soon as the protesters stormed the main Cooper Union building, but [officers] did nothing.”
New York City Council member Inna Vernikov, a Republican who was born in Ukraine, said Thursday morning that she had spoken by that time with four Jewish students, three of whom were barricaded in the library. No one was arrested in the incident on the Manhattan campus, Vernikov said.
The NYPD responded in writing Thursday morning to a request for comment from The Daily Signal, saying that “no threats of physical violence were made.” The statement from police said:
Community Affairs Officers were present while the demonstration took place inside. The school staff allowed the demonstration to take place. The students dispersed after the incident. No property damage was reported, no criminal reports were filed and no threats of physical violence were made. Additionally there were no injuries reported.
Novak said Cooper Union librarians “bolted the doors” to prevent pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters from entering the library, then told “identifiable” Jewish students to “hide in the attic if they wanted to.”
On social media, this decision drew sharp criticism and comparisons to Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis and other Holocaust situations during World War II.
Both Novak and Vernikov said an unidentified dean at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art had said he “could not stop” the pro-Hamas protest “because it was not slated to enter school property.”
The protesters, however, stormed campus buildings shortly after the protest began.
Vernikov said Cooper Union faculty members not only canceled class to accommodate a walkout for the protest, but “encouraged students to participate and even offered extra credit” for participating. She also noted that faculty members joined the protest.
The Daily Signal sought comment from Cooper Union, including information on which classes were canceled and which faculty members encouraged students to participate. College officials didn’t respond by publication time.
The Jewish students barricaded in the Cooper Union library were evacuated through tunnels Wednesday evening, while the university and police left the protesters alone, Vernikov and others said.
Campuses across America recently have been home to pro-Hamas rallies following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 surprise attacks in southern Israel that killed 1,400 civilians, including women and children, and took about 200 hostages. Israel declared war on Hamas and began air assaults on the Gaza Strip, which the neighboring Jewish state had allowed Hamas to govern despite past armed conflicts.
Vernikov reported Thursday morning that Jewish students at Cooper Union were staying home for fear of safety, and some are dropping classes. Three students who were barricaded in the library told her that they “will never walk in there feeling alright again,” Vernikov said.
This isn’t the first time Cooper Union has been wrapped in controversy over radical politics.
In September, Cooper Union hired a professor who only months earlier threatened to “chop” a New York Post reporter with a machete. Shellyne Rodriguez, a leftist professor who also was caught on video cursing at pro-life protesters and damaging the property of pro-life activists, was fired from her job as an adjunct professor of visual arts at Hunter College. She now teaches a sculpture course at Cooper Union.
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One School District’s ‘Woke’ Curriculum Focuses on Dismantling ‘Eurocentric Framework’ in Education
Earlier this month, Townhall covered how documents showed that a California school district spent tens of thousands of dollars to create a “woke” curriculum that would focus on systems of oppression, colonialism and student activism. The curriculum would then be trained to teachers and required for high school students in the foreseeable future.
Documents obtained by parental rights organization Parents Defending Education and shared with Townhall show that a California high school’s “ethnic studies” curriculum focuses on combating “eurocentric framework” in education. In addition, the curriculum focuses on “center[ing] indigeneity, Blackness, race, ethnicity and its intersections to other social categories such as gender and class.”
The Sequoia Union High School District’s curriculum is “an academic field with existing methodologies to question dominant narratives, systems, and their creation and reestablish new ones,” according to the documents obtained by PDE (via Parents Defending Education):
The curriculum framers also suggested that the course include “restorative justice circles” and “weekly socio-emotional check-ins” to combat concerns about students feeling unsafe or ostracized.
The curriculum approval form provides more details on the focuses of the class. The curriculum identifies that two of its core goals are to “Critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society; challenge imperialist/hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels.” The proposal also intends for students to learn “how race and gender are socially constructed, and how colonial powers leveraged these constructed categories to justify colonization and patriarchal systems.”
Lessons in the curriculum explore how “Privilege + Power = Racism” and “Dominant Narrative and Counternarrative: Heteronormativity and patriarchy.” The curriculum’s second unit includes lessons on the “4 I’s of Oppression (Ideological, Internalized, Interpersonal, and Institutionalized Oppression” and gives examples like “heterosexism,” “capitalism,” and “assimilation and acculturation.”
In addition, the curriculum promotes student activism by requiring students to propose an action plan to address a local issue in their community. They will present the project to an “authentic audience” of teachers, administrators, and members of the school board. Beginning in 2025, the curriculum will be required in the district.
“Under a course masquerading as ‘ethnic studies,’ this school district is using this material to indoctrinate the next generation of Americans. They are using taxpayer resources to push hatred and division. Considering students in California are still working to recover from two years of state-mandated school closures, it is embarrassing that this school is wasting precious class time on politically charged content instead of helping students regain academic fundamentals,” Michele Exner, senior advisor at PDE, told Townhall.
As Townhall covered, the Jefferson Union High School District in San Mateo County, California, proposed “Ethnic Studies” curriculum that would focus on stories, experiences, and knowledge of people of color, challenge and dismantle racism and intersectional systems of oppression, and cultivate communities that are committed to wellness, liberation, and solidarity.”
“It should come as no surprise that American students are rallying in support of terrorists when our public schools teach ethnic studies lessons like this one from Jefferson Union High School,” Alex Nester, investigative fellow at Parents Defending Education, told Townhall. “Just 13 percent of American students have a functional grasp on history. Schools like Jefferson Union that spend time teaching divisive race ideology instead of actual history are a huge part of the problem.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/10/23/parents-defending-education-n2630141
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Apollo CEO Marc Rowan hits back at UPenn leadership after antisemitism on campus
Rowan’s attacks on the school stem from what he believes is an atmosphere of antisemitism, including administrators’ failure to quickly condemn the recent deadly Hamas terrorist attacks.
Now so many potential and current donors are joining his effort that the $21 billion UPenn endowment could be deprived of as much as $1 billion in funding, these people say.
And Rowan won’t back down unless Liz Magill and Scott Bok, the UPenn president and the chair of the school’s Board of Trustees, respectively, are booted from their positions — a very real possibility given the surge in alumni support for his defund-antisemitism effort.
The details of this groundswell of support for Rowan’s plan have not been reported, and it is said to be unprecedented in the clubby world of fundraising for university endowments.
For years, top alumni fundraisers like Rowan have chosen to voice their criticism of school policy to college administrators in private; high-profile alumni have traditionally stayed out of divisive cultural debates that occur on our nation’s campuses.
That might be changing given the rampant antisemitism on college campuses that exploded in recent weeks, and school administrators like Bok and Magill failing to promptly condemn both the terrorist attacks as well as their students’ displays of support for the killing of innocents.
For Rowan and now thousands of UPenn grads and benefactors, the tipping point occurred in September when UPenn’s leadership ignored their warnings that pro-Palestinian student groups were featuring antisemitic speakers during a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival.”
The festival took place during the Jewish high holy days and featured speakers who called for “death to Israel.”
People who know Rowan say he was doubly horrified to learn UPenn student groups also supported the Hamas terrorists who on Oct. 7 killed and kidnapped innocent Israelis — beheading some infants at a kibbutz near the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
One of the worst atrocities in recent history occurred while school administrators remained initially silent.
That prompted an open letter demanding the resignations of Magill and Bok; Rowan accused the school’s leadership of fostering a climate of hate that condoned the violence and killing.
“I call on all UPenn alumni and supporters who believe we are heading in the wrong direction to close their checkbooks until President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok resign,” he wrote.
The open letter has grown to include some 7,000 current and potential donors and graduates, some of whom are on the school’s Board of Trustees, people close to Rowan tell me.
They include UPenn grads Ron Lauder of the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire.
Former UN Ambassador Jon Huntsman, whose family are long-time donors to the university, joined the donor boycott as well.
A decision to oust Bok and Magill will be up to the 60-member UPenn board, and it’s unclear if there is, at least for now, the stomach to do so.
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26 October, 2023
Woman, 25, sparks fierce debate after slamming college as a SCAM - revealing it left her $80,000 in debt and unable to find a job that pays more than her role as a SUSHI waitress
A woman, 25, has sparked a fierce debate after she branded college as a scam —revealing that it left her $80,000 in debt and struggling to land a job in her field that would only pay her enough to get by.
College grad Alison Johnson, from Huntsville, Alabama, took to TikTok last month to share her frustration over her long and strenuous hunt for work.
She explained that she had been applying to marketing jobs for 'weeks' with no avail, despite spending four years studying the topic and forking over tens of thousands of dollars to earn her degree.
Alison also pointed out that most entry-level positions offered such a small salary that she would make more at her current job as a waitress, which left her wondering if the time and money she spent on school was even worth it.
Her rant launched a massive argument between viewers, some of whom felt for Alison's predicament, and others who were not a fan of her point of view.
'I have a bone to pick with America,' she began in the clip, which was first shared to her TikTok account last month and got more than 539,000 views.
It was also reposted on X - formerly known as Twitter - this week by the account DramaAlert, where it went viral again.
'I'm headed to my serving job and I f***ing hate it. Meanwhile, I make more money serving [than I would at an entry-level marketing job],' Alison continued.
'I have my literal business marketing degree, which put me $80,000 in debt, and I make more serving sushi rolls.'
Alison explained that she would have to take an 'insane pay cut' if she did get an entry-level marketing job, and that all of the positions that offered a decent salary only wanted people with 'experience' in the field.
'The jobs that are $150,000-$200,000 a year, I'm not getting those,' she added. 'I'm a 25-year-old chick going against corporate America, people with so much experience.
'All I got is my degree. People say, "Get your degree," but then they don't talk about how you need experience [to get a job]. The degree was experience.'
'I have my literal business marketing degree, which put me $80,000 in debt, and I make more serving,' she said. 'The jobs that are $150,000-$200,000 a year, I'm not getting those'
Thousands of viewers took to the comment section to share their thoughts on the subject.
Many admitted that they too were in similar situations, while others reminded her that she has to 'start somewhere' and will 'work her way up.'
'The degree is not the experience. You have to start entry level,' one person replied. 'My first job at 22 was $75K a year. I did three marketing internships in college and started doing contract work my senior year. Experience is experience,' someone else said.
Another user added, 'After you get your degree you work entry level and work your way up... Isn't that how it works?'
'At 25 my first corporate job paid me $30K and at 32 I make over six figures. Start SOMEWHERE. Start small. You will get there,' a different TikToker urged.
'This issue is people think you get out of college and instantly make the top dollar amount for your career,' a fifth comment read.
A sixth said: 'This is a good lesson. Get internships during college. It starts to give you the experience and connections needed to move through any career.'
'I was in the position for so long. At some point you just have to take the pay cut and it will eventually pay off! It sucks at first but so necessary,' someone else suggested.
'24 turning 25 soon. Stuck in the serving/bartender gig because it pays more,' one person revealed.
'Hey, I'm sorry you're in a tough spot right now, but thank you for sharing this. More people relate to you than you know. You are doing just fine,' a supporter wrote.
'Me as a new grad nurse and I just got my first paycheck and wanted to cry cause I make more at the bar,' another user replied.
'Same. I would take at least a $500 pay cut A WEEK if I used my masters degree. I feel you,' a different viewer commented.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12655083/Woman-sparks-debate-brands-college-scam.html
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Cornell professor who called Hamas attacks on Israel 'exhilarating' and 'energizing' takes a leave of absence after admitting the language he used was 'reprehensible'
A Cornell University professor who called the Hamas terror attacks 'exhilarating and energizing' has taken a leave of absence and will not return to class for the remainder of the year.
Russell Rickford told an October 15 rally at Ithaca Commons, the downtown shopping district in the upstate New York city, that he was thrilled by Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed.
His words were met by anger, and Rickford, a history professor, attempted to explain - and doubled down of his outrageous views.
He said he condemned the killing of any civilians, but said he was angered by 'the injustice and the hypocrisy of Western support in celebration of Israeli war crimes, and the equation of any form of Palestinian resistance with terrorism.'
Rickford later apologized, saying on October 18 that he was sorry 'for the horrible choice of words that I used', and calling his language 'reprehensible'.
On Tuesday it emerged Rickford had pulled out of teaching his history class for the rest of the semester.
The university confirmed he would not be teaching for the remainder of the semester.
'Professor Russell Rickford has requested and received approval to take a leave of absence from the university,' the university's spokesperson said.
Claudia Tenney, a Republican congresswoman whose district borders that of Cornell, said Rickford's leave of absence was insufficient, and he needed to resign.
But others have rallied to Rickford's support. Five members of the Cornell University chapter of the AAUP - American Association of University Professors - wrote a letter to The Cornell Daily Sun defending him.
'Professor Rickford's extramural speech at the Oct. 15 rally falls squarely within the protections of academic freedom to comment on political matters,' they wrote.
'That his speech offended or shocked does not lessen its protection, as academic freedom is most needed for speech that others find offensive.'
They pointed out that Rickford's words were spoken off campus, and he apologized.
On October 18, Rickford sent a letter to The Cornell Daily Sun and said he was deeply sorry for his words.
Rickford concluded that he 'unequivocally oppose and denounce racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, militarism, fundamentalism and all systems that dehumanize, divide and oppress people.'
University president Martha Pollack, asked about his comments the next day, said she was 'sickened by statements glorifying the evilness of Hamas terrorism.'
She added: 'Any members of our community who have made such statements do not speak for Cornell; in fact, they speak in direct opposition to all we stand for at Cornell.
'There is no justification for or moral equivalent to these violent and abhorrent acts.'
The following day, October 17, a second statement was sent out, condemning Rickford by name.
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Abbott Enlists Parents to Get School Choice for Every Texas Student ‘Across the Finish Line’
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Tuesday called for parents to contact their state representatives and encourage them to get school choice “across the finish line.”
The Republican governor posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Texas has an obligation to deliver the best possible education for each child. School choice will help achieve that.”
He then asked that parents visit TXParentsMatter.com as a means of contacting lawmakers.
Abbott called for a special session on Oct. 5 to provide education savings accounts, or ESAs, for “all Texas schoolchildren.”
“Now is the time to expand ESAs to every child in the state. That will give all parents the ability to choose the best education option for their child,” he said.
Texas’ governor isn’t the first to call for a major overhaul to the state’s school choice legislation.
A Heritage Foundation report, released in September, identified Texas as ranking No. 35 among the states for school choice, trailing behind more liberal states like California, Illinois, and Vermont. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Texas could improve its ranking by establishing K-12 education savings accounts, making it easier for more charter schools to open and operate, and giving families more choices among traditional public schools,” noted the Heritage Foundation report.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called school choice “the civil rights issue of the 21st century,” pointing out the massive disparity of opportunity between students from lower-income homes versus families that are able to afford more expensive and academically rigorous private options.
Republicans from rural parts of Texas blocked school choice reform in the spring, and not for the first time. In 2017, several of these rural state legislators joined with urban Democrats to vote down a voucher bill that had already passed Texas’ Senate.
One of the representatives, Suleman Lalani, D-Fort Bend County, called vouchers and school choice options a “scam that threatens everything we love about public schools.”
According to Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, Lalani sent his children to a private school.
Rep. Ellen Troxclair, R-Blanco, who represents several rural areas, told The Daily Signal that school choice wouldn’t harm good public schools, but would allow parents to choose the best education option for their children:
The bridge being built in the Texas Legislature right now is that supporting public schools and universal school choice do not have to be mutually exclusive—we can support good public schools while also allowing parents the freedom to choose the education that best fits their child’s needs.
Abbott seems very serious about getting education reform passed. Though Texas special sessions are only allowed to last a maximum of 30 days, the governor promised to bring the legislators back for another special session until education freedom is achieved.
At a Parent Empowerment Rally on Oct. 16, the governor told a large crowd, “I can play this game longer than [the legislators] can play this game.”
Now, Abbott has called on Texas families to directly demand action from their representatives.
Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston and Harris Counties, told The Daily Signal it’s essential that legislators “answer the call” from parents:
Our rights as parents come from God, not government. Parents matter, and they are demanding their voices be heard. We must answer that call and pass a school choice bill that allows every parent to decide which education option works best for their children according to their unique needs.
Many have been calling for school choice options over the last decade because of underperforming public schools, alternative education needs, and how schools are pushing certain social issues. These social issues include critical race theory and radical gender ideology. Texas parents have expressed dismay over finding these ideologies being taught in public school classrooms.
One Arlington father, Drew Smith, told NBC 5 DFW that a “classical-style education” with a focus on learning—not on social issues and sexual content—was the key reason he wanted to move his three children to private schools. Recent undercover investigations by Accuracy in Media have shown Texas public school administrators bragging about still teaching inappropriate content despite state bans on doing so.
At this time, the Texas House and Senate have both put forward bills expanding school choice, but the fight isn’t over yet. Abbott has made clear that he will continue to call special sessions until universal school choice is a reality for all Texas school children.
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24 October, 2023
Bill Maher mocks Ivy League schools for ‘indoctrination’ and anti-Israel hate: College ‘makes you stupid’
HBO host Bill Maher skewered America’s Ivy League universities Friday night, accusing them of being hotbeds of "indoctrination" after many student groups have been hammering Israel in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack against that country.
Citing antisemitic rallies and statements cropping up in academia following the attack, the "Real Time with Bill Maher" host advised that young people should avoid attending these schools.
At the outset of the segment, Maher stated, "As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college."
Showing images of Pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel demonstrations at Harvard University, the comedian continued, "And if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid."
Maher stated that the tragedy in Israel revealed "how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, in the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbes."
The host was referring to Palestinian supporters on these campuses that have insisted that the Hamas attack was Israel’s fault for oppressing Palestinians.
Finding a double standard of many elite college students on this issue, he said, "The same students who will tell you that words are violence and silence is violence, were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings."
"They knew where to point the finger, at the murdered, and then it was off to ethics class," he quipped with a sarcastic smile.
During a previous episode of his HBO late night show, Maher took issue with media people and others insisting there is a "moral equivalency" between Israel and the Palestinian people in their ongoing conflict, even in the wake of the Oct. 7th attack.
At the time he said, "I think the Israelis have always had the moral high ground and I think they still do." He did urge the Jewish state to keep the moral high ground in its response to the Hamas attack, advising them to not go to kill Palestinian babies.
During his Ivy League takedown, Friday, Maher targeted pro-Palestine student groups at Harvard, stating, "34 student groups a Harvard signed a letter that said the apartheid regime is the only one to blame, proving they don’t know what constitutes apartheid."
"They don’t know much of anything actually, but it doesn’t deter them from having an opinion," he continued, adding, "They’ve convinced themselves Israel is the most repressive regime in history because they have no knowledge of history or even a desire to know it. And actual history doesn’t come up in their intersectionality of politics and genderqueers identities class."
Elsewhere in the segment he attacked higher learning institutions in general, stating, "Because college life today is a day spa combined with North Korean re-education camp. It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults."
He also quipped, "If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market."
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Watchdog Says Texas Schools ‘Some of Worst in Country’ in Teaching Critical Race Theory
Public schools in Texas continue to teach racially discriminatory content to children in violation of state law and without parents knowing, Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal.
“What we’ve found in Texas is almost worse than anywhere else in the country,” Guillette said, referring to how entrenched this racial content is.
“The only solution is universal school choice,” he told The Daily Signal later in the interview.
Accuracy in Media, an investigative media watchdog, is in the process of releasing videos from its undercover investigations, which found public school administrators in Texas boasting about hiding instruction in critical race theory and racial equity from parents.
“All over Texas, administrators are pushing critical race theory into every facet of public education,” Guillette said in the interview Wednesday.
Critical race theory, also called CRT, is a sociological theory that suggests every individual and collective action is driven by race, assigning historically negative outcomes of any kind to the oppression of white supremacy. Applying critical race theory includes rewriting history to bolster claims of victimization by white supremacy, such as in The New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Accuracy in Media’s most recent investigations in the Texas cities of San Antonio, Austin, and Corpus Christi showcase public school administrators who admit to teaching critical race theory despite a state ban in 2021 at the insistence of Gov. Gregg Abbott, a Republican.
An undercover reporter for Accuracy in Media asked Marissa Perez, a content coordinator for English, language arts, and reading in Edgewood Independent School District, how the new ban on critical race theory affected her school.
“We do not follow much of, like, what Abbott is trying to get us to do,” Perez replied.
“The superintendent really does what he believes is best for kids,” she said, referring to the interpretation of state curriculum requirements.
In the past decade, trying to hide segregationist “equity” curriculum from parents has become a significant trend among public school administrators even in red states or conservative areas.
Administrators often make these decisions because they believe they’re taking a moral and even “religious” stand in spite of what parents want for their children, Guillette told The Daily Signal.
“As we heard again in Fort Worth, they tell [our undercover reporter] that they can close the door and ‘do what’s right,’” he said, referring to administrators in another Texas district.
Accuracy in Media has released several reports over the past two years in which school administrators admit they break state laws forbidding divisive and segregationist content such as critical race theory and the 1619 Project.
One series of undercover videos in Indiana resulted in the firing of three public school administrators and a healthy dose of damage control in those three districts.
When I was science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools, my superiors explicitly told me to inform parents and teachers that our district didn’t use critical race theory—we just focused on “racial equity.” As soon as the doors were closed, though, my colleagues would cackle over parents’ naivete as our school district hosted a critical race theory scholar, Gloria Ladson-Billings, who praised their deception.
School administrators’ determination to do what they want behind closed doors isn’t fading away as states pass bans on critical race theory, either. Accuracy in Media’s latest undercover interview series from schools in Corpus Christi confirm that some administrators aren’t ready to comply with Texas law.
Karen Mircovich, director of instructional programs at Ingleside Independent School District, told Accuracy in Media’s undercover reporter that their “power” allowed administrators to bend or break state law.
“We have a lot of power because of where we are,” Mircovich told the reporter, going on to say administrators are “very open” to teaching racial equity and will “support teachers” who do so.
The reporter from Accuracy in Media sought clarification, asking, “You’re confident that your teachers would close the door and teach what’s right? Regardless of what the new laws [say]?”
“Right,” Mirchovich responded.
Jodi Ferguson, curriculum director for Calallen Independent School District, told Accuracy inMedia’s undercover reporter that the district doesn’t explicitly use terms such as “1619 Project.”
But, she said, “some of the concepts” and “the way we’re teaching” incorporate the 1619 Project and the ideology of racial equity rather than equality.
The Daily Signal sought comment from Ferguson, Mircovich, and Perez, but received no response by publication time.
Guillette told The Daily Signal that these interviews and dozens like them suggest that states’ “anti-CRT” laws are “worse than worthless.”
“They provide a false sense of security to parents in Texas,” Guillette said. “Legislators are just passing laws to virtue-signal and placate concerned parents. The only solution is universal school choice.”
Abbott called a special legislative session, which began Oct. 9, to pass school choice legislation that the governor said would help Texas families.
“Empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school, or private school with state funding following the student,” Abbott said, adding that school choice “is going to give all Texas children a better chance to succeed.”
Guillette told The Daily Signal that Accuracy in Media plans to continue publishing investigations from Texas to expose conservative areas as rife with racial equity ideology in K-12 schools.
“Most Texans assume, ‘This junk is in Austin, but not here,’” Guillette said, yet that’s not so.
“The reddest areas are the worst,” he said. “San Antonio, an Air Force town, has some of the worst deceit I’ve ever seen.”
Many school districts in Texas have dedicated staff positions for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, to incorporate racial equity into curriculum and instruction.
Guillette told The Daily Signal that Fort Worth public schools have 12 positions designated as DEI staff, and it isn’t uncommon to see such staff making $250,000 annually. The goal isn’t to fire these staff, he said, but to “eliminate DEI positions, period.”
“If this is unacceptable on college campuses, why is it acceptable in K-12 education? There’s no reason Texas should be funding this,” Guillette said.
A Texas law passed earlier this year forbids any state-funded university from having DEI offices or engaging in any kind of racial discrimination or promotion.
Accuracy in Media’s additional investigations in Texas public schools will be published at the link CRTinTexas.com, Guillette said.
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University of Michigan Law School EXPOSED — Rotten to the Core
If you want to spend almost $100,000 a year to turn your son or daughter into a radical, America-hating extremist whose goal is to bring down our republic, particularly our supposedly white supremacist legal system, then Ann Arbor is the place to go.
None of this is surprising given the recent news about student organizations at various colleges, including law students, supporting Hamas terrorists and their kidnapping and murder of Israeli civilians, the same way the infamous, anti-Semitic German American Bund of the 1930s supported the Nazis. Law students at three of the law schools we have covered — Harvard, NYU, and Columbia — have had job offers from law firms withdrawn because of their support for these terrorists.
No shock that the University of Michigan has such groups, too, like the “Young Democratic Socialists of America,” who applaud Hamas’s killing spree as the “revolutionary will of the people,” and “Students Allied for Freedom and Equality,” who call on “honor[ing] our martyrs” in “resist[ing] imperialism.”
Given the militantly leftist curricula and faculty at those schools, the student support for Hamas is no surprise. The only surprise is the politically correct Big Law culture actually doing the right thing and canceling job offers to students who have neither the character nor the fitness to practice law.
If you are going to attend UMich, you had better be prepared to agree, as stated by the law school’s “Advisory Board on Race and Racism,” that there is “systemic, institutional racism and discrimination within the Quad.” According to the school’s interdisciplinary “Program in Race, Law, and History,” the law school’s work “is grounded in scholarship that has established race as at the core of interpreting the history of the Americas.” Apparently, race drives everything we do in “religion, culture, labor, biology, and politics,” which is why we, as a society, have “rationalized profound inequality.”
Speaking of biology, the law school administrators obviously need a basic lesson in biology, since their 2025 class profile says that 1% of the class are neither men nor women but “nonbinary or other genders.” Maybe they should add a third category for the class profile labeled “confused.”
Of course, UMich knows all about racist behavior since it has been one of the leading law schools in promoting race-based admissions for decades. Under “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Information,” the school brags about its leading role in Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that approved the law school’s racial preference admissions policy in the name of “diversity.” The law school criticizes the voters of Michigan for approving the 2006 proposition that outlawed such preferences, and the president of the university, Santa Ono, issued a statement after the Supreme Court finally ruled against such discrimination in the Harvard/University of North Carolina cases expressing how “deeply disheartened” she was by the ruling — no doubt as disheartened as George Wallace was by Brown v. Board of Education.
