RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/harvard-drops-standardized-test-mandate-for-several-more-years

Harvard College is dropping its requirement for SAT or ACT scores for future applicants as young as those currently in 8th grade.

“Students who do not submit standardized test scores will not be disadvantaged in their application process,” William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Ivy League school, said Thursday in an emailed statement. 

The pandemic has altered the way colleges evaluate applicants. Several others, including Columbia University, Amherst College and Cornell University, previously announced the tests would be optional for current high school sophomores, and the University of California system scrapped them entirely. 

The current admissions cycle is the second for which students have been able to apply to Harvard without needing standardized tests. The scores are one factor among many considered, Harvard said in the statement. The school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also announced that it had accepted 7.9% of the 9,406 students who applied under its non-binding early action program.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/against-world-history/

It’s good to study other cultures; that’s not what progressive educators want.

With culturally leftist school­ing only lately ranked as a top-tier political issue, conservatives have yet to take full measure of the woke education threat. Beyond better-known dangers such as critical race theory, the 1619 Project, action civics, and lessons in gender fluidity lies the “world-history movement” — educators bent on forming a generation of “global citizens” who reject both American patriotism and any sense of indebtedness to our Western heritage of liberty.

For decades, the world-history movement has quietly advanced in the slipstream of higher-profile changes in curriculum. The battle over National History Standards for the United States in the mid 1990s — a breakthrough mo­ment for the education Left — focused on the U.S.-history component of the proposal. Critics largely ignored the equally troubling, and thoroughly globalist, National Standards for World History. The 2014–15 battle over the College Board’s revisionist AP U.S. History and AP European History frameworks did much to highlight their globalist underpinnings. Yet widespread adoption of the still more radical AP World History course went largely unnoticed.

This fall, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem rejected draft state-history and civics standards that mandated political protests (“action civics”), short-shrifted high-school U.S. history, downplayed America’s British heritage, and left the role of religion in American history largely unacknowledged. Yet no one even noticed that the draft standards’ adoption of the College Board’s AP World History approach had ef­fectively eliminated the study of West­ern civilization from South Dakota’s schools.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/15/the-new-dark-ages/

If ignorance is bliss, the Western world should be ecstatic. Even as colleges churn out degrees and collect fees, and technology makes information instantly accessible, the basic level of literacy, as measured by such things as reading books and acquainting oneself with the past, is in a precipitous decline. Rather than building a vital world with our technological culture, we are repeating the memes of feudal times, driven by illiteracy, bias and a rejection of the West’s past.

Over half of American adults have a reading level below the equivalent of sixth-grade level (11- to 12-year-olds), and book reading outside of school or work among the young in particular has declined markedly. A survey conducted in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books ‘for fun’, down from 60 per cent in 2010. This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age 14 and found that only one in 10 ever did any reading in their spare time as teenagers. The Covid-related lockdowns, notes one recent UN study, raised the number of children experiencing reading difficulties from 460million to 584million.

Even before the pandemic, people’s cognitive skills were weakening. Many employers in the US report difficulty finding workers capable of having a serious conversation. Over 60 per cent of applicants are found to be lacking in basic social skills. Today’s teens’ experiences are increasingly limited to what they access on their phones and social media. Rather than opening minds, social media seem to be creating a generation with little ability to communicate in person.

Sites like Facebook and Instagram have been linked to reduced attention spans: research indicates that the average attention span has fallen 50 per cent since 2000, mainly due to social-media use. This loss of literacy comes at a time when much of our education and literary establishment has embraced censorship, while on the right there’s an increasingly Pavlovian embrace of book-banning. Even in defending the common culture, the right forgets the necessity of diverse opinions in a democracy.

Right now, the most influential advocates for banning classical literature from curricula, or removing books non-compliant on issues like gender, are not disgruntled conservatives. No, the assault on studying ‘great books’ and Western culture largely comes from progressive professors with PhDs, and the ever-expanding university bureaucracies and their recent graduates. The embrace of these cultural trends, as former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum suggests, has emerged as Democrats have moved far more to the left than Republicans have gone further to the right. This is sometimes enforced with mandatory indoctrination sessions and even requirements to sign the woke version of McCarthy-era ‘loyalty oaths’.

https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-michigan-medical-school-goes-woke

At the University of Michigan, critical race theory has invaded yet another discipline: medicine. In January 2021, Michigan Medicine’s Anti-Racism Oversight Committee Action Plan called for designing a new curriculum, one that would use an “intersectional framework” and incorporate “critical race theory.”

The story is a microcosm of a nationwide trend that has not spared medicine. In the summer of 2020, senior administrators at Michigan Medicine, like many of their colleagues around the country, called for large-scale change. On June 1, five deans and vice presidents published a letter decrying health disparities, declaring: “We must reject and prevent this manifest . . . injustice.” A few days later, the executive vice president for medical affairs expressed the same urgency in a letter titled “The Time is Now.”

