RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-win-for-merit-in-new-york-citys-schools

After 11 p.m. on December 18, the New York City Department of Education’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP) voted to approve the contract for administering the specialized high schools admissions test (SHSAT): the final tally was 14 for, two against, with four abstentions. By then, many SHSAT supporters, especially the children, who had arrived before the 6 p.m. meeting began, had left and missed the roll-call vote. All are grateful to PEP for retaining the test.

A public comment period preceded the vote. The real issues of debate concerned not the contract’s cost—$17 million over five years, a mere speck of the city Department of Education’s $200 billion five-year budget—but questions of race and merit.

Many of the SHSAT supporters in attendance were immigrants of Chinese origin. In thick accents, they told their stories of hard work, sacrifice, and achieving the American dream. There was also a Bangladeshi (a member of one of Stuyvesant High School’s fastest-growing groups) and several people with Russian accents. But tribalism was not the point—this was about merit. From these specialized schools have come 15 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, awarded for inventions and discoveries with broad applications that have benefited humanity.

The SHSAT’s supporters spoke for all future students of any hue. The opposition responded with thinly veiled racism against the Asians in attendance: they’re protecting a system that favors them, they only show up for their own causes. 

In fact, Asians are not looking for special favors or preferential treatment. In the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York’s lawsuit against changes to the specialized high schools’ admissions policy, the plaintiffs did not seek preferential treatment, such as racial set-asides or the implementation of Asian studies curricula. Instead, they sought a colorblind admissions process: equal rights for all.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-private-school-turns-against-dei

There is no need to recite the depredations on all sectors of American society of initiatives devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Our educational institutions are among the hardest hit, making it hard in some parts of the country to find schools that don’t lecture even the youngest students about “settler colonialism,” the evils of “whiteness,” and the “genocide” supposedly being perpetrated by the Israelis.

When institutions push back, as they occasionally do, it merits attention. One example arrived last month in the form of an outstanding—and hardly right-wing—opinion piece in the New York Post by Bill Kuhn, who has been the head of the Birch Wathen Lenox School (BWL) since December 2022. This is not Kuhn’s first excellent article, but it is the one with the highest profile. And it will, I expect, do wonders for his school’s application numbers.

Let me set the scene for those who do not follow the ins and outs of private school education, and what passes for education, in my native New York. The city is home to hundreds of independent schools, and parents who can afford it, or who receive significant financial aid, commonly send their children to these fancy institutions even as the leaders of these institutions devote substantial resources to DEI.

To be sure, there are high-profile kerfuffles: Megyn Kelly removed her three children from two of New York’s most famous K–12 schools, Collegiate (all-boys) and Spence (all-girls—though it now accepts the female-identifying), and Andrew Gutmann became a public figure when he declined to reenroll his daughter in a third, Brearley (all-girls—though ditto). But plus ça change. Earlier this year, Spence fired a beloved French teacher for (it would appear) simply speaking about the French law banning hijabs; a few months later, the head of Collegiate resigned after allegedly calling a report about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia a “power play by Jewish families”; and at Brearley, to quote Gutmann, “the war on our children continues unabated.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/12/the-american-university-is-rotting-from-within/

The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.

American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.

Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-supreme-disappointment

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp.v. The School Committee for the City of Boston, a case that concerned the 2020–2022 admissions policy for Boston’s three selective public high schools. The policy, which aimed to reduce white and Asian enrollment in the name of “racial equity,” is yet another example of a school district engaging in racial balancing.

Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant) are selective public high schools that serve academically gifted students in the City of Boston. All are considered crown jewels of American public education and are consistently ranked among the nation’s top high schools by U.S. News & World Report. BLS, for example, is the oldest public school in America, counts among its alumni five signers of the Declaration of Independence, and offers 26 Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Many parents in Boston, particularly those who are Asian immigrants, view a child’s enrollment in BLS, BLA, or O’Bryant as a step toward the American Dream.

For years, the district based its admissions decisions on a student’s grades in English Language Arts (ELA) and math, as well as performance on an entrance exam similar to the SAT. District officials took the average of each applicant’s grades and assigned a value to that average before adding the applicant’s score on the entrance exam to create a “composite score.” Students with the top composite scores were awarded seats at BLS, BLA, or O’Bryant.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/still-stupid-in-america/

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Then in January 2006, John Stossel’s eye-opening documentary, Stupid in America, was aired. The investigative ABC show was billed as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it…The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic, and South Korea…This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.”

Sadly, since Jobs’ comments and Stossel’s documentary, public school performance has not improved. The latest example of our descent is shown by the scores on the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an assessment administered to 650,000 4th and 8th graders in 64 countries.

The 2023 test, the results of which were released on December 4, revealed that average U.S. math scores declined sharply between 2019 and 2023, falling 18 points for 4th graders and 27 points for 8th graders. Internationally, this puts the U.S., a purported world leader, at 22nd of 63 education systems for 4th-grade math and 20th of 45 education systems for 8th-grade math.

Additionally, average U.S. math scores for both 4th and 8th graders reverted to performance levels of 1995, the first year the TIMSS assessment was administered, meaning any progress made since Steve Jobs’ damning comments has been erased.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-michigan-nixes-diversity-statements-in-faculty-hiring-promotion/

The University of Michigan will no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure, joining a number of elite universities that are moving away from progressive identity politics in an effort to expand diversity of thought and free expression on campus.

Provost Laurie McCauley announced the decision Thursday after an eight-member faculty working group recommended the university abolish diversity statements. While there was no institutional requirement for such statements, UM did implement the practice in its hiring decisions.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are three of our core values at the university. Our collective efforts in this area have produced important strides in opening opportunities for all people,” McCauley said in the University Record, an internal faculty publication. “As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach.”

In June, the provost charged the faculty working group with examining the university’s use of diversity statements. The group published its report on October 31 after reviewing literature on the topic and considering DEI policies at other universities and colleges.

The group also conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 faculty, most of whom believe diversity statements “put pressure on faculty to express specific positions on moral, political or social issues,” per the University Record. Furthermore, a slight majority of respondents said soliciting diversity statements for hiring purposes does not demonstrate an institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.