Ono brags about the university’s “diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan, DEI 1.0,” and the development of its “next strategic plan, DEI 2.0.” Those are code words for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination.
This perverse, distorted view of America and the law pervades the coursework at UMich. The class on “Critical Race Theory” will brainwash — sorry, I mean teach — students that our legal system and laws are “historically central to and complicit in upholding racial hierarchy as well as other hierarchies of gender, class and sexual orientation.” A similar course, “Race and the Law,” posits that the law “has created and maintained a regime of white supremacy in the United States” and will provide students with “the tools essential to resist that regime.”
Haven’t had enough? You can take “Civil Rights: Slavery & Trafficking,” which among other things, explains the “loopholes” in the 13th Amendment that are “used to justify prison labor.” Bet you didn’t realize that when convicted felons are given the opportunity to work to earn some income and develop skills, that is tantamount to the slavery we fought a Civil War and passed the 13th Amendment to end. In fact, according to UMich, such modern work programs are “traceable to the convict leasing schemes of the Jim Crow era.” You’ll learn all about “morality, femininity, and whiteness” and “explore race, gender, indigeneity, anti-Blackness…colonialism, globalization, and federalism.”
I am sure that learning all about colonialism will help a fledgling lawyer pursue a tort case for personal injuries, draft a contract for a business client, close a real estate deal, or prosecute someone in a criminal case. Right? Wrong.
Speaking of prosecutions and trying to protect the public from dangerous criminals, don’t expect to get that training at UMich. Instead, you will get “Progressive Prosecution: Law and Policy,” where you will learn how the role of prosecutors is not to put away criminals who break the law and victimize the innocent. No, according to the course description, prosecutors should “see their role as combatting overincarceration, eliminating racial and socioeconomic inequity, and changing a criminal legal system that too frequently exacerbates those inequities.” You will hear all about the “progress” the “progressive prosecutor” movement has made.
Progress? As my colleagues Cully Stimson and Zack Smith outline in painful detail in their new book, “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” the progressive prosecutor movement has led to dramatic increases in crime in cities throughout the country where these rogue prosecutors have gotten elected. Their refusal to prosecute misdemeanors and many felonies, when combined with their push for no-cash bail and no detention for criminals awaiting trial, has devastated urban communities and victimized the very individuals they claim they are trying to help—law-abiding citizens in poor, often majority-minority urban neighborhoods.
And we can’t forget the need to turn law students into environmental justice warriors. For that, you can take “Environmental Justice,” which will teach you about the environmental decisions that “disproportionately impact people of color, indigenous peoples, and the poor.” The course will address “environmental racism and other form of environmental injustice.”
No modern socialist training camp would be complete without a course like “Life, Death, Love, and the Law.” This course “will inquire into the ethics of reproduction” including the “choice to have children and the choice to terminate a pregnancy.” The course will “think about death, what it is, whether it is bad.” Wait. What? No, really, that is from the course description.
I don’t think anyone who knows the realities of life and has lost a loved one or a friend needs a law school course to know what death is or whether “it is bad.” Israeli families that have had their loved one tragically murdered could also tell the students at UMich who support Hamas everything they need to know about this topic, too.
Christian and I graduated from law school back when these institutions were still trying to teach their students how to practice law, not indoctrinate them with socialist, racist, anti-American propaganda that defames our legal and justice system and trains them to be revolutionaries who will overthrow our system. Going through the course catalogs and programs of the supposedly best law schools in the country has been very depressing.
As Christian said in our first article, these schools are no longer trying to produce “lawyers capable of helping clients” with practical legal problems. They’re churning out a generation of lawyers with contempt for our Constitution and the rule of law who will “destroy treasured American institutions such as tolerance, liberty, and free speech.”
The only piece of advice we have for students is this: quit looking at the elite, expensive law schools thinking they will somehow turn you into a competent, highly professional lawyer, and that you need to go there to get a good job. They won’t make you good lawyers, and the “education” you will receive is probably not worth the exorbitant amount you will pay for it. There are many other fine law schools, including many state schools, that are far more affordable and have not yet become socialist training camps. Do well there, and you will be able to get hired.
Not only will you get a better education at those schools, but you might also actually get through them without being persecuted for being a patriot who believes in the Constitution and rejecting the racist, elitist political orthodoxy that passes for normal in the woke law schools that are living on their past reputations for excellence and masquerading as institutions of higher learning.
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23 October, 2023
Professor Threatens Children of Pro-Israel Journalists With Violence
Another day, another member of our esteemed intellectual elite goes on an unhinged rant about Israel and Jews.
This time it was Jemma Decristo, a transgender African American Studies professor at the University of California at Davis, who decided to take to social media and advocate for violently attacking neighbors.
Decristo’s post on Oct. 10 was even more deranged than the Cornell professor who earlier this week said that he felt “exhilarated” by Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Here’s what Decristo wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter:
“one group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation they have houses w addresses, kids in school they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.”
That was followed by a knife, an ax, and several blood emojis.
Decristo had a few other unhinged follow-up posts as well.
Decristo’s X account has since been privatized.
There’s a lot to break down here.
First, how is it that a professor at a prestigious university writes with such atrocious spelling and grammar? The post reads like the poorly written ravings of a random lunatic on a fetid Reddit forum. Standards in higher education have apparently fallen so far that professors, let alone students, struggle to write at a high school level.
Second, there’s the question of what UC Davis is going to do about one of its faculty members calling for violence and targeting not just people who disagree, but their children, too.
One would think the school should take action to ensure members of the community are safe.
The school is so worried about making UC Davis an “inclusive” and welcoming environment that it has an entire guide for teachers and students to avoid microaggressions. Surely, calling for a knife or ax to be plunged into a member of the community is just a bit out of bounds, right?
UC Davis Chancellor Gary May put out a statement condemning violence.
“I absolutely condemn the posts attributed to a UC Davis faculty member that recently appeared on the social media platform X. I find the comments revolting in every way, and I disagree wholeheartedly with them,” May wrote., adding:
UC Davis rejects all forms of violence and discrimination, as they are antithetical to the values of our university. We strive to foster a climate of equity and justice built on mutual understanding and respect for all members of the community.
I’d add here that UC Davis isn’t really against all forms of discrimination as May suggests. The school has committed itself to widespread “anti-racism” actions based on the ideology of left-wing author-activist Ibram X. Kendi, among others.
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” Kendi wrote in his book “How to Be an Antiracist.”
A quibble, perhaps, but it needed to be said.
As to what would be done about the offending professor, May refused to commit to anything and called it essentially a private matter at the public school.
“The University of California system has specific procedures for the review of complaints of faculty misconduct consistent with universitywide policies and bylaws,” he said. “The status of complaints lodged against faculty members are confidential personnel matters, so we are unable to publicly comment on the steps we are taking.”
The Daily Signal reached out to UC Davis for further comment, but it had not responded as of publication time.
This episode at my alma mater is just one of many that has exposed the pervasive rot inside our institutions of higher education. Most Americans were rightly horrified by the Hamas terrorist attacks and support Israel.
That’s apparently not the case in academia, however.
There appears to be more terrorist-supporting fanatics and antisemites at these self-styled proud bastions of tolerance and diversity than at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
Institutions that have been most relentless in condemning America for its alleged past sins have been exposed as dens of genocidal hate.
At George Washington University, for example, the Colonials mascot was removed, supposedly for being “offensive.” The Washington, D.C., school said that it wasn’t a unifying symbol for the institution. Yet, one of its professors, Lara Sheehi, went on several pro-Hamas tirades after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. On social media, she reportedly praised a statement critical of “anyone condemning the Palestinians’ armed resistance.”
Colonizing is bad and offensive, but “decolonizing” through threats, terrorism, and torture is apparently a reasonable position to hold at our elite schools.
Maybe we should stop giving higher education a blank check to promote such values to the next generation of American elites.
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Israeli Jewish Student Attacked at Columbia University Amid Pro-Palestine Protests
Columbia University has tightened access to campus beginning Thursday amid news that a Jewish student was attacked on campus by an allegedly pro-Palestine student.
The New York Police Department confirmed to The Daily Signal on Thursday that officers responded to an assault on Wednesday around 6:10 p.m. in front of 600 West 116th Street.
Upon arrival, officers were informed that the victim, a 24-year-old male, “was engaged in a dispute with an unknown individual,” the police statement said. “The dispute became physical and the individual struck the victim in the hand with a wooden stick.”
Police arrested 19-year-old Maxwell Friedman, a young woman. The statement also said that the victim refused medical attention on scene.
According to the Columbia Spectator, the victim is a 24-year-old Israeli School of General Studies student. That student spoke with the Columbia Spectator on condition of anonymity citing fears for his safety, and the publication identified him as “I.A.”
The publication reported that earlier in the day, “the suspect approached him and other students who were in Uris Hall putting up posters with names and photos of Israelis that Hamas has reportedly taken as hostages.”
The friend said the suspect asked to join them, telling the students she was Jewish. Throughout the morning, the suspect continued to stay with the group, I.A. said.
Around 5:30 p.m., I.A. said he was outside Butler with four other friends and noticed the suspect, now with a bandana covering her face, ripping the flyers off the wall.
When they approached her, I.A. said the suspect screamed obscenities toward the students and hit I.A. with a stick. I.A. said he defended himself when the suspect allegedly tried to punch him in the face. After the incident, I.A. said that one hand was bruised and his ring finger on the other hand was broken.
The group of students went to Columbia Public Safety, who contacted the NYPD, I.A. said.
The student told the Columbia Spectator that the suspect attacked him because he is Jewish.
“This is because me being an Israeli these days. Not me because being myself,” he said. “It is because me being an Israeli who is under a certain kind of threat.”
In a late Wednesday statement, Columbia University Executive Vice President David Greenberg noted that “as a follow up to the Provost’s email earlier today related to safety and free expression on campus, beginning at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow (October 12) access to the Morningside campus will be open to valid Columbia University ID holders only.”
“This condition is in place to help maintain safety and a sense of community through planned demonstration activities,” he said.
The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. At 4:30pm on Thursday, the campus Students for Justice in Palestine group plans to hold a “Call to Action for Palestine” event where they intend to pressure Columbia to meet their demands for Palestine.
The student pro-Palestine group has expressed solidarity with the attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
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Education boss calls for doubling down on explicit teaching in Australian schools
The head of the NSW public education system has called on schools to double down on the use of explicit instruction – a teaching method that gives students step-by-step and clear instructions – in a bid to boost results and close the stark achievement gap.
Murat Dizdar, who was appointed secretary of the NSW Education Department in June, told the Herald that evidence shows schools using explicit teaching practices have the most sustained improvements in academic outcomes.
The department will release a new public education plan on Monday that will outline six focus points, including plans to boost school staff numbers, raise attendance rates and lift the number of students completing year 12.
“Equity is also a big focus – we want to close the gaps for those students who are struggling,” Dizdar said.
The plan comes as 45 high-profile reading experts send an open letter to Australian education ministers, calling on governments to reduce the number of pupils leaving primary school without proficient reading skills.
The department’s four-year blueprint calls out the use of explicit instruction to help improve reading and maths results. The approach favours clear direction from teachers over student-led learning, and involves breaking down topics into small parts and regularly spot-checking to assess how students are doing.
“One of the reasons I believe in explicit teaching so much is because it does not discriminate,” Dizdar said. “It applies to all age levels and abilities when learning new or complex skills.”
“I’m going to be stronger around it, and I’m looking to reinforce that practice and drive our professional learning around that.”
But Dizdar said HSC and NAPLAN performance targets set for every school – benchmarks for the number of students achieving in the top two bands – will no longer be mandated. There will also be no individual phonics achievement targets for schools.
Instead, schools will have “improvement measures” in reading, numeracy, attendance and post-school pathways.
“We will start discussions with schools about improvement measures this term, and they will be set for every school by the end of term 1 next year,” Dizdar said. “They won’t be top down; rather they will be growth-based, discussed with schools and will consider their context and trajectory.”
Targets were outlined under the department’s School Success Model, an expansion of the 2016 Bump It Up strategy that aimed to boost the number of students achieving in the top performance bands.
Dizdar said feedback from teachers and principals was that “the top two band measures had inadvertent consequences, and that schools may not be focusing on all students”.
The ambassador schools program, which was designed to study the state’s best schools to work out the secrets of their success, will also be wound up.
Meanwhile, an open letter signed by reading experts and sent to education ministers has pushed for immediate action to tackle the achievement gap and set national targets for reading.
The letter, signed by cognitive science expert Anne Castles, Pam Snow and education expert Bill Louden, calls for urgent reforms to “set ambitious but achievable reading proficiency targets” and address the substantial achievement gaps between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families.
“The next National School Reform Agreement must clearly outline targets for reading based on the new NAPLAN proficiency benchmarks,” it says.
The latest NAPLAN data shows almost one-third of Australian students are failing to meet proficiency standards in reading, writing and maths, with a vast achievement gap between students in cities and regions.
“This means well over 1 million children in school today do not have the literacy skills to navigate the world with confidence, proficiency and dignity,” the letter says.
The head of the Australian Education Research Organisation, Jenny Donovan, said highlighting explicit instruction in the NSW public education plan was “commendable in its direction” but the department will “need to hold a line, and be clear about the practices that don’t work, such as over-reliance on inquiry-led learning”.
“You can use inquiry-led or student-led learning, but [it] can’t be the main approach,” she said.
The plan for public education involved an eight-week consultation period with thousands of teachers, principals, parents and stakeholder groups.
It outlines six key focus areas: ensuring high quality, evidence-based teaching; improving literacy and numeracy outcomes; lifting student wellbeing; increasing the proportion of children in preschool; strengthening respect for the teaching profession; and lifting the proportion of students going into university, training and work after school.
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said addressing teacher shortages and delivering high-quality, evidence-based learning was at the centre of the document.
“I am proud to deliver this blueprint for the next four years, which reflects the aspirations of teachers, parents and students,” Car said.
But opposition spokeswoman for education Sarah Mitchell said the plan contained no detail around how the goals within it would be achieved in NSW schools.
“Key policy areas like phonics, delivery of free universal pre-kindergarten and increasing the number of students in the top two NAPLAN bands for literacy and numeracy appear to have been dropped, which indicates the new Labor government is watering down transparency and accountability measures in schools.”
Federal education minister Jason Clare has commissioned a root-and-branch review that will examine targets and priorities for the next National School Reform Agreement, which will also look at transparency and accountability around public funding. A report is due by the end of the year.
The Productivity Commission has said targets should be developed to reduce the proportion of students who do not meet basic levels of literacy and numeracy.
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22 October, 2023
Another Big-Name Law Firm Has a Message for Pro-Hamas Students
Proving that, at least in some corners of the world, actions still have consequences, another big-name law firm has announced that it revoked job offers provided to law students after they signed on to pro-Hamas statements in the wake of barbaric attacks that saw more than one thousand Israelis slaughtered by the Iran-backed terrorists.
The U.S.-based international law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell — described by The Daily Beast as "revered" — said on Tuesday that it had revoked its employment offers to three law students from Harvard and Columbia citing the students' "contravention of our firm's value system" with their statements blaming Israel for the horror that befell its people.
"The views expressed in certain of the statements signed by law school student organizations in recent days are in direct contravention of our firm's value statement," Davis Polk & Wardwell said in a statement to Bloomberg Law, through the firm did not name the three students whose offers were revoked.
Another internal email viewed by Bloomberg Law showed the firm's chair and managing partner Neil Barr calling the anti-Israel statements "simply contrary to our firm's values" and explaining "we thus concluded that rescinding these offers was appropriate in upholding our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment for all Davis Polk employees."
As Leah reported previously, the firm of Winston & Strawn similarly withdrew a job offer for a law student at NYU who wrote in a newsletter that "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life" which was, of course, actually caused by barbaric Hamas terrorists.
Townhall has also worked to document the leaders of student groups at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Virginia who authored or signed on to similar statements blaming Israel for the rape and slaughter of its citizens.
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UK: Girls hatched a 'playground plot' to get maths teacher Jonathan Hawker sacked
This is the male teacher who was awarded almost £45,000 after he was sacked from his job at an all-girls grammar school when pupils allegedly made up sex assault claims ‘for fun’.
Jonathan Hawker, a maths and computer teacher, can be seen smiling in a series of pictures with family and his pet golden retriever Ralph.
But his world was turned upside down when pupils at all-girls school Devonport High School for Girls in Plymouth, Devon, made the ‘career-ending allegations’ against him in 2021.
Despite having an unblemished disciplinary record during his five years at the school Mr Hawker was suspended, arrested and then fired for ‘gross misconduct’. It came despite reports that the girls had admitted they lied about everything ‘because it was fun’.
The teacher has now been awarded £44,868 after a tribunal in Bristol decided that the school had carried out a ‘wholly inadequate’ investigation and failed to ‘provide a safe working environment for its staff, in particular the men.’
Mr Hawker, a father as well as a keen skier and mountain biker from Plymouth, is understood to have since found a new job but could not be reached for comment on the verdict.
Employment Judge Martha Street slammed the school’s investigation into the girls’ allegations, saying: ‘A fair investigation would at the least have included a transcript of the interviews with them.
‘I make no finding on whether Mr Hawker committed the misconduct alleged.
‘What I can say is that if he is innocent, and a playground plot can end a career and destroy a reputation, the school is not providing a safe working environment for its staff, in particular for its male staff.
‘No reasonable employer would conclude that the younger girls were giving truthful evidence in good faith without question; that is, without exploring the contrary evidence including the contemporary evidence from the older girls of a plot against Mr Hawker.
‘In a career-ending case, the investigation has to be as full as possible.
‘This fell well short of that. The school accepted the evidence of the younger pupils without challenge or exploration and discounted, ignored or avoided finding contrary evidence.’
In June 2021, a student wrote a statement to her tutor that another girl – identified only as Student H – had said Mr Hawker had touched her leg, the hearing was told.
Ruth Morgan, the head of safeguarding, spoke to Student H, who said that during a lesson Mr Hawker had knelt down next to her and put his hand on her thigh, the tribunal heard.
In further discussions with other pupils, Mrs Morgan heard of a ‘similar incident’ described by students, as well as false rumours Mr Hawker had previously been suspended for ‘touching a Year 9 student’ and had an affair with a sixth former.
The hearing was told that on the instruction of the school’s acting head, Beverly Bell, Mrs Morgan took statements from the girls.
One girl, Student D, reported that Mr Hawker had made her feel ‘very uncomfortable’, by ‘massaging my shoulders and stroking my arms’.
She said she had seen Mr Hawker stroking other girls’ thighs and that other girls, Student G and Student F, had said that happened to them.
The teacher was also accused of winking at girls.
As a result of numerous other reports from the girls, which all alleged serious misconduct, Mr Hawker was suspended pending investigation on June 28, 2021.
However, in July, two girls from the year above said they had been stood with the group of accusers when they admitted they tried to get Mr Hawker fired ‘for fun’.
When the older pair asked why, one of the girls had told them ‘because it was fun’ and another one added: ‘Yeah we said he touched our thighs trying to get him done for sexual assault’.
This was reported to Mrs Bell on July 9, before school year ended on July 23.
However, the tribunal heard that the school ‘appeared to reject’ the older students’ account.
In September 2021, Mr Hawker was arrested in a ‘brutal experience’ after two of the original group agreed to police involvement, the hearing was told. It was his first knowledge of the allegations.
An internal investigation was launched at the school in November.
Mrs Morgan interviewed Students D, E, F and G – during which Student D withdrew some allegations and said she no longer wanted to be involved.
She didn’t interview the older students, L and M, about what they had spoken to the girls about – instead categorising it as ‘facts that had not been established’.
In December 2021, Mr Hawker was invited to an ‘investigatory interview’, where he said Student F and G had ‘concocted’ stories after he separated them for doing no work.
Mrs Morgan’s report concluded Mr Hawker ‘overstepped the boundaries and failed to consider the welfare of the students’ and ‘repeatedly recited’ her opinion he was guilty of each allegation.
At a disciplinary hearing in February last year, Mr Hawker was dismissed for gross misconduct.
In March 2022, police decided the charges against him would not proceed.
In the following April a temporary prohibition order by the Teachers Regulation Agency banning him from the classroom was lifted.
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Anxiety, ADHD, ‘snowplough parents’: Behind Australia's worsening school discipline crisis
With her booming voice, no-nonsense attitude and gaze that could wilt cactus, Megan*, a 30-something teacher, oozes authority. The untrained eye might see her as petite, but to students she’s towering. One day, as she walked down a corridor of her boxy, ageing Sydney public high school, she heard a six-foot, year 12 boy curse. “F---, you’re short!” he said in surprise. “It’s so weird. You don’t seem like that in front of the classroom.“
Megan is one of the lucky ones; a teacher born to run a room. Eyes in the back of her head. A look that stings. An instinct for weaponising silence. And yet even Megan, who is using a pseudonym because she would be fired for speaking out, is struggling to manage student behaviour. “When I first got to this school, I was like, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” she says. “I’m pretty strong, but it’s been so bad that I’ll sit at the front with my laptop and say, ‘Teach yourselves.’ “
There’s the occasional crisis – fights, knives, drugs – but there always has been. The pressing problem is disruption. In a high school such as Megan’s, it might be boys streaming cage fights in class or girls ignoring the teacher to chat among themselves. They swear at each other, harass peers, refuse to participate. “It’s getting worse, yes – a thousand per cent,” Megan says. “If the media really knew what happened inside schools, the places would be shut down.”
Students tell us themselves that Australian schools are among the most disorderly in the world. When 15-year-olds were last surveyed by the OECD in 2018 about noise and disruption in their classrooms alongside peers from 75 other countries, Australia was eight places from the bottom. Local studies also show teachers are struggling with behaviour, and a long-term, annual survey of principals suggests disrespect and aggression are getting worse.
The reasons are myriad. Complications of technology, such as social media fights and bullying spilling over into school; the lingering effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on social development; scant resources to deal with skyrocketing diagnoses of autism, anxiety and ADHD; a “crisis of adult authority”, as one expert described it; and a more diverse social landscape than ever before, in which children bring wildly differing family norms to the classroom.
Sceptics dismiss the behaviour crisis as a moral panic fuelled by reactionaries worried that a spared rod has left children spoilt. But there is a tangible problem at its heart: disorderly classrooms are bad for learning. Some believe this is why Australia’s academic results are falling. If disruption halts a lesson 10 times, even for just a minute on each occasion, that’s “10 minutes of teaching time you lose out of 50”, says Lisa Holt, the principal of Rosebud Secondary College in Victoria, whose students had forgotten “basic manners and courtesy” when they returned from lockdowns.
Many teachers don’t have Megan’s natural gifts. Controlling a classroom might seem like an educator’s core business, but they were never taught how to do it. Old-fashioned discipline, with its connotations of harsh, corporal punishment, has been replaced by a decades-old creed that behaviour is the language used by young people to communicate their needs and improves when those needs are met. With four million Australian students, each with their own needs, that puts a lot of pressure on teachers.
The backlash against the behaviour-as-language philosophy is gaining momentum across the English-speaking world. Proponents of what’s being called the “neo-strict” movement – rules and routines with the “neo” addition of positive reinforcement – say it misinterprets human nature. Misbehaviour is not a pathology nor a symptom of a more profound problem, says Tom Bennett, the adviser to England’s education department, who has been dubbed Britain’s behaviour tsar. Students, he says, “usually misbehave because they feel like it, and they think they can get away with it”.
Politicians admit there’s a problem. A Senate inquiry considering “the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms” is set to report next month, and a federal government-ordered report this year ruled that universities must include lessons in how to control classrooms in their education degrees. But those are longer-term fixes, and right now, many students are having their one shot at education curtailed by constant interruptions. Schools need to act, but they can’t agree on how: is the answer to toughen up – or try a little more tenderness? After decades in the doghouse, the discipline debate is back.
It’s late Monday afternoon, and three teachers from different primary schools slump, exhausted, over tea and biscuits in a suburban Sydney kitchen. They’re nervous because they are taking a risk; their employers’ ban on contact with journalists means they could be fired for speaking to Good Weekend. But they’re fed up. Not with the kids, but with what they say is a lack of help with the behavioural issues wearing them down.
Mondays can be difficult in schools. Students might have spent their weekend cooped up in units playing computer games and are full of pent-up energy when they arrive in the classroom. Some hate returning to class because they’re falling behind, and their shame manifests in aggression and defiance. For others, home is far more permissive than school, and they struggle to adjust to different expectations.
As he munches on a biscuit, one of the teachers around the kitchen table, a softly spoken, blond 30-something called Mike* recalls explaining to a puzzled father that it’s not okay for a student to yank down another’s shorts at school, even if it’s a favourite prank at home. “He looked at me like I was an extremist prude,” he says. Another teacher – Mary*, a pretty, studious 30-something who works in an underprivileged area – called one mother to say her primary-aged son had been in a fight; the mother responded with relief that her son wasn’t a wimp. “She’d told her child that if someone is disrespectful, you punch them.”
Dysregulation leads to big arguments over little things. “Disagreeing over the rules in footy ends in physical violence, rather than just working it out,” says Kate*, an empathetic and passionate young woman. “They’ll come into class very unsettled, to the point where oftentimes it’ll be yelling, screaming, swearing at staff.” (Some schools have restricted before-school play for this reason.) When such students arrive in the classroom, the teacher has to help them calm down. “Often they can’t self-regulate and you have to intervene, which takes you away from the rest of the class,” she says. “The others get restless. It snowballs.”
The restlessness, says Mary, manifests as chatter, rolling around on the floor and calling out. One child says, “I’m not doing that,” and their friends follow. They’re more likely to behave for their main teacher, who knows them better, than a casual or once-a-week art teacher. “Generally speaking, they wouldn’t say ‘F--- you’ to a classroom teacher – although some do,” Mary says. “It’s when they have [different] staff, with whom they don’t have as strong a relationship. They might see them twice a week but don’t, for some reason, want to show them any respect.“
Parents used to back schools when it came to discipline. Some still do. But others don’t and will believe their child’s version over the teacher’s, or complain about the unfairness of consequences – something teachers say is more common in wealthier areas where there’s more “snowplough parenting” (trying to remove obstacles facing their children). One principal tells of a mother who offered to sit her daughter’s detention. Another says students use their mobile phones to text Mum or Dad straight after a ticking-off and, within minutes, the parent calls the office. “It undermines school authority,” she says.