Students pressured the administrators to follow through on their ambitious rhetoric. A coalition of students and student organizations published its own letter, demanding concrete action from the medical school. “Correcting centuries of historical injustices perpetrated against the Black community,” the letter reads, “requires a radical departure from what we are currently doing.” The letter listed over a dozen far-reaching demands. “Michigan Medicine must end traditional policing efforts on its grounds,” it asserted. “Michigan Medicine must support physicians in taking an active role in advocacy efforts”—that is, “a greater role in advocating for change in our communities and government.”

Most notably, the letter demanded a curriculum overhaul. “The redesign,” it dictated, “must use an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory.” It hyperlinked to a journal article on intersectionality in medicine, which surmises that “considering intersectionality could lead to more successful patient-clinician interactions.”

The school was happy to oblige. It created a Racial Justice Oversight Committee, which released its Action Plan in early 2021. The 24-page document lays out concrete steps based on the students’ demands, steps which were then “endorsed by Michigan Medicine Leadership.” Thus, Michigan Medicine promised to integrate racially divisive ideology into its curriculum. Closely following student demands, the plan calls for a redesign of Michigan Medicine’s undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. The redesign should adopt the new framework “in partnership with health justice education professionals.”

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/digital-technology-to-reverse-pandemic-learning-losses-by-henrietta-h-fore-and-david-malpass-2021-12

When schools around the world moved online due to COVID-19, children in developing countries suffered the most. Even though digital learning does not produce the same outcomes as in-person education, technology used effectively can close educational gaps and prevent learning loss.

WASHINGTON, DC – As the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, classrooms remain fully or partially closed for as many as 647 million schoolchildren around the world. Even where schools have reopened, many students continue to lag behind.

It is now abundantly and painfully clear that children have learned less during the pandemic. According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures could drive up “learning poverty” – the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read a basic text – to around 70% in low- and middle-income countries. This learning loss could cost an entire generation of schoolchildren $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. As the Omicron variant takes hold, more governments may be tempted to close schools. Without the online infrastructure in place to support learning, doing so would extend the educational losses and deny children the many other benefits of daily school attendance, like the possibility to connect with classmates and develop social skills for personal growth. Interactions with teachers and peers are essential to develop the abilities necessary to work collaboratively. Being part of a class promotes a sense of belonging and helps build self-esteem and empathy. Throughout the pandemic, marginalized children have struggled the most. When classrooms around the world reopened this fall, it became clear that these children had fallen even further behind their peers. Before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But school closures placed an estimated ten million more girls at risk of early marriage, which practically guarantees the end of their schooling. Unless this regression is reversed, learning poverty and the associated human capital loss will hold economies and societies back for decades. Children must be given a chance to recover the education they have lost. They need access to well-designed reading materials, digital learning opportunities, and transformed education systems that help prepare them for future challenges. Well-qualified teachers and effective use of technology are fundamental to this process. Many countries have deployed massive stimulus packages in response to the health crisis. But, as of June 2021, less than 3% of these funds was devoted to the education and training sector. And most of these resources were spent in advanced economies.

http://christopherrufo.com

Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”

DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.

The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”

As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students  to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/14/the-logic-of-californias-leftists-will-keep-us-all-children-forever/

Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, and San Diego Unified school districts have found a novel way to improve academic results—they’re getting rid of D and F grades. One imagines this will improve results immediately. On paper.

Reporting from San Francisco, KRON 4 News, writing in semi-literate English, informs us, “If a student fails a test or doesn’t complete their homework, they’ll be able to retake the test and get more time to turn in assignments.” 

The assistant principal at Fremont High School in Oakland, speaking in semi-literate English, told KRON, “Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.” 

I don’t think anyone will dispute that schools are not paying much attention to what kids are learning. But banning Ds and Fs won’t help students as much as it will help teachers and principals in these districts look less awful by comparison, or else make comparisons with schools that retain a full grading system impossible. The real goal is to rescue teachers’ unions and professional administrators from what they’re doing to the kids. 

To take a random example from the English readers on my desk, a seventh grader of a century ago, learning, no doubt, in a one-room schoolhouse with just enough funding for these text books, would have read Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Poe, Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Kipling, Thoreau, Whitman, Washington, Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius, to cite just a small subsection of the included authors. Selections range from stories and poems to nature study, science, and history. These authors have long since gone the way of the D and F grades: Better to eliminate challenging material than create the impression students are failing. Which really means—better to eliminate material than create the impression that teachers are failing to teach their students.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/1619-project-story-weeks-mary-grabar/

“It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s guide for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. “The first step in mitigating harm to children as you teach the hard and triggering history of the enslavement is confronting yourself.” This sentence is bolded.

This guide for those teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is linked at the page of the publisher, the multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House, but is produced by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a criminal, conservative-smearing non-profit. It was the SPLC’s “survey” claiming that students were not being taught about slavery that was used as a pretext to justify The 1619 Project, published as an issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019. A guide for high school teachers is also provided for the 600-page hardcover edition, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

New York Times “race” reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the much-criticized 1619 Project, co-author of the children’s book, and co-editor and contributor to the hardcover edition, accuses those introducing or passing laws forbidding classroom use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory of “censorship.”