More here:
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20 October, 2023
Academia Needs to Go Extinct
Crises clarify what is true, and what is indisputably true during this crisis is that academia, as currently constituted, is a poisonous cancer infecting our society. Like many other institutions, academia has gone from respect to contempt in the eyes of normal people, if not our garbage ruling class. But its latest series of public disgraces may wake up even the most obstinate cheerleaders for pretending that nothing fundamental has changed. And let’s use the opportunity we have been given to eliminate this dinosaur institution. At the top of our conservative agenda must be making it extinct.
It has outlived its usefulness. Among people paying attention, academia's reputation is already in the garbage bin. From political correctness to administrative bloat, from its inability to teach basic concepts, from its greed to its arrogance, those of us who know what time it is already despise it.
But these last couple weeks have been clarifying for everyone else. It’s almost beyond the point to go through the litany of the moral illiteracies that idiots in and around academia have demonstrated over the last two weeks. We’ve all seen them cheering on the slaughter and hating the Jews – a lowlight was a Cornell associate professor of history who found the mass rape/murder spree to be “exhilarating.”
His words. Uttered in public. Uttered without shame.
This is what we are paying for, both in cash and cachet.
This is the kind of mutant teaching our alleged best and brightest, though they are neither our best nor our brightest. Much of the reason it is so hard to reform our college campuses is because of the default inertia towards respecting them held primarily by people who enjoyed their college years and embrace nostalgia for a dead reality. They can’t imagine that things have actually changed from back when they were a Delta Gamma Something and enjoyed the football games and the keg parties and, after they graduated, the network of alumni that helped them get ahead in the world.
Of course, college is not about that today. It is, instead, a grim conformity factory where students' academic and social lives are both patrolled and controlled by official and unofficial commissars suppressing any kind of dissent in favor of liberty, tradition, or patriotism.
But there was another aspect to this, one that is even more likely to change minds and hearts in the direction of reality. It is the realization by the people with an antiquated view of the universities that their kids are likely to never see the inside of a big name campus. Oh, the very richest kids’ spawn will. They will have no problem getting into the Harvards and Yales because daddy has $1 billion and just paid for the new wing of the Social Justice and Decolonization Department building. But regular folks, whose children aren't able to check multiple boxes on the intersectionality form are out of luck. The big lie is that if you work hard enough and show merit, your kid can get in too. But your kid can't. These are exclusive clubs, and your kid better stay outside the velvet rope because your kid is not on the VIP list.
Everyone recently saw that story of the A+ graduate with near perfect SATs who actually started his own company, and yet couldn’t get admitted into any of the top universities. He made the mistake of being Asian, which is a mistake on par with being some white kid from the suburbs. The colleges have decreed, and the awful wine women inhabiting their admissions departments concur, that if you were those things you don’t get a shot. Merit is dead for the designated undiverse. And when people realize that their kids are out of luck if they don’t have some bizarre gender identity or something else that makes them thrill the hearts of the Chardonnay-swillers who pick and choose the Ivy student bodies, these voters are going to say “Oh, hell no!” next time they are asked to subsidize academia both with tax money and respect.
As soon as it dawns on most Americans that, no matter how hard they work, their kids have zero chance of getting into not just the most prestigious colleges, but any of the allegedly better colleges simply because of their race, normal gender identity, and failure to be communist weirdos, the remaining support for academia is going to nosedive. Add to that the consistent insistence of the little brats who took out huge student loans and now demand that we pay them back and you have a recipe for unprecedented resentment against colleges. And that will eventually manifest is our elected officials who hold the purse strings.
Worse for the college complex, this all comes when people are seeing that college is not the only pathway to success. We all know that a huge percentage of college graduates are borderline morons, generally useless for anything unless completely retrained. College is now purely a credential manufacturing operation. You go to Harvard, and the product is not an educated person but a person holding a degree that says “Harvard.” That kid who got turned down for all the colleges, despite his stellar academics? Google gave him a job. He’s skipping four years of treading water in a cesspool of communist nonsense to skip ahead and get the merit-based success that used to be available via academia. If he wants to obtain the well-rounded education that colleges are supposed to provide, but never do, every single thing he might want to learn is available online and for free.
Think about that. All the knowledge of humanity is available on the same device you are reading this column on. If you really want to learn, the only thing stopping you is your own unwillingness to go out and learn it. And learning on your own is where you actually do your learning. Let’s not fool ourselves. The democratized four-year college experience that has been normal for the last 75 years – a process largely started by the G.I. Bill that made college financially practical for many more young men – has become not an educational process, but a socialization process.
Those four years constitute what high school used to, a transition to adulthood. What you learn in your classes does not translate into what you need to make a living. Hell, that was true 40 years ago. I went to what is considered a top university, and the only real use for anything I learned in a classroom was when I watched Oppenheimer this year and knew the names of all the nuclear scientists thanks to one of my classes on the Cold War.
That’s not an exaggeration. What I got out of college that was tangible came from my extracurricular writing, both political and humor, and a gig working in Congress over a summer. That, plus a lot of fun, was the practical sum of my college experience four decades ago. It was also about 10 grand a year, pricey but doable even for my middle-class family. What is impractical is to expect that same kind of bespoke experience for $75,000 a year today. That’s crazy. It is unsustainable, and therefore it will not be sustained.
So, what we are seeing in the decline of academia as we knew it is a combination of structural factors, new technology, and bad decision-making that totally alienates the very voters who need to be mollified in order to continue to support academia as currently constituted. That, on top of the fact that college students are demonstrating themselves to be useless little pieces of garbage being taught by useless bigger pieces of garbage, and you have a giant comet coming to wipe out these dinosaurs.
Let’s use the opportunity. Let’s not let this crisis in academia go to waste. I propose that conservatives starve academia of money and respect, and thereby gleefully hasten the inevitable creative destruction that would inevitably be underway anyway in order to drive this failed institution to extinction.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/10/19/academia-needs-to-go-extinct-n2629986
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Major businesses are moving away from requiring college degrees for an increasing number of positions. Instead, they’re focusing on applicants’ skills, experience, passions, and even their cultural fit
Fox News reports that companies such as IBM, Bank of America, Accenture, Walmart, and Google are reducing the number of corporate jobs that require a four-year college degree.
In September, for example, Walmart announced it was rewriting hundreds of job descriptions to allow for relevant experience to take the place of a college degree. In 2021, IBM announced it was removing the college degree requirement for half of its U.S. job openings.
A recent report from Philadelphia-based Burning Glass Institute predicts that the shift away from college degree requirements could open up 1.4 million jobs in the next five years for folks without such a degree.
Given the high costs of college, the leftist political agenda that has infiltrated higher education, and the assembly-line issuing of degrees in mediocre online university programs, the shift away from degree requirements is a win for job seekers and employers alike.
On today’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we explain why eliminating the college degree requirement for more U.S. jobs is a public good and how high schools can and should help young people discover their career interests before graduation.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/19/major-companies-ditch-college-degree-as-job-requirement/
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Audit reveals that Australia's universities are now little more than Madrassas for the Left
The century of spin has arrived. Today, the battle for the minds of the people is a battle for control of the narrative.
Universities have been at the forefront of this battle, and free speech on campus is a significant but overlooked casualty.
By 2016, a censorious culture was already evident on university campuses, undermining the battle of ideas. In 2023, the social and political narrative on campus is increasingly being controlled by universities that are adopting ideological positions as institutional goals.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023, over the last six years, Australian universities' hostility towards free speech on campus has more than doubled.
It is no coincidence that the rise of the “activist university” has occurred simultaneously. Right across the tertiary sector, there has been a marked shift in focus away from education and towards ideology.
Activism and hostility towards free speech usually go hand in hand. The former tends to give rise to the latter
This shift in the debate recalls George Orwell’s famous words, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Spinning the narrative one way will redefine, influence, and ultimately limit thought and speech.
Of Australia’s elite Group of Eight universities, seven received the lowest rating for free speech on campus due to having hostile policies.
The total hostility score across all institutions, as measured by the number and severity of university policies that are hostile to free speech, increased by 117 percent between 2016 and 2023.
Just How Controlled Is Speech?
The 2023 audit found that Western Sydney University (WSU) was the tertiary institution most hostile to free speech in Australia.
From a policy perspective, WSU epitomises the activist university perfectly. Its bureaucratic web of policies infiltrates every aspect of university life. No problem is too great, or too small.
This is a university with tentacles in both the minutiae and the overarching meta-narrative.
WSU has policies on “Indigenous Australian Education,” “Indigenous Australian Employment,” “Environmental Management,” “Gender Equality,” and “Respect and Inclusion.”
The University’s Bullying Prevention Guidelines define bullying as “name-calling,” “sarcasm,” and “teasing.”
Its Environmental Management Policy requires the university to promote an “understanding of and responsibility for environmental issues both within the University and the community.”
While Western Sydney University represents the worst of its kind from a policy perspective, most other Australian universities are not far behind.
The IPA’s 2023 audit shows across all of Australia’s 42 universities, there are now 77 policies pledging allegiance to one of three ideologies: sustainability, indigenous issues, and gender equality.
The activist university is inherently opposed to debate because it promotes only one side of an issue, attaching a value judgment to it and suggesting it is the superior position to hold. This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity.
Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at New York University, noted that a university cannot be dedicated to an ideology and simultaneously open to challenging perspectives.
Excessive policies, guidelines, and regulations contribute to this culture by censoring speech or undermining viewpoint diversity.
Some examples include the University of Wollongong’s Inclusive Language Guideline which instructs students to avoid words like “man,” “ladies,” “mothering/fathering,” and “wife.”
Central Queensland University's protocol for Engaging and Communicating with First Nations People says, that “direct verbal confrontation” and “expressing disagreement” with Indigenous people should be avoided, in order to “preserve consensus.”
Bond University forbids posts that “can be interpreted to portray” content that is “injurious or objectionable” to the university.
Previous Attempts at Guaranteeing Free Speech Have Fallen Flat
The federal government's attempts to strengthen protections for free speech by requiring universities to adopt a free speech policy have been relatively ineffective.
In the case of the University of New England (UNE), the new policy arguably hindered rather than helped free speech on campus.
Not only did UNE leave out key provisions in the free speech template policy provided by the government, known as the French Model Code, but it also included provisions that detract from free speech, such as the humiliation provision.
This provision was included within the French Model Code’s definition of “the duty to foster the wellbeing of staff and students” which includes “speech which a reasonable person would regard, in the circumstances, as likely to humiliate or intimidate.”
Humiliation is an inherently subjective term that can be interpreted broadly. This caveat ironically means the code restricts the very speech it was designed to protect.
While all 42 universities have managed to produce a free speech policy, only a third have adopted the six essential pro-free speech criteria identified by the IPA in the French Model Code.
The only way universities can appropriately protect free speech is to acknowledge that the only legitimate restrictions are those that apply generally to all people and institutions; namely laws relating to defamation, the incitement of violence, and racial vilification.
There is no basis for universities to limit free speech beyond this.
The bottom line is when the feelings of others, no matter how misguided or fragile, can put a stop to the dissemination of facts or genuinely held opinions, there is no meaningful right to free speech.
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19 October, 2023
Study Debunks School Choice Critics on Tuition Increase Claims
Critics of school choice often say it leads to higher tuition at private schools, but that doesn’t actually happen, a new study has found.
To the contrary, the study by The Heritage Foundation found that school choice significantly held down the cost of tuition of private elementary schools and had no impact on tuition at private high schools. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Over the past 10 years, states that adopted school choice policies had lower rates of tuition increases than states that never had school choice policies. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of tuition rose more slowly in states that had previously adopted school choice. States without school choice had an average 27.6% increase in tuition, while states with school choice saw a 15.4% increase, the study found.
The vast majority of Americans support school choice, polls find. According to a RealClear Opinion Research poll from late June, of 1,000 registered voters surveyed, 71% supported school choice, while just 13% opposed it.
Many Republicans governors, among them Ron DeSantis in Florida, Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, have campaigned in support of school choice and parental rights.
“Republicans are working to end the policy of trapping kids in failing schools and sentencing them to a lifetime of poverty,” Sanders said. “We will educate, not indoctrinate, our kids and put students on a path to success.”
Thus, supporting school choice policies has been a winning strategy for many politicians who take account of parents’ desire to have more control over their child’s education.
“[Democrats have] lost our advantage on education,” Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and a former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote in an August opinion column for USA Today, conceding that school choice resonates with voters.
Some opponents of school choice contend that subsidies encourage K-12 schools to increase tuition as it does for colleges. But unlike higher education, K-12 schools typically have fewer barriers to entry, and therefore a higher capacity to serve more students, and the supply can increase more quickly than demand, according to the study.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/07/critics-school-choice-proven-wrong/
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Teenage girls at NYU caught tearing down posters of Hamas Israeli child hostages
Two young women have been filmed tearing down posters of Israeli children taken hostage by Hamas while another teen from Columbia University is facing hate crime charges for attacking a Jewish classmate with a broomstick.
The two female students have not yet been named publicly and the school is yet to confirm whether they are currently enrolled.
They were filmed yesterday at Tisch Hall in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, stripping clean a wall where students had plastered the faces of some of the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas.
The pair were filmed by Students Supporting Israel, a campus organization which is now demanding that the pair be excluded permanently.
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School Choice Is Better for Democracy Than Government Schooling
As state after state embraces policies that empower parents with more options in K-12 education, opponents of school choice are claiming that it is a “threat to democracy.” But if anything, school choice is better for democracy than government-run schooling.
In Texas, the legislature is considering an education choice bill that would make every K-12 student eligible for an education savings account (ESA). With an ESA, parents can use the state dollars associated with their child to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, homeschool materials, and other educational expenses. More than 60% of Texas voters support school choice, but critics claim the sky is falling.
“This is an existential threat to public education,” bellowed state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, in a Oct. 11 webinar about the ESA bill, “and therefore an existential threat to democracy.”
This talking point has long been a staple of the teachers’ unions, even though states that have adopted robust school-choice policies have seen their district schools improve and still have democratic institutions. Earlier this year, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, alleged that school choice would “destroy public education as we know it,” and is therefore “bad for … democracy.”
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), similarly claimed: “Public education is the foundation of our democracy,” adding “we must defend [public education] from those who would underfund, politicize, or dismantle it.” Although Pringle says she doesn’t want public education politicized, the NEA spent nearly $42 million in one year on political activism causes while spending less—$38 million—to fulfill its tasked role of protecting union members.
Yet, Pringle, Weingarten, and their political allies abhor parental empowerment through school choice. Instead, they want children held as a captive audience in the government school system, despite its track record of failing to effectively educate children. More children in government schools equals more teachers paying dues to her to funnel into political activism.
Freedom and self-government rely upon an educated citizenry. “If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People,” wrote Samuel Adams in 1779, “they will never be enslav’d. This will be their great Security.” Yet government-run K-12 schools are far from serving as the cornerstone of democracy. Indeed, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for producing informed, civic-minded citizens that a democratic society requires.
Government schools are clearly not sufficient to produce an informed citizenry because our more than century-long experiment with K-12 public education has produced dismal results. Nearly nine out of 10 adults attended a government-run K-12 school, yet fewer than half of Americans can name the three branches of government—and a quarter can’t name any branch at all.
Teaching students a historically accurate understanding of our nation’s founding and the role of government is not a priority. Instead, classroom instructional content too often centers on social justice, ethnic studies, and Marxist-inspired Critical Race Theory.
On the most recent National Assessment for Education Progress, American students’ history scores hit an all-time low. As the Associated Press reported, “40% of eighth grade students are performing below basic proficiency in history, meaning they likely cannot identify simple historical concepts in primary or secondary sources.” Only 13% scored at or above proficient in history. On the civics exam, students also fared poorly, with only 22% of American eighth grade students scoring at or above the proficient level.
Government-run schooling is clearly not sufficient to instill students with civic knowledge and values. Nevertheless, the union leaders might nevertheless claim that government schools are still necessary to achieve these goals, even if they don’t always live up to their mission.
The evidence belies this claim.
As Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas has documented, the research literature on the effects of school choice policies on civic outcomes show an overwhelming advantage for school-choice policies over government-schooling. These findings include studies of the effects of different types of schooling on political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, and voluntarism and social capital.
Of the 93 findings regarding the effects on civic outcomes, 60% show a statistically significant advantage for school choice, while only 3% find an advantage for government-run schooling. About 37% of the findings show no discernable difference.
Advocates of government schools often claim that they are where people of all different backgrounds learn to live and work together. Yet, in the research on political tolerance—a virtue our nation needs direly today—there are 13 studies showing a private-school advantage and only one showing a government-school advantage. When it comes to civic knowledge and skills, 10 studies find a private-school advantage, six find no difference, and none find a government-school advantage.
School-choice policies even appear to foster law-abidingness and self-governance. One study, by Wolf and Corey DeAngelis, found that students participating in Milwaukee’s school choice program saw an 86% reduction in property damage convictions, a 53% reduction in drug crime convictions, and a 38% reduction in paternity suits.
The unions and their allies also claim that government schooling is a check on extremism. Do we want our tax dollars funding schools that teach extremist ideologies, including that people are defined by certain immutable characteristics such as race? Of course, that’s exactly what Critical Race Theory teaches, and government-run schools are suffused with it.
Parents are a much better check on extremism. This is obvious because government schools pushing extreme ideologies in the classroom have gone to great lengths to hide their indoctrination from parents. The greatest check on extremism in the classroom is academic transparency and parental choice in education.
School choice—not the government-run K-12 school monopoly—allows for the will of the people, which is true democracy. Parents have a much better record than government bureaucrats of choosing schools that instill their children with the civic knowledge and values necessary to preserve freedom, democracy, and the American way of life.
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18 October, 2023
UC Berkeley law professor urges firms to not hire his ‘antisemitic’ students
A Berkeley law professor is warning future employers to not hire his students — accusing some of them of being antisemitic in an opinion piece published Sunday.
Steven Davidoff Solomon, who teaches corporate law at the University of California, Berkeley, alleged that some of his students at the college promoted hate towards Jews and therefore should not be given jobs in an op-ed he penned for the Wall Street Journal.
“My students are largely engaged and well-prepared, and I regularly recommend them to legal employers,” Solomon wrote. “But if you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students.”
The educator, who advises the Jewish law students association, lobbed the serious accusation at his students after nine campus groups adopted a rule last year banning pro-Israel speakers at events.
Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine drafted the bylaw stating the organizations wouldn’t invite speakers “that have expressed interest and continue to hold views, host, sponsor or promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine,” and asked other student groups to sign on to it.
The student organization said the amendment aims to stop the spread of Zionist beliefs and protect “the safety and welfare of Palestinian students.”
But many on and off campus said it was antisemitic and exclusionary.
“It was rightly criticized for creating ‘Jew-free’ zones,” Solomon said in his opinion piece.
“You don’t need an advanced degree to see why this bylaw is wrong. For millennia, Jews have prayed, ‘next year in Jerusalem,’ capturing how central the idea of a homeland is to Jewish identity,” the professor added. “By excluding Jews from their homeland—after Jews have already endured thousands of years of persecution—these organizations are engaging in anti-Semitism and dehumanizing Jews.”
Another 11 student groups subsequently adopted the bylaw, according to Solomon.
“They didn’t include Jewish law students in the conversation when circulating the bylaw,” he wrote. “They also singled out Jews for wanting what we all should have—a homeland and haven from persecution.”
Palestinians, however, often advocate for the same thing, a homeland and haven from persecution, themselves as they live under a blockade by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza — the latter of which has been called “an open-air prison” by some human rights organizations.
Still, Solomon called the Berkeley students’ behavior “shameful” and claimed it made the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on innocent Israeli civilians possible.
“The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible,” he said. “It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.”
Solomon called on potential employers to “treat these law students like the adults they are” during the recruiting process.
“If a student endorses hate, dehumanization or anti-Semitism, don’t hire him. When students face consequences for their actions, they straighten up,” he wrote.
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NY Legislature approves 5 new NYC charter schools following state accord
State regulators approved the applications to open 5 new charter schools in New York City over the next two years — following a Post campaign that pressured state lawmakers to ease the cap that blocked expansion.
The five new schools — Bed Stuy New Beginnings Charter School 2, Central Queens Academy Charter School II, Haven Charter High School, Kwenda Collegiate Girls Charter School and MESA Charter High School 2 — had been on hold since 2019 because of the rigid limit set in state law.
“These were five strong applications for new charters when they were first approved back in 2019 and even stronger – and needed more today,” Joseph Belluck, chairman of the State University of New York Trustees’ Charter Schools Committee, said in a statement Monday.
“Parents in these districts, some of which are within the most economically disadvantaged in NYC, are clamoring for a high-quality education option in their area and we’re confident these new schools will provide just that. These are applicants with a strong track record, that come from the communities they wish to serve and that have thoughtful plans to deliver innovative, rigorous academic programs to children and young adults that need them most,” he said.
SUNY is one of the two authorities that review, approve and reject charter school applications, along with the state Education Department/Board of Regents.
Two of the five schools — Central Queens Academy Charter School II and Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School 2 — will open in August, 2024. Central Queens Academy will eventually serve grades K to 8 and Bed Stuy Charter grades K to 5.
Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School 2 will open in August 2025 and serve students covering the heavily Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods in southwestern Brooklyn’s District 20. It will seek to replicate the successful MESA HS in Bushwick.
The Haven Charter High School will open in August 2025 and serve students in the south Bronx and northern Manhattan and focus on career and technical education programs.
In April, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature approved a law as part of the state budget that paved the way for 14 new charter schools to open in the Big Apple’s 5 boroughs, and 8 others outside the city — 22 in total.
The deal was only agreed to following a grueling political fight with anti-charter teachers’ unions and their allies in the Legislature.
Hochul’s initial plan would have removed a state cap of 275 within the five boroughs and allow for the reissuance of so-called “zombie” licenses from shuttered schools.
But Democrats who control the state Senate and Assembly rejected that proposal, following fierce opposition from the United Federation of Teachers.
An accord was reached allowing the 22 “zombie” charters to be reissued to new schools, with Hochul agreeing to have the state pick up the entire tab for the cost.
The Post published a series of stories showing the academic success of charter school stories, whose students often outperform those in traditional public schools.
The state law allowing charter schools was approved in 1998 by then-Gov. George Pataki and the sector’s educators and backers are celebrating the 25th anniversary.
There are now 142,500 students enrolled in 274 charter schools throughout the five boroughs – roughly 15% or one of every six public school students.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/16/5-new-nyc-charter-schools-approved-following-state-accord/
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Our Public Schools Are a National Disaster
Perhaps what’s most distressing about the latest collapse in high school test scores is that no one seems to be very distressed.
You’ve probably heard the news that ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year. Our high school kids are less equipped for a job or college than at any time in three decades.
Why isn’t anyone in Washington or anyone in our $800 billion education bureaucracy sounding the alarm and declaring this a national emergency? It certainly puts our national security, our technological superiority, and our economic prosperity in grave danger.
Instead of outrage, it is almost as if Americans have become anesthetized to bad news about our kids.
One theory is that Americans feel about their local schools as they do toward Congress: They love their own representative but think the rest of the members are corrupt and incompetent.
Yes, there are some excellent public schools, and yes, there are thousands of great teachers. But I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and we had to pull our kids out of the public schools because they were so bad—and because they shut down during COVID-19.
I shudder to think what’s going on in the Baltimore schools down the road.
Exactly 40 years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its findings on the state of the schools in its 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” Here was the grim conclusion: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
The nation never paid attention. If you think I’m blowing one bad report out of proportion, the National Assessment of Educational Progress report that came out earlier this year found similarly dismal student performance in the public schools. Reading and math proficiency collapsed over the past four years in part because of the teachers unions’ insistence that public schools stay closed during COVID—a national act of child abuse.
The left obsesses about income inequality and the gap between rich and poor. Yet they are so captive to the teachers unions that they do nothing about what is arguably the most regressive policy in the United States: our failing public school system. The decline in test scores is only half the story. The other part of the story is that the biggest declines in learning and achievement are among the poorer families.
I’m the furthest thing from an education expert, but I have had five kids. It’s pretty clear that three essential components to an enriching education are discipline in the classroom, high expectations, and a classical curriculum. This isn’t that complicated. It’s not like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
Today, most public schools fail all three of these standards.
California recently announced it is going to make climate change a standard part of the school curriculum. Really? They are going to scare the bejesus out of kids with a propaganda campaign telling them the world is coming to an end. Why don’t they just try phonics so kids can read?
The school blob’s pitiful response to this abject failure to teach is to call for more money. We’ve tried that for 40 years. Spending per student in the public schools after adjusting for inflation is up 50 percent in 30 years, which almost entirely inversely correlates with the continual test score slide.
The one glimmer of hope is the burgeoning school choice movement in the United States, which allows the dollars to follow the students and parents to choose the best schools for their kids—public, private, Christian, Jewish, or whatever works. Ten states this year have expanded school choice.
Meanwhile, the teachers unions argue with a straight face that school vouchers would hurt the public schools. Have they seen the test scores? How could they possibly get worse?
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17 October, 2023
No One Should Be Surprised By The Depraved Radicalism On College Campuses
Students and administrators at top universities — along with Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, and practically the entire radical left industrial complex — have shocked Americans by supporting terrorists who massacred more than 1,200 Jews last weekend. No one should be surprised, however.
As we have long pointed out, DEI, CRT, BLM, ESG, etc. — the radical left’s unsavory alphabet soup — are Marxist groups or concepts dedicated to societal destruction, not reform.
Their leaders were clear about this. They said it. Elite institutions handed the keys to society to them for many reasons — fear, white guilt for crimes they never committed, a period of collective hysteria following George Floyd, careerism, etc. But they can’t now claim to have been misled.
“Critical Race Theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it,” said Derrick Bell, the godfather of Critical Race Theory. Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter, was clear that her goal was “dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Most of the student groups’ statements have quoted the 1960 revolutionary Frantz Fanon, by name or by words. Fanon described “decolonization” as “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”
Larry Summers, former cabinet secretary, may now say he’s never felt more alienated from Harvard, the university he once led as president because 31 student organizations issued a statement condemning Israel — not the terrorists — for the slaughter. But what did people think the radicals meant?
As Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA succinctly put it on Instagram, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” Or, as Joseph Stalin is often quoted, “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
Except now it is finally dawning on many Americans that they sent their own children to campuses to be indoctrinated into the amoral acceptance of the rape of Jewish women, the beheading of babies, the savaging of grandmothers, the slaughter of entire families, the abduction of children.
They accept this depravity because they have been told by school administrators that Israel, like the U.S., is a “settler state,” a place that was colonized. Like the U.S., the descendants of the settlers must now give the country back to the original inhabitants. Practically every campus today has a sign that indicates from which tribe the land was originally “stolen.”
Never mind that Jews preceded Arabs and have continuously lived in the land they are alleged to have colonized. And never mind that those tribes from which campus land was allegedly stolen themselves took that land from another people who preceded them.
Instead, the radical left is pushing their narrative about colonization, justifying unlimited moral crimes with indifference to historical facts. Derron Borders, director of DEI at Cornell, wrote on Instagram that, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”
The day Hamas began its orgiastic killing spree, Borders wrote “F–k your fake outrage at Palestine when you’ve literally been silent about the violence perpetuated by Israel against Palestine every day.”
Cornell parents were so outraged that Cornell now says that Borders is on “administrative leave.”But again, what did they think BLM, DEI, CRT, etc. meant?
Elite institutions began handing the keys to the likes of Derron Borders a long time ago. When universities began hiring unrepentant terrorists and Marxist revolutionaries, like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis, as their professors they had to know where this would all lead.
They produce students who excel at storming Jewish student events with chants about freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” by which they mean a genocide of the Jews.
But those students tend to lack other socially useful skills and behaviors that would make them employable. Only universities seem eager to welcome campus radicals by hiring them as DEI staff or admitting them to graduate programs where they can be trained as the next generation of faculty fomenting more campus radicalism.
This long march through our institutions has culminated in universities that are unwilling or unable to adhere to norms of decent morality, let alone rigorous scholarship.
All of this took decades to develop and was perfectly foreseeable as it unfolded. Now, even if these radical ideologies begin to recede as a result of their excesses, fixing universities will take years, if not decades.
We can begin by defunding the ones who refuse to police the behavior of their faculty, staff, and students when they engage in unscholarly and monstrous behavior. Academic freedom does not require that we donate or appropriate public funds to the arsonists setting decent society on fire.
Firing Derron Borders and eliminating the DEI bureaucracy he heads would be a good start.
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The Lesson Is Clear: Regulation Makes Charter Schools Less Innovative
When the Blues Brothers posed as the band in a rural bar, Elwood asked what kind of music they usually had. The bartender cheerfully replied, “We got both kinds. We got country and western!” If you are seeking a charter school in a state that heavily regulates them, you can expect a similar kind of answer. They have both kinds of charter schools, “no excuses” and college-prep.
Of course, many parents want charter schools with strict “no excuses”–style discipline that focus narrowly on preparing students to excel on math and reading achievement tests, but not all of them do. One of the great advantages of school choice is that it allows families to find the right kinds of schools for their own children.
Quite often, different kids need different kinds of schools. If states regulate charter schools too heavily, they stifle the variety of approaches that school choice could offer and prevent too many kids from finding the right kind of school for them. We know heavy charter regulation has this negative effect on diversity and innovation in the charter sector because we actually measured it in our new peer-reviewed study.
To gauge regulation, we looked at how the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) assessed the policies governing charter schools in each state. States with higher scores from NACSA are those that more heavily regulate who can open a charter school and how charter performance is evaluated, and force charter schools to close for failing to meet those performance goals, even if parents want them to remain open.
To measure how innovative charter schools are in each state, we examined the websites of 1,261 charter schools that opened at the same time that NACSA issued its ratings, to see how they varied along five dimensions: the type of curriculum they used; the pedagogical approaches used to teach that academic content; the types of students they sought to serve; whether they delivered that education in person, virtually, or with a mixed approach; and whether they had a specialized theme, such as technology, art, or the environment.
Some of the states with the most innovative charter-school sectors included Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah. Colorado has charters focused on math and reading achievement, like KIPP Academy, but they also offer classical-education options, like Liberty Common School, as well as schools using Montessori techniques, such as St. Vrain Community Montessori School.
But Colorado, as well as North Carolina, Utah, and other states with innovative charter-school sectors, receive low marks from NACSA for regulating their charter schools more lightly than NACSA prefers. By contrast, states with high NACSA scores, such as Nevada, Indiana, and Ohio, have a remarkable lack of variety within their charter-school options.
The pattern is unmistakable. More heavily regulated charter-school sectors are generally less innovative and diverse.
Let’s put the choice back in school choice. Severely limiting education options through onerous regulation defeats the purpose of true education freedom. Parents care about a lot more than standardized-test scores. They want a school that is safe, aligns with their values, develops character, and cares about their children.
Some states have figured this out better than others. If policy-makers and charter-school authorizers don’t start ignoring national “experts” such as NACSA and offer families the variety of school options they want, those families might avoid charter schools altogether. States with the most innovative charter schools enroll a higher percentage of students and have been growing that enrollment faster than states with the least innovative charters.
Parents want options, and charter-school regulatory environments must ensure that those options are available.
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Australia: Queensland teachers quitting in droves
Will the government ever walk back the wishy-washy discipline policies that are driving them away?
The number of new teachers and teacher aides starting at Queensland schools is barely bridging the gap left by the thousands who are deserting classrooms, despite Education Queensland's celebration of “exceeding” recruitment targets.
In 2½ years, the state school system has hired more than 6600 new teachers and teacher aides. But in the past 18 months, more than 5700 have left the workforce.
There are about 55,000 teachers and almost 19,000 teacher aides employed across the state, which means it lost 7.2 per cent of its teacher workforce in 18 months, and 9.2 per cent of its overall teacher aide numbers.
The Courier-Mail obtained a region-by-region breakdown from the Education Department that showed South East Queensland was topping the teacher and teacher aide losses.
Further afield, Central Queensland and the Darling Downs also recorded comparatively high turnover, while the Sunshine Coast and Mackay-Whitsunday regions were comparatively low.
The new data comes after an alarming two-year surge in the rate of overall Education Department staff packing in their jobs, reaching a five-year peak of 6.61 per cent.
The department’s 2023 annual report said the state government was on track to meet its 2020 election promise to recruit more than 6100 new teachers and more than 1100 new teacher aides in 2021-24.
About 1000 unqualified university students will have taught in Queensland classrooms by the end of this year, recruited before graduating to help desperate principals unable to fill vacancies with qualified staff.
Ms Grace said Queensland was below the 9.5 per cent national education staff turnover rate, and teaching vacancies in the state remained steady at about 2 per cent.
“With a workforce of around 97,000 people, there will always be people leaving and joining, but I am proud of our 95 per cent retention rate among our teachers – one of the highest in Australia and higher than the workforce more generally,” she said.
“There’s nearly 6000 more teachers and 1500 more teacher aides since we came to government in 2015.
“And even as enrolments have fallen through the last few atypical years, our teacher numbers have gone up, meaning our ratios continue to improve.
“But we will never rest on our laurels – we want more of the brightest and best coming to work in our classrooms and staying there.
“That’s why our excellent EBAs, nation-leading programs like Turn to Teaching and Trade to Teach, our new supported pathway for teacher aides, and support for our staff including our new Education Futures Institute, are so important.”
Opposition education spokesman Dr Christian Rowan said Queensland students were falling short of key targets and the state government was failing to deliver teachers to turn this around.
“The government promised 6190 additional teachers and 1139 teacher aides at the last election, but three years on, they’ve delivered less than 10 per cent of what they promised,” he said.
“The latest Queensland Workforce Profile figures from March 2023 revealed there has been an increase of only 578 teachers since September 2020.”
Queensland Teachers’ Union president Cresta Richardson said addressing the current teacher shortage would take time, but the union would continue to work with all levels of government.
“Attraction and retention of teachers to the profession hinges on providing adequate resourcing to state schools along with a focus on the reduction of teacher and school leader workload and student engagement,” she said.
“Quality internships also play an important role and the QTU calls on the state government to expand the Turn to Teach and Trade to Teach programs and to consider a range of other multifaceted solutions.”
The $19.8m Turn to Teaching program – providing aspiring teachers with financial support, paid internships, and a guaranteed permanent role in a state school – had 39 interns in schools in 2023, and a second cohort of 99 due to do their internships next year.
The $9.88m Trade to Teach program – aiming to boost technology teachers by turning tradies into teachers – has 38 registered participants at the University of Southern Queensland or Central Queensland University due to start their internships next year.
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16 October, 2023
Billionaire Board Member to Harvard Leadership: I'm Done
Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife have resigned from the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School in protest of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s initial response to the student letter blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists.
Upset at the “shocking and insensitive response by the president of the university, who did not condemn the letter by student organizations who blamed Israel for the massacres,” the couple submitted their resignations, according to reports.
Ofer, a shipping and chemicals magnate, is worth an estimated $20 billion, Bloomberg’s billionaire index shows.
The couple was joined by many others who expressed outrage over Harvard’s response.
“The delayed @Harvard leadership statement fails to meet the needs of the moment,” said former Harvard president Larry Summers on X. “Why can’t we find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when terrorists kill, rape, and take hostage hundreds of Israelis attending a music festival?”
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Stanford lecturer suspended after 'ordering Jewish students to raise their hands and sit in the corner in public shaming over the oppression of Palestinians'
A Stanford University lecturer has been suspended after asking Jewish students to raise their hands and sit in the corner during a public shaming stunt over the oppression of Palestinians.
The instructor reportedly asked Jewish and Israeli students to ‘identify themselves’ before telling them to grab their belongings and stand in a corner, saying ‘This is what Israel does to the Palestinians,’ The Forward first reported on Thursday.
‘How many people died in the Holocaust?’ he then asked the Jewish students of the class, to which they replied, ‘Six million.’ He allegedly responded, ‘Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.’
He also reportedly stated that Hamas represents the Palestinian people and the horrific acts of terrorism they committed over the weekend were 100 percent legitimate.
Multiple students reported the disturbing incident they recalled as giving ‘1930s vibes,’ to Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center.
'I was waiting to post this until it was confirmed by multiple sources I trust,' Shaun Maguire posted on X naming Hasan Loggins. 'These are 1930s vibes.'
They identified the instructor as 46-year-old Ameer Hasan Loggins, a Lecturer, at Stanford Introductory Studies of Civic, Liberal, and Global Education, however at this time, Stanford has kept his identity anonymous.
Speaking to the Forward, Rabbi Greenberg said that he was told by at least three students who were in the room that the instructor asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves during a session for a required undergraduate course called ‘Civil, Liberal and Global Education.’
Stanford President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez addressed a letter to the university community following the reports on Wednesday, claiming the instructor is ‘not currently teaching while the university works to ascertain the facts of the situation.’
‘We have received a report of a class in which a non-faculty instructor is reported to have addressed the Middle East conflict in a manner that called out individual students in class based on their backgrounds and identities,’ the letter read. ‘Without prejudging the matter, this report is a cause for serious concern. Academic freedom does not permit the identity-based targeting of students.’
The school then went on to confirm that 'offensive speech' is acceptable at Stanford but illegal threats cross a boundary.
'It is important to remember that controversial and even offensive speech is allowed except when it crosses the line into certain illegal categories such as threats or harassment for which the threshold is quite high,' the letter continues.
'Unlawful threats and harassment will not be tolerated. Stanford also has content- and viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner rules that limit locations for banners and signs. Thus, many of the banners and signs have been removed, because they were in places where they are not allowed.
'Moreover, it is worth remembering that while a climate of free expression requires breathing room, our aspiration as a community is for respectful and substantive discourse.'
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Parents Who Object to Pornographic Material in School Libraries Aren’t ‘Book Banners’
Randi Weingarten, president of America’s second-largest teachers union, didn’t even wait for Banned Books Week to begin before posting on X: “Texas teacher fired for reading Diary of Anne Frank to class—THIS Speaks for itself!!!”
Just the latest example of “book banning” in our schools, it seemed.
But like almost every other aspect of overwrought book-banning claims, the description of this example is distorted. The book in question was not Anne Frank’s classic “Diary of a Young Girl,” but an adaptation of that work, a graphic novel called “Anne Frank’s Diary” that emphasizes and inflates sexual passages in the original diary.
Specifically, the teacher asked her eighth grade students to read aloud and discuss a sexually explicit passage from that adaptation, in which Frank asks her friend if they could “show each other our breasts” and expresses a “terrible desire to kiss her.” So, what was billed by the avatar of the American education establishment as a proto-fascist incident was just parents reacting to a teacher’s choice to emphasize sex in the Anne Frank story.
This, more or less, is what has been happening for years now in America’s contrived—and, frankly, perverted—debate over “book bans.”
School librarians decide to stock sexually explicit books, frequently far more obscene than the passage above. Parents object to the presence of pornographic material in their children’s school libraries. And then the American education establishment and media try to tar them as “book banners,” suggesting they are racists, transphobes, and akin to Nazis.
The entire conversation on “book banning” has taken place under a false definition promulgated by PEN America, a left-wing advocacy group that purports to monitor an unprecedented spike in “bans.” But it defines “ban” so expansively as to render that term meaningless.
If a book has been temporarily removed, reviewed, and then returned to the shelves, it has been banned, according to PEN. If a school places a parental permission requirement on a book, it has been banned, according to PEN. If a school moves a book to a guidance counselor’s office, it has been banned, according to PEN.
A school in Miami made international news when it supposedly banned the poem by Amanda Gorman that she read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. What really happened: The K-8 school moved the poem from the elementary to the middle school section of the same library.
Given that most English-language speakers understand the word “ban” to mean “made unavailable,” we conducted a study to determine how many of the 2,532 books that PEN America alleged were banned were actually still present in school libraries. The answer: about three-fourths of them.
The media has fabricated the narrative that book bans are about race. We found that while some parents have certainly objected to books about race, school districts seldom oblige that objection. For example, PEN America listed the Black Lives Matter-inspired “The Hate U Give” as the fifth-most banned book. We found it available in every single school library in question.
The media has also fabricated the narrative that book bans are about LGBTQ identity. But, as The Washington Post documented, only 7% of parental objections included “LGBTQ” without also including the word “sexual.”
All 10 of the books we found that were actually removed most often contained disturbingly explicit passages about sex. Take, for example, the most-banned, “Gender Queer.” That graphic novel features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy. It also contains an X-rated passage.
Lest you think we’re cherry-picking, consider the other top 10 most-removed books.
“This Book Is Gay” provides a how-to guide to find strangers for sex on gay sex apps. “Out of Darkness” contains a rape. “l8r g8r” contains discussions of oral sex. “All Boys Aren’t Blue” contains underage incest. “It’s Perfectly Normal” contains drawings of children masturbating. “Lawn Boy” contains a passage about 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other. “Jack of Hearts” talks about a condom that is “covered in s—-.” “Crank” details a meth-fueled rape. “Lucky” also details a rape. And “A Court of Mist and Fury,” tame by comparison, contains an extremely explicit sexual passage.
The true significance of so-called book bans is not some resurgent racist or fascist impulse exhibited by a faction of American parents. It’s the profound moral disconnect between the 90% of Americans who believe that sexually obscene material does not belong in school libraries and an education establishment broadly convinced that it’s good, necessary, and “inclusive” to show children explicit images of sexual acts.
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15 October, 2023
CA School District Spent Tens of Thousands Creating 'Anti-Racist' Curriculum
Late last month, Townhall reported how a new survey explained why more families have chosen to homeschool their children. According to the poll, homeschooling has become more “racially and ideologically diverse” since COVID-19 pandemic onset.
In the findings, 74 percent of respondents said that “concern about school environment” is a reason why their family chose to home-school. Thirty-one percent of respondents said that COVID-19 policies were “too strict at local public schools.” Forty-six percent said that “local public schools” are “too influenced by liberal viewpoints.”
This week, parental rights organization Parents Defending Education shared documents with Townhall showing that a school district in California paid tens of thousands of dollars to create “Ethnic Studies curriculum focused on systems of oppression, colonialism, and student activism” and train it to teachers.
According to PDE, the Jefferson Union High School District in San Mateo County, California proposed “Ethnic Studies” curriculum, which would “center the stories, experiences, and knowledge of people of color, challenge and dismantle racism and intersectional systems of oppression, and cultivate communities that are committed to wellness, liberation, and solidarity.”
In addition, the curriculum would focus on “systems of oppression,” broken down into specific lessons on “power and privilege” and “colonialism.” One specific example, PDE noted, is “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.”
Reportedly, three schools in the district have begun teaching pilot programs of the course, which would be offered for ninth-grade students (via PDE):
JUHSD hired Community Responsive Education Consulting Group to help develop the Ethnic Studies curriculum and train teachers. Invoices obtained by PDE indicate that JUHSD has paid Community Responsive Education Consulting Group at least $60,000 for their services.
The curriculum also includes a unit on “Social Movements and Solidarity” with links to lesson plans from the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project focused on how the Black Panther Party shaped #BlackLivesMatter.
“It should come as no surprise that American students are rallying in support of terrorists when our public schools teach ethnic studies lessons like this one from Jefferson Union High School,” Alex Nester, investigative fellow at Parents Defending Education, told Townhall.
“When children are taught to lump entire groups of people into categories such as ‘oppressors’ or ‘oppressed,’ and ‘Zionist settler colonialism’ is oppression, it’s really no wonder how a generation of American students have chosen to side with Hamas over the descendants of Holocaust survivors,” she added. “Just 13 percent of American students have a functional grasp on history. Schools like Jefferson Union that spend time teaching divisive race ideology instead of actual history are a huge part of the problem.”
https://townhall.com//tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/10/13/pde-exclusive-n2629803
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Three Jewish schools in London close amid safety fears
Pupils told to stay away after ex-Hamas leader calls for street protests by Muslims
Three Jewish schools in north London are closing on Friday over fears for children’s safety amid a rise in antisemitism.
Fears have grown of street protests in support of Palestinians as Gaza comes under bombardment from Israeli air strikes. A former head of Hamas has called for protests across the Muslim world on Friday.
Ateres Beis Yaakov Primary School in Colindale, Torah Vodaas Primary School in Edgware, and Menorah High School in Neasden all told parents on Thursday they would not reopen until Monday.
The head teacher of Menorah High School for Girls, a state secondary school with 389 pupils, said the decision was made “in view of the planned protests” on Friday.
The BBC reported that Esther Pearlman told parents: “Please be aware that this difficult decision has been reached because the [sic] of the risk of violence on the streets.
“The police are concerned that as the girls are not in school, they will venture outdoors and have asked us to advise you that it is incumbent on you as parents that your children remain indoors.”
Schools have advised Jewish pupils to disguise their uniforms because of a fear of retaliatory attacks.
One father told Sky News he had been advised by his children’s school to alter their uniform “so they are not signalling in any way they are Jewish”.
He said: “And in 2023 for my kids to go to school and it not be OK for them to wear uniform, a kippah, star of David on their blazers, to have to hide their identity in 2023, it’s very scary.
Nearly a week after Hamas militants launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, Benjamin Netanyahu’s unity government is preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak has announced £3m in extra funding to protect schools, synagogues and other Jewish community buildings in the UK in response to Hamas’s attacks in Israel.
The money will be given to the Community Security Trust (CST) after the group, which acts on the behalf of British Jews on matters of policing and racism, said it had recorded a 400 per cent spike in antisemitic incidents in the UK since the weekend’s assault.
They included six assaults, 14 direct threats and 66 cases of abusive behaviour.
The letter to parents at Ateres Beis Yaakov, a small primary school, referred to the call for protests across the Muslim world on Friday.
The letter said the decision was made “in the interest of the safety of our precious children”.
Rabbi Chaim Pinter, the principal of Yesodey Hatorah, said certain measures had been put place, including extra patrols, and therapists and counsellors for children.
Pupils who normally travel in on public transport were now taking taxis, he said.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/jewish-schools-close-protest-hamas-b2428906.html
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In Special Session on School Choice, Texas Legislators Should Emulate Arizona
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special legislative session to begin Oct. 9 to expand K-12 options for Texas families.
In the past few years, nine states have made every K-12 student eligible for education choice.
“Empowering parents to choose the best educational path for their child remains an essential priority,” said Abbott, who noted that a “majority of Texans from across the state and from all backgrounds support expanding school choice.”
Evidence from other states shows that students benefit greatly from school choice policies.
But not everyone in the Lone Star State is on board.
Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, and the House minority leader, claims that Texans “already have school choice” in the district school system. His claim is reminiscent of Henry Ford, who once said that customers could have a Model T in any color they wanted “as long as it’s black.”
The Texas Constitution guarantees funding for K-12, but it does not mandate a one-size-fits-all system. In reality, one size fits few.
Critics also claim that giving families more education options will “destroy” rural school districts. Fortunately, they have nothing to fear. Other states have been expanding choice for decades without harming rural schools.
Indeed, if anything, choice policies appear to spur improvement.
Two states away, Arizona has the most robust K-12 choice in rural areas of any state by a country mile, and its rural schools show strong positive trends in academic achievement. Rural Arizona not only still has Friday night football, but also educational variety and academic improvement.
By contrast, in rural Texas, national exams show a significant long-term drop in learning.
Rural students in Texas suffered large declines in reading and mathematics achievement both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Texas eighth graders dropped approximately a grade level in math between 2007 and 2019 and then dropped an additional grade level between 2019 and 2022.
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13 October, 2023
US Naval Academy Is Sued Over Use of Race in Admissions
A couple of weeks ago, Students for Fair Admissions sued the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Now, it’s suing the U.S. Naval Academy, claiming the academy’s race-based admissions practices are unconstitutional.
The group was already successful in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of race in admissions by private and public universities violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Both suits against the two premier military academies (Is the Air Force Academy next?) assert that West Point and the Naval Academy cannot justify using race in admissions for the same reasons that the Supreme Court found the discriminatory policies of Harvard and UNC unconstitutional.
As a soon-to-be published law review article by my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation concludes, Student for Fair Admissions is correct. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The service academies are the nation’s premier military officer-training institutions, even though they only produce 17% of the officers in all the services. More than 80% of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard, and Space Force officers get their commissions from Reserve Officer Training Corps programs or other direct commission programs.
But there is something special about being a graduate of one of the service academies. Regardless of how an officer received his or her commission, once he or she is on active duty and leading enlisted men and women, no one cares how those officers got their commissions.
The suit against the Naval Academy acknowledges that the academy has produced “some of our nation’s most revered admirals,” but lambastes the academy for now abandoning evaluations of potential midshipmen based on merit and achievement in favor of race.
As one of the greatest fighting captains in naval history, John Paul Jones, once lamented: “Without a respectable navy, alas America.”
The lawsuit, Students for Fair Admissions v. U.S. Naval Academy, was filed Thursday in federal court in Maryland. It makes many of the very same allegations contained in the lawsuit that the group filed against West Point, and it is similarly making its claims under the Fifth Amendment’s equal-protection requirement that applies to the federal government—including the military, the group says.
While the Army and Navy are great rivals when it comes to football, they are not when it comes to their discriminatory admissions. They are, according to Students for Fair Admissions, violating the law with the same arrogant assumption that they are immune from the equal-protection requirements of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Just like West Point, the Naval Academy has a two-step admissions policy: nomination and appointment. The first step requires passing a medical and physical fitness test and securing a nomination from the president, the vice president, a member of Congress, the secretary of the Navy, or the Navy and Marine Corps’ ROTC detachments.
It’s in the second step—the appointment—where the “Academy’s racial preferences kick in,” says Students for Fair Admissions. Only about 1,200 midshipmen are accepted, less than 10% of the applicants who try to get in.
The academy “openly admits that race is a factor” in its admissions decisions. It claims that it doesn’t use “quotas,” but that its “use of race is ‘holistic,’” according to the complaint.
“Holistic” is the modern code word used by academics to engage in the type of discriminatory conduct pioneered by the president of Harvard University in the 1920s. He didn’t like the fact that so many highly qualified Jewish students were getting into the college, so he implemented the type of subjective, individualized “character” and “fitness” reviews—aka a “holistic” review—that would allow admissions officers to keep out Jews, no matter how qualified they were.
That’s exactly what the Naval Academy is doing with its “holistic” approach, according to Students for Fair Admissions. A diversity task force created by the chief of naval operations recommended deemphasizing the use of standardized academic test results and prioritizing “subjective” factors instead. That was intended to improve “minority representation” and ensure the officer corps reflects “relevant national demographic percentages.”
In other words, subjective racial quotas are used at the academy to ensure that the percentage of cadets match the racial proportions of the general population, although now the emphasis is on making the officer corps “mirror the demographic composition of the troops [sailors] they lead.”
A Naval Academy professor involved in the admission process admitted that if an applicant identifies himself as a racial minority—other than Asian—the requirements for admission are immediately dropped. In fact, a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office notes that “the Academy makes offers of appointment to the majority of qualified minorities to achieve the Chief of Naval Operations’ commission goals for minorities.”
Goals equals quotas.
This process is so ingrained that the same professor recounted an episode where the board of admissions “debated whether students of Brazilian origin ‘counted’ as Hispanics” to be eligible for preferred admission,” according to the complaint.
As Students for Fair Admissions points out, all of this is based on invidious stereotypes, categorizing “sailors and Marines primarily as members of racial groups, rather than as individuals, and are grounded in the assumption that minority service members all think and feel the same way.”
It’s also based on the irrational and racist view that black sailors and Marines will be “more likely to trust a black officer or a chain of command that includes black officers … because of their skin color, not their trustworthiness,” with the same being true of Hispanics.
These are the same “nebulous arguments … made [65] years ago by opponents of desegregation” of the military, says Students for Fair Admissions.
This displays a dismissive, contemptuous attitude toward members of our naval forces and “completely ignores reams of evidence showing that trust between sailors at sea or Marines on the battlefield is formed through performance, and that service members in war zones are more concerned with their leaders’ competency than with their skin color.”