At the same time, she has been publicizing a collaborative effort by her publisher, bookstores, and the nonprofit diversebooks.org (which receives donations from Penguin Random House!) to encourage fans to buy and donate her books to “low income classrooms, libraries, and educational organizations.” The non-profit Pulitzer Center, which produced the original curricular materials for over 4,500 schools, has sponsored events for librarians and after-school initiatives, including the “1619 Freedom School.”

Hannah-Jones insisted that the first stop on her nationwide book tour be at West High School in Waterloo, Iowa, where the celebrity author appeared “in conversation” with Mr. Dial, the high school teacher who radicalized her thirty years ago by introducing her to the writings of Lerone Bennett, a 1960s Ebony Magazine polemicist and coiner of the term Black Power. She tweeted on November 22, “Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature might not respect me or my work as they sought first to ban the 1619 Project explicitly and then passed one of these anti-history laws, but my community always supports and I can’t wait to see you all.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-schools-without-de-blasio-education-gap-chancellor-banks-charter-mayor-adams-11639518269?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

New York’s departing mayor, Bill de Blasio, has spent eight years at loggerheads with law enforcement and school reformers. When he wasn’t siding with Black Lives Matter demonstrators at antipolice protests, the mayor was busy thwarting the expansion of high-performing charter schools, attacking gifted-and-talented middle-school programs and denouncing public high schools that admit students based on a standardized test score.

This was all done in the name of racial equity, but New Yorkers apparently have tired of wokeness-driven governance. Last month, voters opted to replace Mr. de Blasio with a former police officer, Eric Adams, who in turn has tapped education innovator David Banks to be the city’s next schools chancellor. Mr. Banks is a former teacher and principal who founded the six-school Eagle Academy network, which serves low-income black and Hispanic boys in New York City and Newark, N.J. Eagle Academy is a network of public schools that, like charter schools, operates mostly outside the strictures of the traditional public-school system, which Mr. Banks believes has long ill-served minority communities.

Unlike Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Banks has not called for dumbing down the admissions standards of the city’s elite public high schools to produce more racial balance. He wants to expand gifted-and-talented programs rather than phase them out. He is refreshingly outspoken about the city’s bloated and unaccountable school bureaucracy, which operates as though public education were, first and foremost, a jobs program for adults. That 65% of black and Hispanic students in New York never reach proficiency on standardized tests is “a betrayal” of those kids, he said last week, joking that “if everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results.” Or maybe he wasn’t joking.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s 800-pound public-education gorilla, did not endorse Mr. Adams in the Democratic primary. Michael Mulgrew, the UFT’s president, was conspicuously absent from the news conference announcing Mr. Banks’s appointment. That chilly reception from the teachers union is one reason education reformers tell me they are cautiously optimistic about the Adams administration. One early test of the new mayor’s resolve will be how hard he fights to lift the cap on charter schools in the city, where no new ones can open even though more than 163,000 children are on waiting lists, according to the school-choice advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.

A related test will be whether Mr. Adams can find locations for any new charter schools that get approved. In New York, where space is at a premium, charter schools often seek to co-locate in buildings where traditional public schools are operating below capacity. Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a champion of charters and accelerated their expansion though this co-location process. One of the ways that Mr. de Blasio kept charter growth in check was by denying operators space in underused public-school buildings. A 2018 report by the Manhattan Institute noted that “in the last five years of the Bloomberg administration, 150 co-locations were approved, an average of 30 per year. In the first five years of the de Blasio administration, 59 co-locations were approved, an average of 12 per year.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-dissident-voice-at-cornell/?itm_source=parsely-api

The administration at Cornell University has gone absolutely mad with its “antiracism” crusade. Critical race theory education becomes mandatory, and it even appears to think it can compel people to accept the curriculum.

Law professor Bill Jacobson is speaking out against this astounding perversion of academic values. He explains what has been going on at Cornell in this Legal Insurrection article:

Here is a slice from his statement in opposition to the administration’s reeducation mandates:

Proposal F starts with the compulsion that “Faculty must understand structural racism and the forces of systemic bias and privilege” (emphasis added). Later, Proposal F “requires” that faculty accept that “structural racism, colonialism, and injustice, and their current manifestations have a historical and relational basis.” That CRT worldview, which in its current incarnation is often misleadingly referred to as “antiracism,” is off the table for debate under this proposal. Rather, CRT becomes the official ideology of the University. The rest of the proposal dictates how that mandate will be implemented, including dictating “a framework for interacting with other faculty, with students, with members of the staff, and the broader community” with the faculty “educational requirement . . . to support the faculty in this effort.” Why such compulsion? This campus already is awash in CRT-driven programs, courses, events, workshops, and faculty and student activism, and the separately proposed Center will further the breadth of CRT-based education.

If I were a Cornell grad, I’d let the school know that I would never donate another dollar to them and would try to convince as many Cornellians that the place is no longer worth supporting.