The Naval Academy claims that using racial preferences to achieve diversity makes Navy units “more effective at accomplishing their missions,” but cites no evidence whatsoever to support that claim.
There is no evidence that “military units that choose their members based on race are more successful on the battlefield than units who select their members based on objective measures of tactical competency, regardless of skin color,” Students for Fair Admissions says.
This disregard for national security—for training the most effective warrior class possible, regardless of race—is truly concerning, since it obviously endangers our troops and our country.
The courts should not provide “blind deference to assertions of national security or military necessity,” especially when those assertions fly in the face of common sense.
Doing so, as the Supreme Court noted in the Harvard decision, can lead to “gravely wrong” outcomes and “gross violations of civil rights,” as happened in the infamous Korematsu case, when the internment of all individuals of Japanese ancestry was upheld during World War II because of supposed military necessity.
The Naval Academy also insults Americans generally by claiming that an officer corps that does not mirror the racial makeup of the general population will be viewed by the public as not legitimate.
That wrongly assumes, says Students for Fair Admissions, that Americans assess the “legitimacy” and “trustworthiness of an institution based on its racial makeup.” That is “both un-American and devoid of any evidentiary support.”
The group cites polling that shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not support racial preferences in universities and says that Americans “think that military leaders’ over-emphasis on social-justice issues and political correctness is ‘undermining military effectiveness.’”
That may be one of the leading causes of the Army’s and Navy’s severe recruitment shortfall problems.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/06/u-s-naval-academy-is-sued-over-use-of-race-in-admissions
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Meet the UVA Student Leader Who Is 'Proud to Stand in Solidarity' With Hamas
Two days ago, Townhall identified Harvard student leaders whose groups signed a letter supporting Hamas. Now, Townhall is identifying a prominent student leader at the University of Virginia.
On October 8th, Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia (SJP at UVA) published a statement “unequivocally support[ing] Palestine Liberation” and “stand[ing] in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.”
Excerpts of the letter read:
“Students for Justice in Palestine unequivocally supports Palestinian Liberation and the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means necessary.”
“In an unprecedented feat for the 21st Century, resistance fighters in Gaza broke through the illegitimate border fence, took occupation soldiers hostage, and seized control of several Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law.”
“While the Israeli government publicly declared war today, the war and genocidal campaign against Palestinians began over 75 years ago. The Nakba started in 1948 with the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Palestinian villages, forcing 2 million Palestinians into the Gaza strip and expelling over 700,000 from Palestine entirely.”
“We stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters and all oppressed people around the world seeking freedom and a better world.”
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Australia: Jewish students have safety fears over campus support for Hamas
Jewish students say anti-Israel material being distributed on university campuses following the Hamas attacks is deeply distressing and has led to students hiding their Jewish identity, as one of Australia’s biggest student bodies declared it “stands in solidarity with Palestine”.
The University of Sydney Student Representative Council on Wednesday urged students to “stand against oppression … until Palestine is free”.
Earlier this week, the SRC promoted the Sydney Rally for a Free Palestine, where protesters marched on the Sydney Opera House as it was lit in the national colours of Israel, chanting violent anti-Semitic slogans.
“The Israeli state has waged a war on Palestinians for 75 years,” the SRC said in a statement.
“Palestinians have faced ethnic cleansing, torture, bombing and violence against civilians.
Gaza has been under a blockade for 16 years and all Palestinians live under an occupied apartheid state, which is the root cause of violence.
“The movement for Free Palestine is not anti-Semitic, and rally organisers strongly share this belief,” the SRC added.
A spokesperson for the University of Sydney said the vice-chancellor had written to staff and students “acknowledging many hold strong views on this conflict and encouraging them to express themselves in a way that considers the impact on other members of our campus community”.
Paris Enten, a Monash University student who is vice-president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, said many students had family in Israel and felt the impact of the attacks very strongly. “Whilst we in no way want to limit anyone’s freedom of speech, walking through campus and seeing people celebrating the attacks that have impacted them so personally is really upsetting,” Ms Enten said.
“We’ve heard of students who are avoiding campus out of concern for their safety,” she said, adding other students were deeply angry at seeing support for Hamas on campus.
“They’re saying ‘How dare you talk about my dead relatives that way’,” she said.
Association being handed out this week says the Hamas attack was an “attempt to reclaim Palestinian land”. The flyer, which was also distributed at Macquarie University, does not mention the many innocent civilians – including babies and young children – killed or wounded by Hamas, nor the civilian hostages who were forcibly removed to Gaza.
Since Saturday, the AUJS has helped submit more than 400 special consideration requests for students who have fallen behind in their studies because of the stress brought on by the recent events.
Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson called on the Albanese government and universities to take steps to protect Jewish students on university campuses.
She pointed to a recent survey of Jewish students which found 64 per cent had experienced anti-Semitism on campus and 57 per cent had hidden their Jewish identity in order to avoid it.
Senator Henderson said she had written to Education Minister Jason Clare asking him to say how the government would protect Jewish students in universities and schools. She has also written to umbrella body Universities Australia urging universities “to have much better measures in place so that student safety and wellbeing is of the highest priority”.
Universities Australia CEO Catriona Jackson said there was no place for racism or any form of discrimination on campus. She said universities had “zero tolerance for attitudes and behaviours which create unsafe learning and working environments”.
The Palestine Action Group, which was behind Monday’s rally in Sydney, has organised another rally in Canberra on Friday, which office bearers from the Student Association of Australian National University spruiked through their council agenda.
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12 October, 2023
North Carolina Families Win With Passage of Universal Education Choice Eligibility
And North Carolina makes nine. After a transformative year in which lawmakers in more than a dozen states either created new learning options for children in K-12 schools or expanded existing opportunities, North Carolina officials adopted a budget that includes a provision making their state the ninth in the U.S. that empowers all families with the ability to choose how and where their children learn.
Tar Heel legislators expanded the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program to allow every child in North Carolina—some 1.4 million students—to apply for a private-school scholarship. Scholarship award amounts will be staggered based on family income, with students from low-income families receiving the largest amounts: Students eligible for federal school meals will receive vouchers worth the full portion of the child’s state funding from the state education formula, and the awards continue along a sliding scale for children from middle- and upper-income families.
Notably, families have other private-school scholarship opportunities that can be combined with the Opportunity Scholarships. Children with special needs can apply for education savings accounts, which allow parents to customize their student’s education by purchasing textbooks, paying for education therapy and more. Under the Opportunity Scholarship’s new provisions, a child with special needs who was using an ESA but did not qualify for a scholarship will be able to access both.
The ability to combine ESAs and scholarships in this way is an important feature. According to research, a sizeable share—64 percent—of ESA parents use their child’s account for more than one item or service, which means access to a scholarship will help them afford private school tuition and additional services critical to their child’s success.
Children from persistently failing schools who also have special needs often need more than the services offered during a traditional school day. These students benefit from personal tutors and other learning options such as online classes. In fact, my report produced by the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina explains that parents have already been using a combination of accounts and scholarships, though the number of accounts awarded each year is strictly limited by law.
This year, lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Utah created new education savings account or account-style options for children, while Florida and Ohio officials expanded existing private learning opportunities to all children in their states.
These inclusive accounts and scholarships are necessary in more places today because, in some locales, every child is failing. Researchers have found that in 13 assigned schools in Baltimore, Maryland, a grand total of zero students scored proficient in math. Nearly 75 percent of students at these schools scored at the lowest possible level.
Baltimore may be an extreme case, but nationwide, students in almost every urban school system that participated in the nation’s report card scored lower in fourth and eighth grade math in 2022 than in 2019, (scores for a small handful of districts were unchanged). Two North Carolina school districts, Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Guilford County were among those that posted lower scores on these latest assessments.
It is only fitting that when every child is struggling to succeed in assigned schools that lawmakers would make every child eligible to find help somewhere els
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As Families Take to Charter Schools, Cities and Their Teacher Unions Throw Up Obstacles
A vote by the Los Angeles board of education vote last month to ban charter schools from sharing space at 300 district campuses is the latest big-city attack against alternatives to struggling traditional public schools.
With the strong support of United Teachers Los Angeles, school board members say the ban will protect black and Latino students from the disruption and harm that occurs when charters are placed in buildings used by other public schools. But charter advocates reject the board’s reasoning. Far from hurting disadvantaged students, charters in LA and other cities have established an outstanding track record in accelerating their academic performance compared with traditional schools, according to researchers.
Behind the battle in Los Angeles is a fierce competition for students and the funding that accompanies them. Urban districts are continuing to lose enrollment as families leave cities for the suburbs or other states – a broad trend that also effects charter enrollment, to a lesser degree. As more charters earn a reputation for excellence, particularly in major cities, they have become one of the favorite destinations for exiles from traditional schools.
The threat posed by charters – privately run schools that aim to bring innovation to public education – helps explain why districts and teachers unions are putting more obstacles in their path to expansion. In Los Angeles, the ban on co-locations has long been on the agenda of the teachers union and could affect 11,000 students at charters that share a campus, says Myrna Castrejon, president of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), which hasn’t ruled out a lawsuit against the district.
“It is supposed to be a shared resource,” Castrejon says. “But there's constant pressure locally to divide the community, as in these buildings are for district students and not for charter students.”
President Biden, a staunch ally of unions, has emboldened charter opponents. Each year the administration has declined to push for an increase in the $440 million Charter School Programs, which provides vital federal funding for facilities so charters can expand. It also attempted to restrict access to the money, sparking a fight with charter advocates.
Biden’s cold shoulder marks a departure from the support of every president going back to Bill Clinton, says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which advocates for more ambitious standards in public education. “The Biden administration has been hostile to charter schools,” Petrilli says. “Unions have so much power over the Democratic Party and that’s making it more difficult.”
While charter expansion has ground to a halt in many urban centers where the movement first took root, a new frontier of growth has emerged. In southern and western states, charters are chalking up big enrollment gains as city dwellers flock to these areas.
All told, charter enrollment likely grew in the 2022-23 school year, continuing a pattern of incremental expansion, according to an estimate by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), which plans to release enrollment data for last year in November. In the prior three years during the pandemic, enrollment jumped 7% to about 3.7 million students while district public schools lost 3.5% of students.
Enrollment jumped 7% to about 3.7 million students while district public schools lost 3.5% of students, according to this study. The trend was clear among minorities including blacks and Hispanics.
In vying for students, urban charters have one hard-earned advantage over traditional schools: academic achievement.
Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has been tracking charter performance for 15 years in the biggest ongoing study of its kind. After the initial CREDO report in 2009 found that charters on average underperformed traditional schools, suggesting they were a failing experiment in innovation, a second evaluation in 2013 showed improvement.
In June, the most recent assessment of charters, which included schools in 31 states, grabbed the attention of educators. It revealed for the first time that students in charters on average have been advancing in reading and math faster than their peers in traditional schools. Charter students got the equivalent of 16 more days of learning in English and six additional days in math in a school year from 2015 to 2019.
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Australia: What's Gone Wrong With Arts Degrees?
What David Daintree remembers below is very similar to what I remember when I did my Arts degree in the '60s. And my regrets about what has been lost nowadays are similar. I wrote something similar to his comments in 2015
“If you had your time over again, would you do an arts degree?” That’s the question my wife put to me, and it got me thinking. It wasn’t easy to answer.
I really loved my degree in the late 60s and early 70s. It was such a joy to read what I wanted to read across such a wide range of topics.
Sure, there was a syllabus to follow and some of the material you’d prefer to avoid if you had your druthers, but there was also that feeling that disciplined and structured study was a good thing and that mental training was no less important than physical exercise.
It wasn’t just externally imposed discipline, either: true, your teachers chose the contents of your courses, but it was your choice to accept their challenge and enrol.
But things are different now. Arts faculties in universities throughout the world have strayed into the crazy world of identity. Gender and race now define us, and there’s almost no escaping from a focus on certain big-ticket issues such as Colour (black lives matter, colonialism), Gender (toxic masculinity, women’s studies), Sex (choose your own), Politics (left good, right very, very bad).
United, in partnership with this identity focus, is the post-modernist notion that rejects hierarchies of any kind. Shakespeare is not intrinsically better than Mickey Mouse, rap is as good as anything Mozart wrote (he was a white male, after all, even if he didn’t make old age), and stone-age art is right up there with Michelangelo.
These two modes of thinking (and I use the term pretty loosely) make a dangerous combination. Dangerous, that is, if you think that the major achievements of world culture have no special value and that our greatest literary and scientific achievements as a human race are of negligible worth.
Then and Now
I recall that as undergrads doing English I, we were expected to read the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (in Middle English, too, not in translation), four Shakespeare plays, a range of novels by authors male and female from Fielding and Richardson up to the mid-20th century, and a good selection of poetry from across the range, though focusing on the romantics.
In later years, the gaps were filled in: more Shakespeare (of course), Milton, the metaphysical poets, Pope and Dryden, and lots more novels. It was a wonderful spread.
The idea was that after three years, you would have sampled and tested for yourself the lofty peaks of English literature and many of the less exalted but important foothills as well.
Nowadays, you can do three years of undergraduate English without more than a glance at Shakespeare and the others who were once thought great. You can specialise before you can generalise. You can even do a degree in Music in some universities now without it being thought necessary to read Western notation.
In general, this deplorable tendency to deny greatness and exalt mediocrity has so far been limited to the arts faculties.
If your goal is to read Medicine or Engineering, then universities are still the best or the only places to go, though we are now starting to hear stories of architecture departments focusing on indigenous design, whatever that can mean, and Law faculties de-emphasising the study of jurisprudence and the philosophical underpinnings of law.
How many law students nowadays, I wonder, would appreciate the Christian basis of the Common Law?
I had the very good fortune to serve for several years as president of Sydney’s Campion College, Australia’s first dedicated liberal arts college.
Campion offered only one bachelor’s degree at that time, focusing on what was described as the “core” subjects—literature, history, philosophy, and theology. There were few choices within the degree—all students studied all four subjects diachronically.
This meant that Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Tacitus were studied at depth in year one; the second year focused on the Middle Ages, third year centred on the moderns. I thought and still think that it was the best arts degree in the country.
By contrast, art students at mainstream universities are embarrassed by the awesomely wide choice of subjects—but how do they choose? There are so many options now, some tightly focused on women’s issues, race relations, or colonialism. Some apparently frivolous, such as rock music studies (I guess somebody has to do them) or tourism.
Are these worthy of a university? Or is it that universities have to offer them to educate or entertain throngs of people who have been told that everyone is entitled to a university degree in something or other?
Choosing more or less randomly from disparate subjects means that the broad overview is impossible unless one has the wit or is very well advised to choose wisely.
Usually, there is often no connectivity or context. History units are studied in isolation. How can you understand Australian history without a background in British history? How can you understand British History without some reckoning with Greece and Rome? How can you do any of these things without first learning to read, write, and think?
The big lie is that standards haven’t dropped. They have.
In a world obsessed with false notions of “equality”, there are now too many sociologists and criminologists and far too few apprentices and tradies to do the real work of running the country.
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson once said that the arts faculties of the mega-universities are no longer fit for purpose. He thought that the humane arts would survive and thrive only in small organisations, such as the liberal arts colleges, specialised institutes, and “classical” high schools that are now springing up all over the world. Every little bit counts.
I treasure a remark of Edmund Burke: “No man ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-gone-wrong-with-arts-degrees-5485769
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11 October, 2023
Teacher Opens Own Schoolhouse, Teaches Bible, Reading, Math on Seeing Drag Queen in Public School
A perfect little red schoolhouse stands on a plot of land outside Petersburg, Virginia, complete with four walls, a flagpole, and that classic schoolhouse look. Its classes follow that old-fashioned school model to the letter in that they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, learn the Constitution, and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
As for the status quo, that same little schoolhouse blows the protocols of public schools out of the water. It certainly forbids LGBTQ ideology and CRT from being taught and refuses to celebrate Pride Month—now espoused in so many American public schools.
Dennita Miskimen, who excelled as a public-school teacher for 23 years, founded The Little Red Schoolhouse in 2022 after becoming disillusioned with her then employer. She saw drag queens walking the hallways where she taught and thought that shouldn't be allowed; nor should showing American allegiance be replaced by LGBTQ Pride ceremonies.
“That's not allowed at my school,” Ms. Miskimen told The Epoch Times. “We support our men and women in uniform, and we say the Pledge every day. We pray to God every day.”
Ms. Miskimen’s colleagues, friends, and family were shocked when she opted to upend her career so close to retirement, but she believed it was her calling from above. “God, He said to me, ‘Build a school,’” she said. “I can stay and retire and be miserable every single day in my life, or I can then enjoy teaching and teach until the last day of my life.” Choosing the latter instead of becoming a public school superintendent as she could have done, the teacher of classes from kindergarten through 12th grade submitted her resignation in April 2022.
Eventually, besides teaching the Bible, patriotism, and real American history, The Little Red Schoolhouse would see its students excel academically. A religious private school with certification, it employs the “more rigorous" Bob Jones University curriculum. Students will learn phonics instead of sight words; Ms. Miskimen’s system has seen kindergarten students reading at second-grade to fifth-grade levels.
“Public school is lucrative business,” she told the newspaper, speaking of why it dumbs down its students instead of spurring excellence. “I don't know whose idea it was way back in time to decide that children should go through school from kindergarten to grade 12, but it's ludicrous.”
Outside the red school's four walls, Ms. Miskimen and her husband also keep animals—including cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, and a donkey—and grow fruits and vegetables on the 25-acre plot, called The Red Barn Farm. Here, students will also learn about another essential subject: agriculture.
“It's important for children to know how to grow food—grow real food,” she said. “Our government is allowing people to put bioengineering in our foods.
“If you learn how to take care of your own self, then you become a little bit more self-sufficient in a world that's changing direction that none of us are prepared to go down.”
The challenge of building a school from the ground up for Ms. Miskimen posed daunting obstacles. From taking out a $50,000 bank loan to delving into the coded construction despite having no general contracting experience, she felt wholly out of her depth. Yet she said she persisted with God's help—and the support of likeminded members of the community.
Pouring the cement foundation cost nearly $30,000 alone. Finding an architect proved nearly impossible as none wanted the job—not without charging exorbitant fees as high as $50,000. But after canvassing several dozen, she eventually found a Christian architect who charged her $3,000. Meanwhile, a nearby Methodist church allowed her to rent a space to teach her first classes as the school neared completion and awaited its permit, which finally came last October. In spring 2023, The Little Red Schoolhouse opened its doors to students for the first time.
It started out with just 15 students, plus a few local homeschool students who volunteered. In terms of staff, besides herself, Ms. Miskimen hired one other teacher, Judy, a few years her senior. “She’s the sweetest. She's got the patience of Job,” Ms. Miskimen said. “I call her Job's sister.” This year their class has grown to 25, with many students hailing from military families.
Ms. Miskimen’s family is military also. Her husband is a retired Army and Navy veteran; both their two sons currently serve, one in the Navy, the other in the Marines. That's one reason she feels it's so vital to continue teaching children where freedom comes from.
“You should respect those who've worked so hard, selflessly, to make certain that we are the land of the free. It comes with a heavy price," she said. “We're learning about the people that came here from England and what it was like for them. Why did they leave? What is taxation without representation?”
Today, Ms. Miskimen is planning to make The Little Red Schoolhouse a nationwide franchise, having spoken to a lawyer last month about getting the ball rolling. “We're talking about what this is going to look like," she said. Down the road, more teachers aching to get out of public schools could soon be hearing daily prayers to God and Pledges of Allegiance in classrooms once again, inside their very own Little Red Schoolhouse.
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Poisoned Ivy: Harvard students will be blacklisted by Wall Street after joining 31 organizations that blamed Israel for the Palestine war
Harvard students who blamed Israel for the massacre of its citizens by Hamas had their own future thrown into doubt last night as a host of blue chip CEOs declared them unemployable.
The elite university faced a massive backlash after 31 of its student societies issued a joint statement ‘holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.
The Anti-Defamation League denounced the statement as ‘anti-Semitic’ and others accused the university of tolerating hate speech.
But Wall Street appears even less forgiving with billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman revealing that his fellow bosses want to know who they are so ‘none of us inadvertently hire any of their members’.
The CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management said he has been approached by ‘a number of CEOs’, adding: ‘One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.’
Jonathan Neman, CEO of food chain Sweetgreen agreed, tweeting he ‘would like to know so I know never to hire these people’.
DoveHill Capital Management CEO Jake Wurzak supported the call, and EasyHealth healthcare services CEO David Duel responded: ‘Same.’
In their statement on Sunday the groups said the attack which left more than 1,000 dead 'did not happen in a vacuum', and claimed the Israeli government has forced Palestinians to live in 'an open-air prison for over two decades’.
'The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,' they wrote.
'From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.'
Among names to have emerged so far are Shir Lovett-Graff, founder of the university’s Jews for Liberation, Bengali Association co-treasurer Shifa Hossain and Fatima Almire of Harvard’s Middle Eastern and North African Student Association.
Many of the groups which put their names to the statement appeared to be disabling their web pages last night while at least two had withdrawn their support in response to the backlash.
The university’s Nepali student association said it condemned ‘violence by Hamas’ and said it regretted that the statement ‘has been interpreted as a tacit support for the recent violent attacks in Israel’.
And the Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo, which promotes South Asian culture, said it would like to ‘formally apologize’.
‘The Ghungroo strictly denounces and condemns the massacre propagated by the terrorist organization Hamas,’ it added.
‘We truly apologize for the insensitivity of the statement that was released recently.’
The statement was initially removed by Instagram but reposted on Monday night with the names of the student groups replaced by just ‘Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups’.
‘For student safety, the names of all original signing organizations have been concealed at this time,’ it added.
Harvard law student Danielle Mikaelian said she had stepped down from her role as a board member of one of the student groups that co-signed the controversial statement, calling it 'egregious'.
The slowness of the college to distance itself from the remarks also sparked fury with Harvard President Emeritus Lawrence Summers calling it ‘sickening’.
'The silence from Harvard's leadership has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,' he wrote on social media platform X.
'I am sickened.'
His successor Claudine Gay finally issued a statement on Tuesday condemning 'terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel' and insisting the 31 student groups 'don't speak for the university or its leadership'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12617357/harvard-israel-hamas-ceos-ackman.html
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NYU Law School Bar Association's non-binary president Ryna Workman sends email saying Hamas' slaughter in Israel was 'NECESSARY' while refusing to condemn mass-murder of Jewish families
New York University's Law School Bar Association president stated that Hamas' slaughter of children in Israel was 'necessary,' in an email send to members of the university community.
Ryna Workman, 24, a non-binary student at NYU's School of Law sent a weekly newsletter saying the murder of innocent Israeli children, women, and citizens this past week was is Israel's 'full responsibility.'
Workman, from Simpsonville, South Carolina, also refused to condemn Hamas - an internationally-recognized terrorist group who have triggered the all-out war.
New York University told DailyMail.com that Workman's statement 'does not in any way reflect the point of view of NYU.'
University spokesman John Beckman said: 'Acts of terrorism are immoral. The indiscriminate killing of civilians and hostage-taking, including children and the elderly, is reprehensible. Blaming victims of terrorism for their own deaths is wrong.'
President Joe Biden today called their actions 'pure, unadulterated evil.'
As well as studying at NYU, Ryna completed their undergraduate degree at the University of South Carolina and also studied at the University of Warwick in the UK on an exchange program - where they took classes in international law.
Workman, who goes by the pronouns they/them, wrote in a weekly newsletter to fellow Student Bar Association students: 'Hi y'all.
'This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.
'Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.
'This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary.'
Referencing violent terrorist group Hamas, who have murdered innocent Israeli children, Workman said: 'I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.'
Workman has worked as a summer associate for two years at Winston & Strawn.
They continued in the email: 'I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison.
The newsletter was signed off: 'Your SBA President, Ryna.'
NYU's Law School Dean Troy McKenzie also said: 'This message was not from NYU School of Law as an institution and does not speak for the leadership of the Law School.
'It certainly does not express my own views, because I condemn the killing of civilians and acts of terrorism as always reprehensible.'
The student bragged on their social media that they 'embrace organizing for what’s right and push for real change in my community.'
Workman said that they: 'Push for economic justice, anti-racism, and gender equality.'
The student said they want to 'become someone who breaks down systems to help make the world we live in more equitable. I hope to continue to be an advocate for underserved and minority communities.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12615911/NYU-Law-School-Hamas-Israel-NECESSARY.html
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10 October, 2023
Some serious concerns about the present efforts in education
Eugene E. Nalence
I got my master’s degree from a well-regarded graduate school of education in 1966. I spent the following 41 years in secondary school and community college classrooms teaching physics, chemistry, and computer science. I still write about education.
I have serious concerns about the present efforts in education—especially urban education. In the more than half century since I got my master’s degree, very little has changed. Results from urban education systems may actually be worse now. That should have alarms sounding, klaxons blaring, warning lights flashing, and every other possible alert activated in every graduate school of education.
How can there still be students arriving at high school unable to read? How can Baltimore public schools happen? What about all the books written, papers published, programs developed, conferences held, people trained, money spent? Why do problems still exist? Why have things gone so horribly wrong?
In the years since 1966, education policy has wandered off in some odd directions. Remember Ebonics? Policies now may be off onto the strangest path ever. There is a new orthodoxy that blames all failures and problems on “white supremacy” and pervasive “systemic racism.”
This clearly totally devalues the efforts of all the people who followed me out of various graduate programs. There were hundreds and hundreds who went out into school systems everywhere and gave their best. Sincere efforts were made. Some tears were shed. Are we to believe that these efforts were all wasted and destined for failure? That idea is mistaken at best, and may be delusional. I know that I am being heretical, speaking in opposition to current orthodox beliefs, but I feel compelled to speak out. I fear no cancellation. At my age (80), the only real cancellation that can come for me is the final one that comes for us all. I would like to offer ideas for new directions educators should explore.
Let me explain the genesis of these ideas. I graduated in 1965 with a BS in chemistry and physics minor, and decided to go into education as a socially responsible career. I needed education courses to qualify for teaching certification, so I went after an MS in education. It turned out that the best (and really only) course that prepared me for student teaching in a large city school system was an extra course I took in cultural anthropology.
That course made me realize that I was going into a different culture—urban teenagers—and I needed to be aware of their customs and values. I could see the highest value was given to personal respect, and perceptions of disrespect always led to problems. I made it clear to every class I had that I would treat everyone with respect and expected respect in return. I never had a serious problem. Mutual respect worked.
I think the principles of sociology and cultural anthropology need to be applied to urban education. If education is not valued, all programs will fail. If students see nothing to be gained from education, nothing will make it work for them. The urban culture—the value system—must be changed so that education is seen to be worth the effort. Education must always be active, not passive. Education is not given, it must be achieved. A model for how effective this is can be seen in any school by checking the music program and the athletic program. In these programs, you will always find amazing results because of the active involvement of students.
I would also like to take the time to clearly demonstrate the ignorance of racism. Albert Einstein used to describe what he called “thought experiments” to work through his ideas. Here’s a “thought experiment” about racism. Suppose we borrow some samples from medical school dissections. Imagine three human brains displayed on separate trays—one Asian, one Caucasian, and one African American. If they were not labeled, no one—no one—could tell them apart. Perhaps blood work or DNA analysis could decide which was which, but as far as appearance and general components, they would be indistinguishable. The same thing would be true for three human hearts. Clearly, all are linked by a common humanity, and all racial differences are purely external, and matter no more than different colors of eyes, different heights, or any other external characteristics. Clearly, racism is pure ignorance. This leads to another conclusion. All differences in educational performance between different racial groups must be entirely due to external causes. These causes are cultural, and without considering them, no educational reform can ever succeed.
If real change is to come, it would be appropriate to create an educational Manhattan Project, bringing together the best minds in education, sociology, psychology, etc., to address the problems with input from all disciplines. It should be done with no limits on ideas to be explored and no political bias. Present efforts in education focus on “equity” as a goal. Equity is not a product—it is a characteristic of the result of a functioning education system. Equity is like reliability. No company manufactures reliability. They produce products with reliability and adjust their processes to make sure that happens. If our education system works properly, equitable outcomes will be a result. Equity cannot simply be imposed.
In conclusion, it’s obvious that something different needs to be done, or there will be a 2023 graduate from some education program writing in 2080, wondering why nothing had changed. Imagine the talent that has been lost since I graduated in 1966. Let’s not lose any more.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/thoughts-about-education-5501887
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Black conservatives are not welcome on the campus of the University of Wisconsin
I truly doubt that many know about this disturbing story, but you should:
During a Thompson Center event, which was also on Zoom, several prominent Black conservative speakers were featured. Civil rights icon Bob Woodson and Dr. Carol Swain were among the invited guest speakers. However, during the presentation, the event was hacked into by some leftists who seemed to struggle with English and were using profane and disparaging verbiage. They even used gay slurs, which one would think would bring forth the ire of the alphabet soup LGTBQIA+ mafia, but nope. Some of these Marxists even went so far as to take the path of Jonathan Toobin and expose themselves, with one even committing a sexual act upon themself.
All this was done to shut down a conversation with Black conservatives, ya know, the feared enemies of the progressive socialist left. The folks that Joe Biden castigated as not being Black if they did not vote for him. Now, where was the national news coverage on this episode? Can you imagine if young campus conservatives hacked into a BLM leftist socialist campus-sanctioned event and conducted themselves in such a reprehensible manner and behavior? Yes, there would be calls of racism, and the students, if they were, would be expelled, and all campus conservative groups would be banished. There would be law enforcement investigations into hate crime charges.
But, when leftists take such actions against Black, Hispanic, or Asian conservatives, there is deafening silence.
It is time we start declaring who the true ambassadors of systemic racism in America are. It is time we start defining and pointing out who the faithful acolytes of fascism in America are. The most racist aspect of those who embrace the progressive socialist left, aka the Democrat Party, is that they believe they have every right to denigrate, disparage, demean, and physically attack any minority that does not want to be a part of their deranged ideology. It is no worse than burning a cross in someone's front yard. Then again, members of the Democratic Party were the founding fathers of the KKK.
Heck, the patron saint of the left, the mother of murdering unborn babies in the womb, primarily Black babies, Margaret Sanger, is revered by the left. Her legacy, Planned Parenthood, does her handiwork in the Black community to this day. How interesting that California Governor Gavin Newsom made a decision based upon identity politics and appointed the head of Emily's List as the next Senator from that state: a black lesbian woman, acolyte of Sanger, and the 20 million genocidal murders of Black babies in the womb. Right up to birth!
But it is not just the blatant racism proven by this disconcerting interruption evidenced. It is also the abject display of fascism that was revealed, once again, from the left. Instead of attending these events and seeking to gain an understanding of different thoughts, perspectives, and insights, leftists prefer to eradicate, eliminate, and shut down any and all dissenting discourse. If you do not like the individual speakers or the subject matter, stay at home or in the basement and just leave well enough alone. Nope, that is not what fascists do. Since they are intellectually unable to make a cogent dissenting argument, their mantra is to coerce, intimidate, instill fear, interrupt, and, in the case of Antifa (the so-called anti-fascists), resort to violence.
I have said it before and will reiterate: Joe Biden's inaugural speech was not about unity but conformity. There are severe repercussions if you choose not to conform, such as having a man interrupt a discussion with notable Black conservatives by masturbating.
The citizens of Madison should be embarrassed to have had this happen. The students of the University of Wisconsin should be disturbed and offer an apology. The Democrat governor of Wisconsin should issue a public statement condemning such abhorrent behavior. None of that will happen because, in the eyes of the progressive socialist left, it was deserved punishment for not being subjugated to their ideology. In other words, being their slaves.
To Live Free means to have the freedom of speech, expression, thought, and conscience, along with the right to assemble peaceably. It is not contingent upon the acceptance of modern American Marxists. It is certainly not based on one's skin color or philosophy of governance.
To the people of Wisconsin: is this what you want to be known for? Heck, all Americans, is this acceptable? Always remember, when tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads to cultural suicide, the goal of the cultural Marxists who desire to transform America fundamentally.
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Flocks of Sheep Roam Our University Campuses
Australian universities are now decidedly devoted to passing as many students as possible.
Passing is relatively easy, considering students typically only have to satisfy 50 percent of the requirements on their exams or assignments to pass. Of course, this is a very low benchmark.
If students are allocated a mark of 49, 48, or even 47, they are bound to use the ubiquitous appeal processes to get over the line.
They have access to a swath of bureaucratic solutions, ranging from essay or assignment resubmission to supplementary, or deferred examinations to achieve success.
Many students ask for preferential treatment, examination concessions, or apply for extensions. They may also request an acknowledgment of a “disability,” and some might even resort to illegal means.
It is not uncommon for academics to pass those who should fail because it saves them the unpleasantness associated with appeals procedures and form filling.
To obviate the need for a long drawn-out, and often acrimonious, appeals procedure, it is often convenient for academics to give their failing students a 45.
Yet hard evidence, for example in the form of directions from the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee, confirms that universities will also lean over backward to pass students who clearly shouldn't be in tertiary education in the first place.
This is a consequence of increased government oversight and novel legislative requirements for universities to reduce the rate of failure for students.
In a sobering article, Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz argues that our politicians and universities “look forward to offering voters a world where failure ceases to exist and success requires no effort. A world in which every student gets a degree just for showing up.”
It is an impassioned plea for society to recognise the salutary impact of “failure” because successful people are those who are able to learn from and outlast failure.
Indeed, how is it possible for people to face the harsh realities of life, if they have never learned to live with, confront, and conquer failure?
Professor Andrew Norton argues that, although the government has correctly identified the university student failure rate as a real problem, “its heavy-handed regulation would create unnecessary red tape for universities.”
Nevertheless, the universities’ response to the rate of student failure (and attrition) is often merely a band-aid solution.
Thinking for Yourself Denied on Campus
The reality is that some students might not really be able to read or write English well enough to benefit from, or contribute to, their education because they lack “critical thinking” skills.
Although some of these students are undoubtedly devoted and hard-working, their inability to think critically unfavourably impacts their studies.
While some universities pride themselves on teaching such skills, these efforts are in vain if students lack the capacity or the interest to benefit from it.
Critical thinking is a disciplined way of reasoning. It involves analysis, evaluation, and reflection.
However, on most campuses, critical thinking, which endures only in an unrestricted and uncensored free speech environment, is frequently curtailed by university administrations that impose conformist behaviour, supposedly to preserve “diversity.”
For example, on Australian campuses, students are afraid to criticise The Voice (and other social engineering developments).
Critical thinking is thus often seen as the natural enemy of the kind of “diversity” that universities impose on students.
In this context, it is useful to remember the words of John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century philosopher and politician, who wrote in his celebrated essay “On Liberty”:
"The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint … and as the power is not declining, but growing unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase."
Mill’s analysis also aptly describes the precarious world of our universities.
He derides the sheep-like conformity, which now enables university academics, administrative apparatchiks, and indoctrinated students to impose their freedom-unfriendly views and arbitrary rules on people.
According to Mill, “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
Surely, there should be an attitude of “openness” that fosters free speech, which is a pre-condition for critical thinking to flourish on our campuses, even if the dark forces of oppression seek to impose a preferred ideology on students.
Undoubtedly, the promotion of critical thinking is the right recipe to combat the ogre of students’ failure and to restore a sense of pride and achievement in those who are seeking knowledge and skills to enhance their lives.
It is a way to overcome an over-reliance on fuzzy feelings or emotions, to avoid conforming dogma and peer pressure, and blatant indoctrination of young impressionable minds on Australian campuses.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/flocks-of-sheep-roam-our-university-campuses-5502834
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9 October, 2023
Florida judge exonerates Christian teacher who was fired for refusing to use a student's preferred pronouns because 'God makes no mistakes'
A Florida judge slammed transgenderism as a 'new secular faith' in a controversial ruling in favor of a teacher who was fired for refusing to use a student's preferred pronouns.
Science teacher Yojary Mundaray lost her job in 2019 after she slated a transgender student's requested pronouns, telling her that 'God doesn't make mistakes.'
Mundaray was fired after an investigation by school administrators at Jose de Diego Middle School in Miami, but law judge John Van Laningham called for the educator to be exonerated as he penned a scathing rebuke of transgender ideology.
'Advocates of transgenderism can be as doctrinaire as religious zealots these days,' he wrote in his decision. 'As this case demonstrates, adhering to the traditional view that gender is biologically determined can get a person excommunicated, from a job in this instance.'
According to Van Laningham's decision, the student - referred to only as 'Pat' - was born a biological female but asked the teacher to use male pronouns after being scolded by Mundaray for 'routine horse play.'
Mundaray refused after citing her religious beliefs, to which the student told her that 'God made a mistake.'
'I'm a Christian, and my God made no mistakes,' the teacher replied.
Students were reportedly left in tears at the hostile back-and-forth, with the school determining that her 'personal conduct... seriously reduced her effectiveness as an employee of the school district.'
The student complained to school administrators, sparking an internal investigation that led to Mundaray being fired in June 2020.
Although the educator lost her job after it was determined she had imposed her religious dogma on her classroom, Van Laningham argued that she was free to hold her beliefs.
'Given that Mundaray made no attempt to force Pat to accept, conform to, or even acknowledge any Christian doctrine, the allegation that she imposed her personal religious views on Pat is untrue,' he wrote.
'At most, Mundaray expressed her view that God is inerrant, which is about as anodyne a theological statement as one could make.
'Further, she did so only in defense of the God she worships. Surely, such cannot constitute a disciplinable offense in a country whose foundational principles include religious freedom.'
He felt that the dispute hinged on religious freedoms, arguing that 'the case is not about proselytizing but about transgender ideology.'
In his decision, Van Laningham also referred to the student with female pronouns, despite their past requests to be identified as a male.
Van Laningham noted a recent law passed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that would have spared Mundaray's job, as it orders schools to identify students by their biological gender.
'In short, had the incident with Pat occurred today, instead of three years ago, Mundaray would have been protected against the significant loss she suffered simply for refusing to do what the law now deems false,' he wrote.
The judge's staunch views on transgenderism in schools, a hot button issue in the culture wars debates dominating American politics, were also on show in his decision this week.
He branded supporters of transgender people as followers of a 'new secular faith', adding: 'Advocates of transgenderism can be as doctrinaire as religious zealots these days.'
The case remains to be concluded, with the Education Practices Commission set to issue a final ruling.
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Two Dueling Court Rulings on Parental Notification in California. What Happens Next?
A Southern California school district requires teachers and staff to notify parents when their children say they have been bullied, are considering self-harm, or decide to publicly identify as a gender opposite their biological sex at school.
But California’s Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, sued the district to block that policy, claiming that it violates the state’s constitution; specifically, the students’ privacy rights.
Emily Rae, senior counsel at the nonprofit Liberty Justice Center, sat down with “The Daily Signal Podcast” to break down the issues at the center of the case. Her organization represents the Chino Valley Unified School District, the Los Angeles-area district whose policy Bonta opposes.
“While it is true that students have certain privacy rights, this is not a case that violates those privacy rights,” Rae said. “The child is going to school; the policy is only triggered or enforced if the child actually goes to a teacher or a school administrator and affirmatively says, ‘I want to go by a different name. I want to use different pronouns. I want to use a different bathroom.’”
“You know, this is an action that the student is taking, and it’s public in school,” she noted. “Anyone who works at the school needs to know this so that they don’t ‘misgender’ a child or ‘deadname’ a child. The only people who don’t know are parents, and that is absolutely not OK.”
(“Misgendering” involves referring to a person who claims to identify as transgender with the pronouns associated with their biological sex, while “deadnaming” involves referring to a person who claims to identify as transgender by his or her original name, as opposed to the name associated with his or her stated gender identity.)
The San Bernardino Superior Court issued a temporary restraining order Sept. 6, barring the Chino Valley Unified School District from enforcing its policy. Yet about a week later, Judge Roger T. Benitez in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California granted a preliminary injunction preventing the Escondido Union School District from punishing teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West if they notified parents about a child’s claimed transgender identity.
The Escondido school district’s policy mandates that teachers and school staff will immediately accept a student’s claimed transgender identity and hide it from parents or guardians unless the student consents to notifying them.
Benitez ruled that Mirabelli and West are likely to succeed in arguing that the school district violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The judge ordered the school district—and the California Board of Education—not to punish Mirabelli and West should they break the district’s policy.
Benitez cited nine Supreme Court rulings declaring that “parents have a right, grounded in the Constitution, to direct the education, health, and upbringing, and to maintain the well-being of their children.”
Bonta has suggested that the Escondido case has nothing to do with the Chino Valley case, but Escondido’s lawyer, Paul Jonna, a partner at LiMandri and Jonna LLP and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, said Bonta is defying Benitez’s order.
“The court’s analysis in the Mirabelli opinion focuses on the First Amendment and explains under the 14th Amendment parental rights are being violated by this policy,” Jonna told The Daily Signal last month. “If this policy in our case violates the U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, parental rights, that would apply anywhere in the state.”
Jonna sent an open letter to the California attorney general, warning, “If California continues to openly defy Judge Benitez’s preliminary injunction, and undermine its holding and reasoning, an injunction against the Chino Valley litigation may be necessary.”
Rae noted that “at the heart of both cases is the same idea, that schools should not be able to keep secrets from parents.”
She also noted that California law already stipulates that if parents are abusing or neglecting a child, the state should intervene. Bonta’s preferred transgender-secrets policies are based on the idea that parents who disagree with the state’s ideology on gender represent a threat to their own children, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
“So, anyone that’s trying to say that kids can get hurt because of this, it’s a red herring,” Rae argued.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/06/inside-fight-keep-parents-know-kids-gender-california-schools
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Stop Sanitizing Education: ‘If It’s Not Offensive to Anyone, It’s Probably Not Important Either’
The American education system used to be the envy of the world, and we need to return to the tried and true ways of traditional classical education, according to the founder of a standardized test for classical education that’s an alternative to the College Board’s SAT.
“The mainstream education system is at fault in a generation that thinks America is the big, bad bully and that isn’t grateful for the country. A country cannot be sustained on this,” Jeremy Tate, founder of the Classic Learning Test, told Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on his “Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
Tate, a former teacher, said he created the Classic Learning Test because of his concerns about the College Board, which he called “left-wing.” The test is for grades 3-12 and can be an alternative to the SAT and ACT for select colleges that value classical education models.
The College Board has “become deeply compromised” over the past 10 years, according to Tate. A 2020 report by the National Association of Scholars found the board has ties with the Chinese Communist Party. The report showed the board was whitewashing the revolution in China and diminishing the role of Christianity and Western Civilization.
The College Board has had a “tremendous opportunity” to decide what is and isn’t important in American education, and that even affects private religious schools. For example, many students won’t take classes such as philosophy and Christian apologetics at Catholic schools because the College Board doesn’t offer AP credits for them, and that could harm students’ GPAs even if they were to get As in those classes. That is because AP courses are graded on a different scale and can boost GPAs above 4.0.
“Here we have this left-wing organization, the College Board—make no mistake, it is a left-wing organization—calling the shots for our Catholic school … that kids are not taking philosophy or Christian apologetics because the College Board doesn’t prioritize it,” said Tate.
In response, Tate created the alternative test, which has three sections measuring verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and quantitative reasoning, but uses different classic source materials for the assessment.
Tate said the College Board’s Sensitivity Committee “has gone totally insane” and everything is declared offensive to someone on the committee, according to people he spoke to who work there. He took the opposite approach with the Classic Learning Test and decided “if it’s not offensive to anyone, it’s probably not important either.”
“Education always is about cultivating the affections in some way for good or for ill,” Tate said, and this current generation isn’t taught “the genius of our system of government and how many millions of people it has lifted out of poverty.”
Particularly after the COVID-19 school shutdowns in 2020, math and reading scores for U.S. students dropped to the lowest levels in decades. Now, many are noticing the need for education reform.
“Everyone knows that we’re in a crisis and what we’ve needed is a solution,” said Tate. “I think classical education is now, I think, front and center as the alternative to the mainstream progressive nonsense that’s gotten us where we are.”
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8 October, 2023
Pennsylvania School Board Reverses Decision, Bans Boys From Girls’ Restrooms
A Pennsylvania school board is reversing a prior decision and choosing now to ban boys from girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, following pressure from parents and students.
Last month, the Perkiomen Valley School Board in Montgomery County voted against a policy that would have required students to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex. School board members reversed that decision on Monday, on a narrow 5-4 vote.
In response to the school board’s previous rejection of the policy, Perkiomen Valley high school students staged a walkout. Some 400 students left their classrooms and stood outside school buildings to protest the school board’s decision.
In comments to The Washington Stand, Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, said, “This reversal is significant for many reasons. I regret that it came down to the students themselves to shame the adults into protecting women and girls, but that’s where we are on the timeline apparently.”
She added, “I’m so grateful to these students, their parents, and the school board members who did in the end protect all students with this policy. They will now be treated to relentless retribution from the state leaders in Pennsylvania government and [President Joe] Biden’s Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.”
The new policy defines “sex” as a student’s “biological sex classification based upon chromosomal structure and anatomy at birth” and states:
In all school buildings in this District, restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that are designated for one (1) sex shall be designated for use only by members of that sex. No person shall enter a restroom, locker room, or shower that is designated for the use of the opposite sex.
The policy was first introduced earlier this year, after a father complained that his daughter reported encountering a male student in the girls’ bathroom and expressed fear. School district officials reportedly told the father, Tim Jagger, that nondiscrimination policies meant students could use whatever bathroom corresponds to their “gender identities.”
After a contentious school board meeting last month that lasted four hours, Republican board member Don Fountain cast the tiebreaking vote in favor of rejecting the proposed policy. Later that week, students staged their walkout, drawing attention from national media, including The Washington Stand, Fox News, and the New York Post.
On Monday, school board member Matthew Dorr moved to reconsider the bathroom policy and was seconded by Fountain, who changed his vote to adopt the policy.
During the meeting, board member Rowan Keenan told his colleagues that he never even knew the previous policy allowed students to use opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms based on “gender identity,” noting that he and other conservative board members would have addressed the issue years ago had they been aware.
He alleged that school administrators “intentionally” avoided discussing bathroom-use policies with conservative school board members. Left-leaning board members asked Keenan to explain how teachers are supposed to enforce the new policy.
One asked, “Can you tell me how you know it’s a boy versus how you know it’s a girl in the bathroom, just by looking? Because essentially, these teachers have to be able to enforce this policy.” Keenan, a bearded man with a receding hairline, responded, “I mean, I’ve been identifying as a woman for more than a year.” He was interrupted by other board members telling him that he was “being actually hateful and triggering towards people.” Keenan replied: “I am here to protect women.”
Another policy, introduced by leftist board member Sarah Evans-Brockett to allow students to “use the restroom that corresponds to the gender identity they consistently assert at school,” was rejected at the same board meeting.
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Why did it take three brave young women swimmers to give their spineless, cowardly university elders a lesson in how to defeat the latest trans sports fiasco?
This may be, dare we hope, a revolutionary moment for women’s sports, one we'll look back on as the fight that changed everything.
On Thursday, elite female swimmers at Virginia’s Roanoke College revealed the trauma they’d suffered after a transgender athlete had joined their team without consultation.
Shockingly, they said they had been abandoned by their coach, their university and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) — which still has no rules or practices regarding trans athletes in women’s sports — and left to deal with the ramifications entirely by themselves.
How remarkable these young women are. Such a public stance would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.
All you have to do is look at the backlash suffered by anyone who has dared speak up against Lia Thomas. Even parents of female swimmers at the University of Pennsylvania, where Thomas began swimming on the women's team after transitioning, had to write a letter of protest anonymously. That was in December 2021.
Flash forward to this week when three captains of the Roanoke team spoke exclusively to DailyMail.com about their ordeal.
‘There’s so many grown-ups around that should be making these decisions,’ 19-year-old co-captain Kate Pearson said.
‘That’s part of their job… I was going to bed at 3am just thinking about it, thinking what could happen, what couldn’t happen, constantly stressed, crying just all the time. Every single day. We just could not get a break from it — and we have studies. There should be a blueprint for this kind of thing.’
A key point: Every single member of the 17-person female swim team unanimously agreed that swimming against the trans athlete — who several knew as a male, and who all team members supported as a trans woman — was unfair.
‘Our coach had even said to us that he had never seen our team so unified on one thing,’ 20-year-old co-captain Lily Mullens said. ‘We’re all on the same page. Because we have other people on the team who identify in the LGBTQ community who were sitting right there, right there with us.
‘Once the ball started rolling, people just started letting everything loose — every issue that they had with this. Every thought, every feeling, they let it out. It was very needed.’
Indeed — it is needed.
It says something when female athletes at a small liberal arts university, who support the LGBTQ community as well as transitioning students, can all agree on one premise: It is — as World Athletics, which governs track and field, has ruled — fundamentally unfair for anyone who has gone through male puberty to compete against biological females.
The trans swimmer was well-known to Mullens and Pearson — as well as third co-captain Bailey Gallagher — as a star.
Swimming as a male, the athlete had finished ninth in the 500 freestyle in their Division 3 conference and eighth in the 100 fly.
Pearson says that the athlete told the team last year that they were transitioning, and that everyone was ‘very supportive. We were like, “Yes. Do what makes you happy”.’
But when told by their coaches that the trans swimmer would now be competing against them, they were flabbergasted. Biologically, the swimmer still retains greater muscle mass, lung capacity, height, strength and speed.
Even the best female swimmer on the Roanoke team would have no shot. Imagine sacrificing your entire childhood and young adulthood to get to that level of elite athleticism — and the short window of time to perform at your peak — only to be told it's all been for nothing.
Compound that with the complete abdication of responsibility by their coach, school and governing body. College students do not have the psychological training to deal with a situation this fraught and delicate. This is not something that should ever have mushroomed as it did.
Roanoke, of course, is most likely afraid of a lawsuit.
The same probably extends to the team’s coach – but his seeming betrayal, his cowardice, cuts deeper.
After that first team meeting, the three co-captains say they told their coach how anxious and hopeless the whole team felt. His response, they say, was that ‘the athletic department told me I can coach a team of one and still have a job.’
What a complete dereliction of duty. How much more demoralized could these swimmers have been? Perhaps Roanoke would do well to hire a female coach for their women’s team.
After that callous reply, the co-captains say their coach encouraged them to write a short letter to the trans athlete, expressing their concerns. Four times they repeat the same sentiment: ‘We all love and respect you… this is not anything personal.’
The letter, which the team says was meant to remain private, was shared by the trans athlete with student advocacy groups, though Pearson — a health and exercise major — says the athlete ‘mentioned that she didn’t even read it.’
Their coach, rather than take a leadership role, decided the best course of action would be to set a meeting between the women’s team and the trans athlete. It did not go well.
‘I was giving how the whole team felt,’ Pearson said. ‘Like: We support you… But when it comes to the athletic side of things, we just think it’s biologically unfair.
‘After I was done speaking, the individual immediately jumped to saying: I was suicidal, I wanted to kill myself.’
Pearson said the room went silent.
‘I was like, I don’t know how to respond to that.’
Of course not. What 18, 19 or 20-year-old would? Why did this coach and this university let it get to this point?
To put such a level of stress and responsibility on any student is unconscionable. To keep them fearful of defending themselves by tacitly allowing them to be tarred as anti-trans is spineless.
College is as much about academics and athletics as it is learning to become a functional, independent adult.
To read the first letter the Roanoke team wrote to the trans athlete is to see their quite understandable limitations: They write of their only biological difference being menstruation, when it’s so much more than that. They write fulsomely of their support and respect for the athlete without explicitly asking for the same in kind.
Again, absent any institutional backing, from the university or the NCAA, this letter put these young women out on their own.
Finally, after getting in touch with The Independent Council on Women’s Sports and activists Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan, changes were made.
Roanoke apparently began investigating which forms of competition were fair to all involved. Last week, the trans athlete quit the women’s swim team.
And their priceless coach, the co-captains say, spat this at them: ‘You got what you wanted.’
The female swimmers of Roanoke have done a brave and difficult thing, but they should be the first and the last. Others shouldn’t have to worry, as Mullens says, about the cost of standing up for themselves.
‘We had our doubts about speaking up,’ she says. ‘We’re like: Oh gosh, what’s going to come at us next? What’s going to happen to us when we try to get a job?’
It is well past time for a governing body to stand up. If the NCAA won’t do it, perhaps a new, independent one needs to be formed.
There is no shortage of athletes, biological and trans, who would surely want to help navigate this new landscape, one that can be made fair for all.
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Teaching in Australia has become a refuge for the least able
Why? Because anybody with options would not want to spend their days in front of an unruly mob
Problems with the Australian school system are a favourite topic for our newspapers, especially around the time of the final examinations for school leavers. The Sydney Morning Herald in particular publishes the notorious leagues tables on which many parents rely in making school choices, but at the same time loves to expose scandals and extravagant spending at big private schools and regularly gives a forum to writers demanding an end to funding for private education.
The problems are real, and it is wrong that parents should have to pay so much for a good education; it would obviously be preferable to have a high-quality public educational network such as the French lycée system in which I spent the first four years of my own schooling. But that is not going to happen in Australia; we are too resentful of excellence. Our education system, meanwhile, is dominated by bureaucrats and pseudo-academics with little idea of the real purpose of education.
Mediocrity starts with the abysmally low entry requirements for teacher training courses; individuals can be admitted with low ATARs. A report from the University of Sydney a few years ago showed that half the student intake into teaching degrees in NSW and the ACT in 2015 had ATARs below 50. Can we be surprised then if the performance of our schools in international rankings has been in steady decline in recent years? Or is it any wonder that the profession of teaching, so vital to a successful society, is no longer held in the high regard it once enjoyed?
But the poor quality of the intake is just part of the problem. Equally to blame is the training students get once they are admitted to teaching courses, which ostensibly emphasises techniques of teaching rather than subject content, and yet seems to leave young teachers unprepared for the realities of classroom management. And all of this is based on a body of academic theory that is in reality an intellectual pyramid scheme, in which each vacuous and jargon-ridden piece of writing cites 10 others of the same kind and quality.
Finally there is the educational bureaucracy. As school standards have declined, these bodies have relentlessly increased the demands they make on teachers, from tabulations of so-called educational “standards” to regular “professional development” and annual “professional reflection” forms – all of which are frustrating and distracting to good teachers and of course incapable of making the bad ones any better than they are. The fact that the increase in bureaucratic demands has coincided with an even more dramatic decline in educational outcomes should tell us something; but the response of the “academics” and the bureaucrats is always to do more of what doesn’t work.
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5 October, 2023
School Districts With DEI Officers See Worse Black, Hispanic Learning Loss and Secretive Transgender Policies
Administrators focused on diversity, equity and inclusion have ballooned in public school districts across the country, but their presence doesn’t translate to educational improvement for black and Hispanic students, nor to the inclusion of parents in decisions about their kids’ health and well-being.
According to a new report from The Heritage Foundation, the percentage of large school districts with a chief diversity officer rose from 39% to 48% from 2021 to 2023, while school districts with a chief diversity officer experienced a decline in minority student performance and a greater likelihood of secretive transgender policies. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Taxpayers provided $190 billion in extra funding to schools so that they could prevent learning loss during the pandemic,” Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, told The Daily Signal. “Schools then decided to use a bunch of that money to hire chief diversity officers, who actually exacerbated learning loss among black and Hispanic students, rather than prevent it.”
“We found that black and Hispanic students in districts that had hired chief diversity officers lost an additional 4.5 percentile points on their math achievement tests relative to districts that did not have a chief diversity officer,” he added.
“While chief diversity officers were academically counterproductive, they appear to have accomplished ideological goals,” Greene noted. “In particular, we found that school districts with chief diversity officers were significantly more likely to have adopted policies to keep gender transition secret from parents by withholding information about their own children changing names, pronouns, or bathroom use.”
The report, “Equity Elementary Extended: The Growth and Effects of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Staff in Public Schools,” provided first exclusively to The Daily Signal, analyzes the 555 school districts across the U.S. with enrollments of at least 15,000 students. The report identifies which school districts employ a chief diversity officer or an administrator with an equivalent title and role, and compares those districts with data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University showing how well students performed in standardized math tests.
It also compares those districts with a list of school districts with policies requiring that information about students’ changes in names, pronouns, or bathroom usage remain secret from parents. The parental rights group Parents Defending Education maintains that list.
Of the 555 school districts with at least 15,000 students, 265 (or 48%) employed a chief diversity officer as of August. In 2021, only 214 (39%) of those school districts employed such an officer. While 13 school districts appeared to have eliminated this kind of DEI officer, 64 districts had hired one.
In school districts that employed a DEI officer, black students were 4.5 percentile points more likely to have lower math scores between 2019 and 2022. This represents about a third of the average learning loss in math for all students in this time. Even when taking the math learning loss of white students into account, the black students’ learning loss still translates to 2.7 percentile points, according to the report.
Hispanic students in a school district with a DEI officer fared even worse, according to the report. Between 2019 and 2022, these students experienced a learning loss of 4.8 percentile points worse than students in districts without a DEI officer. Adjusting for the change in white achievement in those same districts shrinks the number to 3.2 percentile points.
In other words, at least according to math scores measured by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the employment of DEI officers correlates with larger racial performance gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students.
Yet DEI officers also translated to a higher likelihood of policies keeping parents in the dark when their children claim to “identify” as transgender, the study also finds.
Forty percent of school districts with a chief diversity officer had policies directing teachers and staff not to notify parents if their children claim to identify as a gender opposite their biological sex at school, while only 17.2% of districts without a chief diversity officer had such policies.
Even narrowing the comparison to districts within the same states, a district with a DEI officer is 15.7% more likely to have a gender-secrets policy than non-DEI districts in the same state, the study finds. Some states have banned such policies, so an analysis of districts within each state helps illustrate the facts on the ground. The impact of larger, liberal states such as California does not account for the greater likelihood of DEI districts having a gender-secrets policy.
DEI staffs also dominate universities, and that trend may trickle down to K-12 schools.
A previous Heritage Foundation report measured the size of DEI bureaucracies at the 65 universities that in 2021 were members of one of the Power 5 athletic conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Southeastern Conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference), finding that the average university listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals.
DEI staff outnumbered professors at the average university’s history department (by a factor of 1.4 to 1). The average university had 3.4 employees working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
The more recent study suggests that the growing impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers translates to less racial equality and the exclusion of parents from decisions about their own children. The study urges parents, school districts, and state legislators to reexamine the effectiveness of chief diversity officers and consider eliminating their roles in public schools.
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‘Groundbreaking Legal Victory’: Court Rules School Cannot Trans Kids Without Parental Consent
A Waukesha County Circuit Court ruled Tuesday in favor of Wisconsin parents, deciding that a Wisconsin school district “abrogated” parents’ rights when it decided to socially “affirm” their daughter as a transgender boy against their wishes.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, two sets of Wisconsin parents had sued Kettle Moraine School District, accusing the district of violating their parental rights by “adopting a policy to allow, facilitate, and affirm a minor student’s request to transition to a different gender identity at school without parental consent and even over the parents’ objection.”
Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell granted the parents’ motion for summary judgment Monday, ruling on the merits of the case without a trial. His ruling and order, which the clerk filed Tuesday, said that the case dealt with “whether a school district can supplant a parent’s right to control the healthcare and medical decisions for their children.”
“The well established case law in that regard is clear,” he ruled. “Kettle Moraine can not.”
The judge concluded: “The current policy of handling these issues on a case-by-case basis without either notifying the parents or by disregarding the parents’ wishes is not permissible and violates fundamental parental rights.”
Maxwell ruled in favor of the parents and issued an order preventing Kettle Moraine School District from “allowing or requiring staff to refer to students using a name or pronouns at odds with the student’s biological sex, while at school, without express parental consent.”
The parents’ lawsuit, filed in the Waukesha County Circuit Court in November 2021, alleged that Kettle Moraine School District violated the constitutionally protected rights of one set of parents when it allegedly pushed their 12-year-old daughter toward a significant life decision she was not prepared to make by socially affirming her claimed gender identity against her parents’ wishes.
Another set of parents mentioned in the suit expressed concerns that the district would push their two children toward gender transition in the same fashion.
“I am so grateful the Court has found that this policy harms children and undermines the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” Tammy, the mother of one of the children named in the lawsuit, told The Daily Signal. (She asked that her last name be withheld to protect the family’s privacy.)
“Our daughter experienced increased anxiety and depression and her school responded to this by disregarding our parental guidance,” she explained. “Since leaving the school and allowing our daughter time to work through her mental health concerns, she has been able to healthily thrive and grow. Parents should be concerned when school districts disregard their concerns and override the voice and role of parents.”
T.F.-v.-Kettle-Moraine-School-District-DecisionDownload
That 12-year-old girl began experiencing “rapid onset gender dysphoria” as well as “significant anxiety and depression” in December 2020, attorneys from ADF and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said in a May 2021 letter to members of the school district.
Her parents temporarily withdrew her from Kettle Moraine Middle School so she could attend a mental health center and process what was going on, but the center allegedly affirmed to her that she was actually a boy and encouraged her to transition. So in early January, according to the letter, she told her parents that she wanted to use a boy name and boy pronouns at school.
The girl’s parents decided that “immediately transitioning would not be in their daughter’s best interest,” the letter said, and they told their daughter that they wanted her to explore the cause of her feelings before taking such a significant step. They also asked the staff at the school to continue using her legal name and female pronouns.
“But the District refused to honor their request,” the attorneys wrote, and the parents “were told that, pursuant to District policy, school staff would be required to address their daughter using a male name and pronouns if that’s what she wanted.”
The parents then had no choice but to withdraw her from the school district and to distance her from the mental health center and therapist she had been seeing, the letter said, “concerned that daily affirmation of a male identity could harm their daughter.”
Kettle Moraine School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the parents’ legal teams hailed the news as a “groundbreaking legal victory” for parental rights.
“This victory represents a major win for parental rights,” Luke Berg, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty deputy counsel, said in a statement Tuesday. “The court confirmed that parents, not educators or school faculty, have the right to decide whether a social transition is in their own child’s best interests. The decision should be a warning to the many districts across the country with similar policies to exclude parents from gender transitions at school.”
Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights, emphasized that “parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children is one of the most basic constitutional rights every parent holds dear.”
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College Admissions Officers Use Pronouns to Give Preferences to Liberals
Why are so many of our institutions captured by people on the fringes of the cultural Left? Two new books, one by Christopher Rufo and another by Richard Hanania, offer comprehensive answers to that question.
But a recent study by two economists at West Virginia University provides a microcosmic example of how cultural leftists keep a grip on their power in universities: They discriminate in favor of their own.
No, this isn’t a study about suppressing conservative speech on campuses. This sort of discrimination is much more subtle.
The study, “Gender Identity and Access to Higher Education,” found that college admissions counselors give preferential treatment to emails from people with pronouns in their signature lines.
The authors of the study sent emails to college admissions counselors at 500 randomly selected colleges and universities in the United States. Some of the emails included pronouns in the signature line—“he/him,” “she/her,” or “xe/xem.”
Those who did received responses 4% more often than those who did not.
There was no statistical difference in the speed of replies or in the number of words included in a reply, which suggested that “the decision was whether to respond, and [pronouns] did not affect the eagerness to respond.” But admissions officers’ responses to pronoun users tended to be different than to non-users.
Responses to pronoun users were “more positive” and “friendlier,” including “heightened use of exclamation marks and emojis.” Admissions officers used exclamation marks 10.5% more often with pronoun users and used emojis 141.7% more often with pronoun users.
Pronoun non-users tended to receive “strictly factual replies.”
What follows are some representative examples of the trend. The economists sent an identical email asking about the timing and delivery of decision letters to three admissions officers. The first two emails included pronouns, the third did not.
Here are the responses:
Hi Morgan, Thanks for your message! The first item we will mail to you is your admission decision. It will be sent electronically and if admitted, also through the mail. Will you have moved by February?
Hi Morgan, How long until you move? We will send an admissions email and then a physical packet in the mail within about 3 weeks from them [sic] so it will depend on that as most communication from WVU will be via email. Warm regards,
I would say you should use whichever one you want to get your mail sent to because we’ll mail your acceptance letter, scholarship certificate, and financial aid package to that address.
It was noteworthy that the economists did not find a preference for nonbinary people (represented by “xe/xem” pronouns), but rather a fairly uniform preference for anyone who uses pronouns.
Thus, the economists concluded that the data suggest “that agents of higher education institutions hold a preference for progressively minded individuals.”
The institutions most likely to discriminate tend to be medium to large, based in cities, and have low retention rates and a large proportion of students receiving need-based financial aid.
The economists note that by giving pronoun users preferential treatment, admissions counselors make it easier for those applicants to gain admission.
In economic parlance, they “decrease the transaction costs” of the application process. Admissions officers’ preferential treatment also has the effect of promoting their institutions to pronoun users above others.
If you follow this logic one step further, the end result is that pronoun users will have an easier time getting through the application process and will tend to feel more welcome at a school than non-users will.
It may be a small effect in the grand scheme of things, but it’s only one small effect among thousands of similar effects. And just as thousands of raindrops will fill a bucket, thousands of little discriminations will fill a university with the preferred sort of student.
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4 October, 2023
Students being placed into advanced math classes based off standardized test scores, not grades
DALLAS (AP) — When Tha Cung looked over his sixth-grade class schedule, he took notice of the math block. He had been placed in an advanced class.
“I didn’t know ‘honors’ even existed,” he said.
Tha was little when his family immigrated from Myanmar and, for much of his time in Dallas schools, he took courses designed for children who are learning English. In fifth grade, his standardized test scores showed he was a strong math student — someone who should be challenged with honors classes in middle school.
Under the Dallas school system’s policy, Tha’s parents didn’t need to sign him up for advanced math. A teacher or counselor didn’t have to recommend him, either. In many schools, those are the hoops a student must get through to join honors classes. But Tha was automatically placed in the advanced course because of his scores on Texas’ STAAR test.
A version of this approach will soon be replicated statewide as part of an effort to remove barriers that can stand between bright students and rigorous courses. Instead of having families opt in to advanced math, they are instead given the choice to opt out
A new Texas law calls for every student who performs in the top 40% on a fifth-grade math assessment to be enrolled automatically in advanced math for sixth grade.
The rollout could provide lessons for other states. Leaders across the country are confronting the need to prepare a new, diverse generation of workers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. Heightening the alarm: Students nationally have been struggling to bounce back from widespread learning loss in math.
Before the pandemic, Black and Hispanic students in Texas were routinely left out of advanced classes — even if they earned high test scores, according to research by the E3 Alliance, an Austin-based education collaborative that advocated for the law.
Enrolling in advanced math in sixth grade clears the way for a student to take Algebra I in eighth grade. That leads to courses such as calculus and statistics during high school. And that can set a foundation for a STEM major in college and a high-paying career.
Advocates for the new policy say it’s a workforce issue in addition to an equity issue.
“Especially in today’s rapidly changing and technology-driven economy, math matters more than ever — for individual students and for the larger Texas workforce to remain competitive,” said Jonathan Feinstein, a state director at The Education Trust, a national nonprofit promoting equity.
One recent morning at Sam Tasby Middle School, dozens of students in Room 304 were calculating the area of parallelograms and trapezoids. One of them, Alexis Grant, 11, thinks her year in sixth-grade honors math will pave the way for achieving one of her goals: studying at Harvard.
“I knew it would be challenging,” Alexis said of her math class. “We push each other to get the work done.”
More Dallas students have been enrolling in advanced math, and the classrooms have been more diverse.
In 2018, prior to the opt-out policy, about 17% of Black students in sixth grade and one-third of Hispanic students were in honors math, compared to half of white students. Now, 43% of Black students are in honors math when they enter middle school and nearly six in 10 Hispanic students are. The percentage of white sixth graders in honors math has also gone up, to roughly 82%.
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Student Loan Repayments Begin Again
Student loan deferment has come to an end. The U.S. Supreme Court in late June overturned President Joe Biden’s executive bribe and, as of Sunday, October 1, those who had not been paying their student loans all along need to resume paying their debts.
Many took advantage of the COVID-era deferment that should have ended two and a half years ago when people were able to go back to work. But the freeze on student loan payments continued, and President Biden led people further down the path of financial burden by promising to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.
Biden and even then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew that he didn’t have the executive power to forgive that debt, but he tried to do it anyway. Not having to pay student loans during the pandemic acted as a carrot in front of voters who saw loan forgiveness as a way out of a financial hole. Team Biden used those borrowers’ plight to apply pressure on the rest of the government to allow his overreach to stand.
Borrowers got used to not having to account for that student loan deficit in their monthly budgets. They could afford more things and have taken on other debt that they now can’t afford. Adding to the hurt of that renewed financial burden is a terrible economy, bad inflation, and rising interest rates. One does feel sad for them, but at the same time, they made a bet and lost. The twofold bet was that Biden would be able to get away with an unconstitutional act and that the rest of America would be okay with using their tax dollars to cover the cost.
Politically, the blame is thrown at the Republicans’ feet, but as Politico reports, this reversal of student loan forgiveness has been part of the Democrat calculus for a while. As much as Politico tries to paint it as Democrat benevolence in terms of programs to help with repayments, the important political point is buried in the happy talk. Realistically, it’s been a lost revenue stream for the government since the loan repayments stopped. However, the trade-off of that renewed revenue stream will mean a more bearish economy since borrowers are going to have to slow spending on goods and services as a result.
Duping millions of people into going along with their harebrained student loan forgiveness scheme is bad, but it’s only a symptom, and it’s not the actual source of the problem.
The advocates for student loan forgiveness, though wrong on just about every point, are right about a college education being too expensive for the average American. Why do colleges and universities charge so much for higher education? Our Nate Jackson has written about this at length, but between government subsidies, too much unnecessary staff (read: DEI diversity hires), and imprudent spending, the price of a college education is unsustainable. Many people who aren’t of the elite class are going to choose other options than college.
Part of the impetus that spurred on the whole student loan forgiveness scheme came from the ideologically driven premise that college debt hurts students of color more than other students. However, this premise is part of the problem. Racism is not to blame for college debt; rather, it’s the pushing of the need for college diversity on students who can’t achieve academically and yet have incurred college debt.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh recently did an interview with Heather Mac Donald, academic and author of When Race Trumps Merit. Mac Donald addresses the inherent problems with identity politics in college. When merit is replaced by an oppression hierarchy, people who aren’t ready or aren’t able to handle the academic rigor of becoming a doctor or engineer are then funneled into programs that are a waste of their time and money, such as gender or racial studies, which are not exactly financially responsible paths for future careers. Even overpaid DEI professors are culled once their positions fall out of favor.
Democrats have used COVID, systemic racism, and the economy as an excuse to lure borrowers into a false sense of financial security. They will try to spin it as the Republicans’ fault, but the reality is that the Democrats placed power, ideology, and potential votes over the financial well-being of their constituents. It won’t end until feckless spenders are booted out of office and the American public becomes financially literate and perhaps even opts out of the college racket.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100922-student-loan-repayments-begin-again-2023-10-03
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Johnny Can’t Spell G-A-Y
You just thought you could get away from Pride Month, which was back in June. The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald laments that leftists just won’t quit.
It has been almost 90 days since Gay Pride month. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is too long a hiatus from the imperative of immersing young children in the arcana of gay and trans identity. So throughout the week of October 9, many elementary school classrooms in Los Angeles will celebrate “National Coming Out Day,” which falls on October 11.
October is itself LGBTQ+ History Month, the Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy has reminded what it calls the district’s “fabulous educators.” Other LGBTQ+ programming will take place throughout October, picking up where Gay Pride month left off. The goals for the so-called Week of Action are ambitious: to turn six-year-olds into budding gender and critical race theorists.
Mac Donald goes on to detail various indoctrination lessons — everything from rainbow colors all over the place to more insidious things like an “Identity Map” for kids to chart their experiences and learning The Narrative about Jazz Jennings, the gender confused boy whose mother is exploiting him for her own gain. Mac Donald highlights plenty more outrageous grooming, but she adds this context:
In 2022, 61 percent of third-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District did not meet California’s watered-down, equity-driven standard for English. Children not reading by third grade will fall further and further behind in school, since they will be ill-prepared to absorb ever more complex academic content across a range of fields.
In 2022, 59 percent of third-graders failed to meet the state’s already-low standard for math competency. Over 76 percent of LAUSD eighth-graders did not meet math standards. Eighth-grade math is a make-or-break point, after which poorly performing students become ever less likely to master the skills necessary for STEM careers or admission to selective schools.
On top of that, she says, the learning loss during COVID was appalling.
But even if fluency in LGBTQ-speak is a school’s primary concern, how will third-graders parse the words “gender expression” and “sex assigned at birth,” much less fathom their meanings, if they can’t do basic third-grade reading? How will third-graders perform the arithmetical calculations necessary to track the ever-increasing number of LGBTQ categories served up by the LAUSD, without third-grade math skills?
Remedying Los Angeles’s ongoing educational failure should be the district’s sole focus. There is barely enough time in the school year to make up for the home deficits that the majority of students bring to school. The district should excise from the curriculum everything not related to academic knowledge and core academic skills.
Regarding the grooming culture, she concludes:
Advocates justify premature gay and trans indoctrination on the ground that it is necessary to prevent harm to trans youth. Their ultimate blackmail is the threat that without such indoctrination (and without “gender affirming care”) trans adolescents will commit suicide. But if “trans” adolescents have higher rates of claimed mental illness and distress, that distress is more likely the cause of their trans and nonbinary identities than the result of the social rejection of those alleged identities.
The number of trans-identifying students is rising exponentially, leading to majorities in the student bodies of the most progressive schools. This rise is without any historical precedent. It is proof of social contagion, not of a preexisting biological reality. …
Los Angeles’s kindergartners know nothing about sex, much less about its recent artificial mutations, other than what the activists are cramming down their throats. If this is not grooming, it is hard to know what is.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100909-in-brief-johnny-cant-spell-g-a-y-2023-10-03
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3 October, 2023
GMU’s President Gets It Wrong: DEI Has Overtaken His School
Does having a bevy of officers who push race, sex, and LGBT victim/oppressor theories on university students enhance or detract from their learning?
This is the question that George Mason University’s president, Gregory Washington, never addresses in his unusually public criticism of our report for The Heritage Foundation on the extravagant “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies he oversees at GMU. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Instead, Washington claims that we overcount the resources his school dedicates to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, and argues that he actually isn’t 100% all in on DEI—just mostly all in.
Even if he were correct about the numbers (and we explain below why he isn’t), the burden is squarely on GMU’s president to justify why spending on divisive programs that breed anxiety and resentment among students should be anything other than zero.
Washington was so concerned by our exposé that he emailed all 40,000 GMU students Tuesday afternoon with an attempted rebuttal. But Washington doth protest too much, and we stand behind our findings.
We start by noting that Washington fails to acknowledge that GMU endorses one-sided and extreme ideological content as evidenced on the university’s own websites, including pages urging students to sign petitions in support of passage of specific legislation, vote for certain kinds of politicians, and donate to advocacy organizations with radical agendas.
As our report pointed out, George Mason University hosts a “Black Lives Matter” website that endorses racially discriminatory behavior. It is inappropriate, we said, for a university funded by taxpayers of all political persuasions to ask for donations to such causes as defunding the police or diminishing the family, particularly at a time when American cities are gripped by a horrendous crime wave that can be directly traced to family destruction.
Washington’s silence on all this speaks volumes. We equally take his studied attempt to downplay any support of DEI itself as a testament to the toxicity surrounding these practices.
Therefore, again, we remain curious to know whether, as GMU’s president, Washington believes that taking political positions such as this with university resources is an appropriate role for a public university.
And if Washington believes it is, we would like to know why GMU selected these pieces of legislation and these politicians and advocacy organizations for endorsement and not others.
Now, in response to Washington’s three stated concerns with our report:
1. Number of DEI staff at GMU: Washington no longer insists that George Mason University only has 17 DEI employees, as he did in an email to all faculty Friday evening. But he does allege that “the report grossly overstates the number of DEI staff at 69.”
We published 20 of GMU’s DEI job titles in our report and publicly posted all 69 on Saturday evening. Even after that, Washington continues to claim that we came up with more than three times too many DEI personnel by including outdated positions, double-counting positions, counting faculty who didn’t have DEI bureaucracy roles, and including “an overwhelming number of part-time student positions.”
We took all 69 job titles from GMU websites and publicly posted links to where these titles may be found. We also have 65 unique names that we did not post, out of respect for privacy. But we would be happy to share those names with Washington if he is unable to identify all of those working to promote DEI at the university he runs.
Four names are repeated because they were listed on different websites with different roles that might have been filled by someone else and not yet updated on the websites. Some of the 69 individuals also may hold faculty positions, but all of them had roles and job titles as part of DEI bureaucracies.
Our definition of DEI staff in the study excluded faculty members whose responsibilities were focused on the core university responsibilities of teaching and research. However, we clearly included student interns in DEI roles as part of our definition of DEI staff.
Only 17 of the 69 positions are held by GMU graduate or undergraduate students, not “an overwhelming number,” as Washington alleges.
These students are properly included in our count. GMU itself seems to believe the contributions of these students are significant, since its own websites list the students under the heading “staff” or “professionals.”
If Washington continues to insist that the correct number of DEI positions at GMU is “less than a third” of the 69 we listed, we would like him to publicly post all the job titles of those he believes should be counted, along with links to where their positions may be found.
We also expect that this list of fewer than 23 DEI job titles (which Washington must have in his coat pocket) would include those with specific responsibilities to serve veterans, students with disabilities, international students, low-income students, students who are parents, first-generation students, and those from many religious traditions.
We include none of them in our list of 69, but they do fall within the expansive definition of diversity, equity, and inclusion that Washington offered in his email to faculty Friday evening.
We note in passing that veteran heroes generally chafe at being included on lists of victims or “oppressed” groups.
2. Indexing DEI staff to tenured/tenure-track faculty: Washington also objects to our comparison of the size of each Virginia university’s DEI bureaucracy to the number of tenure-track and tenured faculty at the school to gauge which institution has the largest DEI bloat.
The reason we focus on tenure-track faculty is simple—it represents the magnitude of each university’s commitment to employing long-term staff to fulfill the core responsibilities of teaching and research. The more a university devotes resources to those promoting DEI rather than serving these core responsibilities, the more wasteful the institution is.
Washington’s argument that George Mason University has an especially large number of adjunct and temporary instructors who contribute far less to research and mentoring of students isn’t the point that most university presidents would choose to highlight. His argument also doesn’t demonstrate GMU’s commitment to its core responsibilities as opposed to promoting DEI.
One doesn’t usually find words such as “Leading the nation in the number of temporary teachers!” in the text of universities’ promotional brochures.
3. Including GMU with Power 5 schools: Washington objects to our comparing the size of his DEI bureaucracy to those found in universities that belong to one of the Power 5 athletic conferences.
In 2021, we chose to collect information on the size of DEI bureaucracies at the 65 universities that at the time were members of one of the Power 5 conferences. We described the reasons for selecting those universities for examination:
The focus was on these universities because they tend to be large, public institutions chosen by many students simply because of geographic proximity. These universities tend not to be highly selective institutions with explicit DEI missions intended to attract ideologically aligned students. Instead, Power 5 universities tend to be mainstream institutions that students select—and state legislatures support—without much thought to their political and cultural aims. … These 65 universities serve over 2.2 million students, representing about 16% of all students enrolled in four-year universities, thereby presenting a broad picture of higher education.
When we expanded our data to highlight the size of DEI bureaucracies in Virginia’s public universities, we included GMU because it met all these criteria.
“George Mason University belongs to the Atlantic 10 Conference, which is not among the Power 5,” Washington observed. That is relevant to GMU’s share of sports broadcasting revenue, but is not disqualifying for our purposes.
We are pleased that Washington says he still would like to meet to discuss these issues further. He offers to give us “an orientation” on diversity, equity, and inclusion. If this DEI orientation is anything like what GMU freshmen have to endure, though, we’ll pass.
If, instead, Washington is open to having a real discussion in a public forum about how much and what kind of DEI content is sponsored by George Mason University, we’re happy to join that debate, receipts in hand.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/27/gmus-president-gets-it-wrong-dei-has-overtaken-his-school
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Australia: The disability commission was split on special schools. Some with lived experience want them closed
Some disablement is pretty severe. Where are you going to put them? Putting them into mainstream schools will require a lot of teacher attention and hamper the education of other students
Disability Royal Commissioner Dr Rhonda Galbally said governments should give significant weight to her own and two colleagues’ lived experience with disabilities when deciding whether to back their call for all special schools to be shut within 30 years, after the commission split over the future of segregated education.
The division among the six commissioners about the future of special schools was a key feature of the landmark 12-volume final report of the Disability Royal Commission, with a three-three split among the experts leaving governments without a clear authority on the issue and facing a choice about the best way forward.
In an interview following the public release of the report on Friday, Galbally acknowledged that the lack of consensus on segregated education had diluted the commission’s influence on the matter, as she stressed that the three commissioners urging the closure of special schools had direct experience with disabilities.
“But on the other hand, the two commissioners with disability are recommending this and the other commissioner who is recommending it is a parent of a grown woman with a disability,” Galbally, a former board member of the National Disability Insurance Agency, said.
“I think governments will give really significant weight to lived experience, to the expertise of people with disabilities. I think that will really be very weighty for them.”
Over the course of the 4½-year commission – which cost $600 million and received evidence from more than 9000 people with disabilities, their families, carers and advocates – no dedicated public hearings were held on special schools.
Hinting at friction among the commissioners on this issue, Galbally said this aspect was “very disappointing”, adding: “some of us raised it many times and would have wished it was different.”
Galbally and commissioner Alastair McEwin, who both live with a disability, joined with commissioner Barbara Bennett in recommending that no new special schools be built from 2025 and that all existing schools be closed by 2051. Bennett’s daughter was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 12 years old.
In a joint position, they concluded that “segregated education stems from, and contributes to, the devaluing of people with disability” and the continued maintenance of segregation in education settings was “incompatible” with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
But their position diverged with that advocated by the commission’s chair, Ronald Sackville, and commissioners John Ryan and Andrea Mason, who found that separate settings did not need to – and should not – involve people with a disability being isolated from their peers or the general community. They recommended a range of measures aimed at ensuring there was regular interaction between students at special schools and those at mainstream schools.
But Galbally said this approach risked being tokenistic and would not drive the attitude change needed for people with disabilities to be seen as equal to able-bodied people.
“Students having contact that’s not gritty and day-to-day and in the process of doing what one does at school, which is learning and playing, it can become a little token,” Galbally said.
She said it was clear that the dual system of education was “failing” children with disabilities, pointing to modelling done by the commission.
“If you go to a special school, you’re 85 per cent more likely to end up in a sheltered workshop and with very limited living options as an adult,” Galbally said.
The three commissioners’ proposal to phase out special schools was welcomed by peak body Children and Young People with Disability Australia, and Down Syndrome Australia, but they also expressed disappointment at the long timeline to 2051.
Galbally said that she understood the dismay from those groups, but said it was driven by a need to ensure there was as much consensus as possible and encourage governments to embrace it.
“If governments feel they could do this sooner, that would be really great. We were aware that out of all the settings we’ve addressed … this schooling one is the one governments would probably find most difficult and so it was an attempt to really try and allow them time to get this done,” she said.
However, some experts have questioned the feasibility of closing all non-mainstream schools and removing choice for parents, while others say the lack of unanimity from the royal commission could erode the political will and substantial funding commitments required to overhaul the education sector to remove segregation.
Former NDIS board member Martin Lavery, chief executive of one of Australia’s largest charitable providers, said he was “really concerned that the royal commission has outlined a destination that we as a society haven’t yet grappled with how to pay for”.
“If we see the end of special schools too, the end of group homes too suddenly, and supported employment being turned off too suddenly, our society hasn’t yet got the mechanism to meet those costs,” he said.
Laverty said the taskforce established by the federal government in response to the commission’s findings needed to hear the message that segregation must end, and determine the “pace at which the taxpayer, the families, the charitable organisations, but most importantly, the people with disabilities want that transition to occur.”
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The niche, elitist research of universities: a waste of money
Each year more than $12 billion disappears into the abyss vaguely described as ‘research and development’ in the higher education sector. By way of return on this ‘investment’, there has been a steady flow of research projects demonstrating an unhealthy fixation on the niche, the ideological, and the political.
Hardworking Australians would be justified in asking where their money goes and who oversees its dispersal.
The allocation of grant largesse is decided by the team of bureaucrats at the Australian Research Council (ARC). The fate of the intellectual culture of our nation rests in their hands.
Yet, research released by the Institute of Public Affairs in 2019 confirmed the extent to which university grants are focused on class, race, and gender and just how much Australians are paying for it. The IPA report Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the ARC had distributed $1.34 billion in funding to humanities research between 2002 and 2019. The dominance of identity politics in successful grant applications raises questions about the objectivity of the allocation process.
The ARC claims its mission is ‘to grow knowledge and innovation’ for the benefit of the Australian community. However, the audit found that ‘identity politics’ and ‘Indigenous history’ were the two most common themes in successful grant applications. In contrast, the ‘rule of law’ and ‘free speech’ were among the least common themes. This more than suggests that post-modernist themes are being promoted at the expense of the values, culture and history of Western Civilisation.
In fact, tertiary research that fails to pay tribute to postmodern thought is disadvantaged on two fronts. Not only is it less likely to secure a grant, but it is further undermined by the funded postmodern research which attacks rather than promotes Western thought.
When the IPA first released its research there was a justified outcry, but the caravan moved on quickly and to this day taxpayers continue to receive a very poor return on their money.
One of the most glaring examples is that of the Sydney Environment Institute’s (SEI) 2024 collaborative grants. From calculating the carbon footprint of medical procedures to interrogating the environmental narrative around the Botany Wetlands, SEI grants highlight the decline of research into a process of propaganda production.
The first grant tackles the theme ‘environmental justices’ which is part of the SEI’s broader goal to ‘reconceptualise justice’ itself. ‘What would justice across the human-more-than-human world look like and entail?’ SEI researchers ask. It must be ‘sufficiently capacious’ to accommodate ‘climate change, Indigenous rights, resource depletion, and industrial farming.’ This leads them to conclude, conveniently, that the solution to injustice is more collaboration between academics like themselves, artists and activists.
A second grant examines the theme of ‘biocultural diversities’ which focuses on finding ‘inclusive solutions’ to issues like biodiversity loss and social inequality. ‘This theme champions and values biological and cultural diversities by elevating Indigenous knowledges and exploring diverse ways of engaging with our living world,’ SEI researchers explain. ‘We aim to better understand and cultivate appreciation for diverse human and non-human lives, knowledges and cultures.’
A third grant falls under the theme of ‘climate disaster and adaptation’. SEI researchers note that ‘communities and ecosystems are increasingly threatened, disrupted, and displaced’. They continue: ‘Mitigation and resilience are no longer sufficient and new climate realities require adaptation, and radical shifts in how diverse communities respond to disasters.’
These research themes raise a few important questions. First, in the case of ‘environmental justices’ has the SEI manufactured a problem and then a solution? If justice is not reconceptualised, the problems they discovered disappear rather quickly. Second, why does the ‘biocultural diversities’ theme emphasise ‘Indigenous knowledges’? Is there a hidden political agenda at play here? Third, why does the SEI’s description of ‘climate disaster and adaption’ use language like ‘radical shift’ and ‘disaster’? The apocalyptic language and sense of urgency evoked does not appear to suit the tone of a research institute.
According to the SEI, based at Sydney University, its research addresses ‘some of the greatest challenges of our time’. However, designing a ‘carbon footprint calculator’ or the ‘implications for justice’ linked to mangroves would be considered a top priority by very few.
These vanity projects highlight the gulf between mainstream Australians and those individuals who hold positions of power in governments and the tertiary sector. Ultimately, the millions spent on research and development each year do little to serve the public interest.
Mainstream Australians have every right to ask why they should fund projects which, far from benefiting society, are designed to undermine the values, principles and knowledge that made the West as free, prosperous and successful as it has been.
What is more, Australian universities are established by government legislation, built on public property and largely backed by government grants and state-subsidised loans. Consequently, universities are effectively public institutions dependent upon and, therefore responsible to, taxpayers.
Finally, IPA research reveals a two-fold problem. Firstly, with the prioritisation of certain research themes in the grant allocation process. Secondly, with the flow-on effects on researchers who are likely aware there is a higher chance of being awarded a grant if they focus on issues of class, race and gender. The evident bias represents a profound problem for the integrity of tertiary research in Australia.
It is clear the system requires comprehensive reform. With the future of higher education hanging in the balance, mainstream Australians need to exert pressure on politicians to demand more from universities, and to hold them to a higher standard and deliver research that benefits us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/the-niche-elitist-research-of-universities-a-waste-of-money
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2 October, 2023
University professor cancelled by students sets up a 'faculty for common sense' at rival institution to fight wokeness
Leaving a well-paid tenured position is a bit edgy but I understand his position. I did the same, resigning from the Univerity of NSW in 1983 at age 39. I just did not feel at ease being among Marxists. They were civil to me but I regarded them as charlatans
An eminent professor cancelled by students at a top London university is launching a war on woke by founding a 'faculty for common sense' at a rival institution.
Professor Eric Kaufmann, 53, formerly head of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London is creating a Centre for Heterodox Social Science as a beacon of academic free speech at the University of Buckingham.
He hopes it will become a globally recognised centre for research into today's culture wars, examining woke attitudes to controversial subjects such as trans rights and critical race theory.
Professor Kaufmann's first course, 'Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology,' will be launched in January. A Masters degree will follow in September 2024. Both are the first of their kind in the world.
The move follows what he believes to be a five year campaign to oust him from Birkbeck for his right-leaning views on ethnicity, national identity, left wing ideology and religion. He quit at the end of August following a 20-year-career.
The professor says: 'I was cancelled by 1,000 cuts. Academia should be about the advancement of knowledge but you're not allowed to advance theories which go against the progressive narrative. If you have a different viewpoint, you're in the crosshairs.
'The climate at British universities has worsened because morally absolutist, often younger, illiberal progressives are using pressure, public reputational attacks and social media to limit academic freedom.
'It's a target rich environment. The woke left can make your life hell and they know it. You worry about saying the wrong thing in class so you make it vanilla. You worry about getting your research grant so you self censor.
'You've got to be in line with the orthodoxy, you can't deviate from dogma. It's an Orwellian threat to the enlightenment - free speech, equal treatment, due process, objective scientific truth.
'I believe this new woke ideology threatens the foundations of our civilisation. Every parent in the UK - and around the world - should be concerned at how far it has penetrated into our universities, schools and elite institutions.'
Today Professor Kaufmann, who is half Jewish, a quarter Chinese and a quarter Costa Rican, reveals details of how he was labelled a white supremacist and a racist apologist for holding views which he defines as 'liberal conservative'.
He has faced:
Social media pile ons, on Twitter, now X, organised by hostile students
An open letter to the Master of Birkbeck denouncing him and calling for him to be fired 'for his defence of white identity politics and his countless attacks against Black Lives Matter and other activists and scholars of colour on social media'
Denunciations from a junior colleague who resigned because of the 'impact on Birkbeck staff and students of being in such close proximity to his [Professor Kaufmann's] far right followers' dragging him into an embarrassing media storm
A number of hostile student course evaluations and letters, which he believes were a coordinated attack, resulting in three damaging internal inquiries
Being avoided by some of his colleagues who were desperate to avoid being cancelled by association
Today he's no longer part of Birkbeck's politics department which is housed in the Bloomsbury Group study rooms once graced by TS Eliot, George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes. Instead he's sitting in a smart London bar telling his story in the soft Canadian accent of his native country.
He says: 'I'm the kind of academic who doesn't want to see Roald Dahl's writing bowdlerised, traditional things renamed and statues taken down. I don't want conversations about immigration or homelessness and the causes of it simply shut down. But if that's you in 2023 - then you're radio active.'
As a conservative thinker he jokes that, at the start of his UK career back in the nineties he was 'in the closet'. 'I was careful to keep things at an abstract enough level, nothing too controversial. I ascended the university ladder. It went smoothly. It is a left wing environment - the jokes were all about the Tory party - so youinternalise the fact that conversation is not as free as it should be, but you adapt.
'However by 2022 when I was nailing my colours to the mast, becoming associated with conservatism, the academic freedom bill and the anti-woke movement, there's no question that I was a scalp.'
The academic freedom bill to which the professor is referring became law in May this year, aimed at protecting dissenting voices in Britain's higher education sector.
It included the appointment of a free speech and academic freedom champion to the board of the Office for Students; strengthened the right to free speech in universities and extended it to students' unions; and created a new complaints scheme for breaches, such as when a guest speaker is 'no-platformed' by opponents at a campus event.
Professor Kauffman co-authored the 2021 think tank report which was the source for several of its key proposals. 'yes, that bill which the University and College Union hate, and which radical students hate …' he shrugs.
Despite the protections offered by the new law, he decided he could not continue teaching at Birkbeck, relinquishing what he amiably agrees was a 'fireproof job for life, a tenured professorship, gold plated with a nice pension.'
From today his new - and far more precarious - academic home will be at the University of Buckingham, one of Britain's few not for profit private universities which is currently flying up the country's good university guides. It is the UK's top ranked university for freedom of expression, according to this year's National Student Survey
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UK: Mobile phones are to be banned in schools
Mobiles are to be banned from classrooms, the Education Secretary will announce on Monday.
Gillian Keegan will order schools to outlaw smartphones during lessons, and also in breaks, in a bid to end disruption and make it easier for pupils to focus.
A government source said new guidance would be issued to schools across England requiring them to take action.
'Gillian believes that mobile phones pose a serious challenge in terms of distraction, disruptive behaviour, and bullying,' the insider said. 'It is one of the biggest issues that children and teachers have to grapple with so she will set out a way forward to empower teachers to ban mobiles from classrooms.'
Some schools already ban the use of mobiles, with pupils required to hand in their phones each morning – or face the punishment of a detention if they are caught using them.
But many others still permit their use, particularly during breaks, despite growing evidence of the damage they cause.
The announcement will be made on Monday at the Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester,
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UK: Former Education Secretary Michael Gove said some state schools are more like “teen crèches”.
After 13 years of Tory rule, the Cabinet minister admitted many pupils are being failed by the school system.
“Show me what those who really have money and influence do,” he told a fringe event at the Conservative conference. “Do they send their kids to, essentially, a teen crèche or do they send them to highly academic institutions with competitive team sports?”
Mr Gove said he believed that state schools should provide a more rigorous education. He gave the example of one academy that provides extracurricular activities like “putting on a play in ancient Greek or Latin”.
He highlighted how Jade Goody had chosen to send her children to private school, saying that “to her enormous credit” she used “celebrity in order to fashion a better life for herself”. “What did she do with her money? What was the first thing she chose to do? It was to send her children to independent schools. Now, she shouldn't have had to do that because the state school should have been good enough,” he said.
“But the whole point was she wanted the very, very best education for her children… She knew the type of education that was best, not private, but education that was academically rigorous. Education, where the subjects that are being taught would give her sons the chance - if they wanted - to go to the best universities.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-education-secretary-michael-gove-31078189
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1 October, 2023
School District Censored Watchdog Group After It Exposed Teacher’s Tirade Against Parental Rights
The person behind a popular X (formerly Twitter) account aimed at exposing leftist ideology in schools is threatening legal action after a Maryland school district that has become notorious for clamping down on parents restricted the account’s access to what courts have ruled constitutes a public forum.
Montgomery County Public Schools blocked the account, Inside the Classroom, days after Inside the Classroom had exposed a public school teacher who condemned the “right-wing idea of parents’ rights” as “literally just fascism.” The school district has fought in the courts to deny parents the right to opt their kids out of lessons that include LGBTQ+ books.
America First Legal, a public interest law firm that represents Inside the Classroom, sent a demand letter to the school district on Tuesday, threatening legal action if the district does not restore Inside the Classroom’s access to the district’s account.
“It isn’t enough that Montgomery County Public Schools has been trampling all over parental rights,” Ian Prior, senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal. “Now, MCPS teachers are taking to social media to bash parents as ‘fascist’ for daring to protect their children from the radical and abusive transgender agenda.”
“Then, MCPS hits the trifecta of bad judgment and violates the First Amendment rights of those, like Inside the Classroom, that are shining the spotlight of accountability on what is happening at our schools,” Prior added. “We look forward to MCPS taking swift action to unblock all accounts and come into compliance with the First Amendment.”
In the demand letter, Inside the Classroom notes that Montgomery County Public Schools blocked its X account shortly after the account exposed the teacher who condemned the idea of parental rights.
“Alright, we have to talk about this right-wing idea of parents’ rights. It’s literally just fascism,” the teacher said in a TikTok video Inside the Classroom shared on Feb. 10. While the teacher says she sees “educators’ role as partnering with parents,” she goes on to insist that “parents and caregivers who reject their children’s gender identities are not taking care of their children.”
“Conservatives that claim that their real concern is ‘parents’ rights’ are just trying to use a family-friendly excuse for wanting trans people to not exist,” the teacher says.
Four days after Inside the Classroom shared that video, “tagging” Montgomery County Public Schools in the post, the school district blocked Inside the Classroom’s account from accessing the school district’s X page.
While X users have the ability to block any other user, courts have ruled that the First Amendment bars government officials from doing so in certain circumstances.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Davison v. Randall (2019) that a Virginia public official violated the First Amendment by engaging in “viewpoint discrimination.” The official had banned an individual from commenting on her social media page, which the court said constitutes a public forum.
Phyllis J. Randall, chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, banned Virginia resident Brian Davison from her official Facebook page, on which she allows public comments. The court ruled that the “interactive component” of a local government official’s social media page constitutes a public forum and that Randall violated the First Amendment by excluding Davison from her page due to his views.
Inside the Classroom claims in the letter that Montgomery County Public Schools is “even more culpable in its constitutional violation” than Randall had been.
“Unlike the defendant in Davison v. Randall, where the account at issue was that of an elected official, the account at issue is the official account for the entire taxpayer-funded school system,” the letter reads. “MCPS has over [122,000] followers on X, and users are able to repost, reply, and like MCPS’s posts.
MCPS’s X account consists of information related to school activities such as upcoming events, announcements, surveys, and school schedules. In fact, according to the MCPS website, social media ‘can help Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) further our mission and core values by engaging students, their parents/guardians, and the community.’”
“Given that the MCPS X account is undoubtedly a public forum, it is thus impermissible for MCPS to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint against those who engage in the interactive nature of that public forum,” the letter adds. “Here, MCPS blocked Inside the Classroom because it tagged MCPS and tweeted a video and its commentary of an MCPS teacher who compared parental rights to ‘fascism’ and stated that parents who don’t affirm their child’s claimed gender ‘are not taking care of their children.’”
Many X users interacted with Inside the Classroom’s post, mostly criticizing the teacher and Montgomery County Public Schools, and then the school district blocked Inside the Classroom.
“It is abundantly clear that MCPS was motivated to take this action by suppressing the ‘particular views taken by’ Inside the Classroom; namely, disapproval of a teacher attacking parents for not supporting ‘gender identity,’” the letter adds, citing a relevant court case.
“America First Legal therefore demands, on behalf of Inside the Classroom, that MCPS cease and desist blocking Inside the Classroom on X and that any and all official MCPS or MCPS staff social media accounts cease and desist blocking users in violation of the First Amendment,” the letter concludes.
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How Marxist Left Captured Higher Education
The mission of a university is to discover truth and transmit that essential knowledge to future generations. That has been achieved by what we call in the West the Socratic dialogue—that is, ferreting out what is good, true, and beautiful by testing ideas in an academic setting.
None of that is possible in an educational environment controlled by a Marxist Left that denies the existence of truth, that seeks to stop the transmission of past traditions to future generations, that decries Socrates and Western concepts, and that wages war on beauty.
Now that this Left is entrenched in academia, it uses myriad ways to impose its views and suppress others.
The concept that the good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendental “properties of being” goes back to Plato, Socrates’ disciple. It was explored further by St. Augustine in the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages and by St. Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.
Quoting Aristotle recently, Peter Berkowitz rightly noted that the purpose of right education consists of “cultivating the virtues and transmitting the knowledge that enables citizens to preserve their form of government and way of life.”
But the leftists running America’s institutions no longer want such preservation. Rather, they see it as their quest to “decolonize” the university from Western thinking and believe that class time must be used instead to study non-Western (read “victim”) ways and works.
This particular Left, which focuses on culture, has gained ascendancy in universities since the 1980s, when the student radicals of the 1960s discovered that they could carry out their revolutionary mission culturally by taking over academia.
The chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” refers to the time on Jan. 15, 1987, when Jesse Jackson rallied 500 students to march on Stanford University. As Robert Curry at Intellectual Takeout reminds us, “They were protesting Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as ‘Western Culture.’ For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of ‘diversity.’ The faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and ‘Western Culture’ was formally replaced with ‘Cultures, Ideas, and Values.’”
In the past decade and a half, this destructive mission has been accelerated, first with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, then with the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and finally with BLM’s damaging riots in 2020. The shock was so great that the leaders of key societal institutions surrendered and accepted the facile, but bizarre, notion that America is systemically racist and oppressive and thus in dire need of systemic overhaul.
During this evolution, the culturally Marxist Left has increasingly used racial and sexual characteristics as determinants of victimhood status and thus as reasons for the supposedly aggrieved to tear up the system.
Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 provided a new interpretation of Title IX in its “guidance” on how universities were to judge sexual accusations. John Schoof of The Heritage Foundation explained at the time that this guidance “pressured schools to use the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard of proof rather than the much stronger ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied to sexual assault cases in our criminal justice system.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
This new guidance soon became “about policing and disciplining speech on campus—especially speech that deviates from the orthodoxy of progressive politics,” as professor Adam Ellwanger explained in 2015.
He was in a position to know. Four years after Obama’s letter, Ellwanger had a Title IX complaint lodged against him because he had not sufficiently “affirmed” a student’s homosexual life choice.
“Title IX in its expanded articulation,” he wrote, “is nothing less than an attempt to advance the ideological objectives of the Left on campus. It has been weaponized to silence dissenting speech and chill open debate of leftist ideology on campus.”
The letter led to a second way in which the new Left polices conservative ideas: the boom in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. The letter “exploded upon impact into a thousand Offices of Diversity and Inclusion,” wrote Ellwanger.
These DEI offices employ a growing bevy of officers who are nothing more than political commissars, imposing the Left’s view on faculty and students alike. As Heritage’s Jay Greene and I wrote recently, the University of Virginia alone has 94 of these officials, or 6.5 for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
A third way (out of many) to suppress thought that does not conform to the Left’s orthodoxy is to demand that faculty sign statements declaring loyalty to DEI and promising to further the mission as a condition of hiring or promotion. These are nothing more than loyalty oaths to the extreme wing of the political spectrum that is dedicated to the victim-oppressor paradigm. They are intended to shut down the Socratic dialogue.
And yet The New York Times informs us that “nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements.”
How do we get out of this fix? First, we need to explain to the public what has happened to create a favorable climate of opinion. That is already happening.
Then, political figures must understand that their political longevity depends on delivering solutions. Most universities, public and private, depend on taxpayer money. And the taxpayers have been clear: They want it to pay for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/28/how-marxist-left-captured-higher-education/
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Foxx: Hunting and Archery Programs are Here to Stay
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Today, the House passed H.R. 5110, the Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act, bipartisan legislation that overturns the Department of Education’s funding ban on hunting and archery programs in schools.
On passage of the bill, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) made the following statement: “The Department of Education is completely tone-deaf to think that cutting hunting and archery programs in schools is a good idea. These programs have been around for decades. They educate millions of students on how to become better stewards of our land and animals, and they develop responsible hunters and gun owners. It should be a wake-up call for this administration that this bill passed on a bipartisan basis. Hunting and archery programs are here to stay.”
The Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act:
Clarifies that the prohibition on the use of ESEA funds for certain weapons does not apply to educational enrichment activities such as archery, hunting, other shooting sports, or culinary arts;
Reaffirms that hunting and archery programs teach America’s schoolchildren self-esteem, responsibility, and how to use these recreational tools safely; and
Sends the Department of Education a clear message that we stand behind student hunters and archers.
Press release
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