RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/national-school-boards-association-apologizes-for-letter-comparing-parents-to-terrorists/

The National School Boards Association has apologized for a letter that called on the Biden administration to investigate whether alleged threats against school-board members constituted domestic terrorism.

The NSBA Board of Directors apologized in a memorandum to members on Friday. The initial letter, sent on September 29, asked the administration to investigate whether alleged threats to school-board members, over masking policies and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory” in lessons, necessitated federal investigation.

“As you all know, there has been extensive media and other attention recently around our letter to President Biden regarding threats and acts of violence against school board members,” the memorandum states. “On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for this letter. . . . There was no justification for some of the language included in this letter.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/20/elite_universities_are_the_worst_for_free_speech_110653.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views, and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to go West and to college at Stanford University.

I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked, and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights where I was able to connect, learn, and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly remember the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new. My old dorm even hosted a speaker’s series where huge turnouts were common for guests on both the left and the right and no one shouted down anyone; we even hosted the frequently-protested Dinesh D’Souza without incident.

While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night. Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to, and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education.

Thanks to the largest data set ever compiled on student’s views toward free speech, we now know that students who attend the nation’s elite schools – those that purportedly thrive in the world of research, innovation and discovery – are actually more likely to try to cancel speech than their peers who attend lower-ranked educational institutions.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/school-enrolment-across-us-dropped-by-almost-3-million-from-2019-to-2020-report_4060563.html

School enrolment across the United States dropped by 2.9 million from 2019 to 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data released on Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

This marks the lowest level—52.4 percent of the learning-aged population—of school enrollment for those under 35 years of age in over 20 years, as per the bureau’s data.

College enrollment also fell to its lowest level since 2007, with the majority of the decline occurring in colleges with two-year courses, which had their lowest enrollment levels in 20 years.

While the reasons for the declining figures are unclear, multiple factors such as pandemic-related lockdowns, school closures, and a focus on remote learning will undoubtably have played a part.

Meanwhile, the percentage of children ages 3 and 4 who were enrolled in school fell from 54 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2020. This decline marks the first time since 1996 that less than half of the children in this age group were enrolled in school.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/jewish-students-under-attack-richard-l-cravatts/

“Anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism, is still Jew-hatred.”

As yet more evidence that Jewish students have continued to be targets of bias on university campuses, a Spring 2021 poll by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, together with the Cohen Research Group, revealed that 65% of students in the leading Jewish fraternity and sorority have “felt unsafe” on campus, while 50% of students surveyed have felt “the need to hide their identity.”

The study, which surveyed 1,027 members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Phi (AEPhi) sorority, confirmed what many observers have already witnessed; namely, that half of students have masked their Jewish identity and that more than fifty percent have felt it necessary to hide their support of Israel. Additionally, of those polled, some two-thirds experienced or were familiar with anti-Semitic incidents that occurred over the previous four months.

While, sadly, bias against Jewish students still includes examples of what might be termed “classic anti-Semitism,” aspersions against Jews as a religion or people, what the poll referred to as “traditional anti-Semitic tropes,” the thornier issue of identifying the new anti-Semitism is that it has emerged as part and parcel of the university’s war against Israel. So, while jokes about Jews and stereotypes of them being “greedy” or “cheap” still persist, the unfortunate side-product of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel advocacy is that it frequently morphs into something closer to anti-Semitic speech and behavior than mere “criticism of Israel.”

Thus, sentiment such as “The ‘Jewish Lobby’ has too much power in the United States” or “Zionism is a form of White Supremacy,” both of which were encountered by students being polled, suggests that the identity of Jews as the logical supporters of Zionism and the Jewish state is relevant to the biased person who expresses such thoughts. When sentiments are expressed like “Israel treats Palestinians how the Nazis treated the Jews” and derogatory statements such as “Zionists are murderers,” both of which were also revealed in the poll, it is clear that biases against Jews are regularly conflated with, and arise as a result of, the existence and behavior of the Jewish state.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/asian-students-and-nyc-exam-schools?token=

New York City’s exam high schools are, in many ways, the crown jewels of the city’s public education system. They’re prestigious, rigorous, and STEM-focused. And, importantly, admission to them is determined by student performance on a single test. They’re meritocratic engines that allow smart, hard-working kids to get a kind of education that would be otherwise inaccessible to many of them.

They also tend to have high concentrations of Asian American students, sometimes over 50%. My guest Wai Wah Chin, Charter President of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, thinks this accounts for recent efforts by the mayor, the schools chancellor, and others to change admissions standards. According to Wai Wah, this attempt to make these schools “look more like the city” by admitting more black and Latino students entails discriminating against Asian American students who have earned their spot by virtue of their test performance.

This is a controversial issue, and it’s not confined to New York. Below, Wai Wah outlines why exam schools are so important, and why she is fighting to preserve a model educational program.

GLENN LOURY: Now we have actually collaborated on something. I should mention this right at the outset. The Pacific Legal Foundation produced and Rob Montz the filmmaker oversaw the production of Dream Factories, I believe is what the documentary is called, which is an investigation of the controversy in New York City about the specialized exam admissions high schools—Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech—in which you, that controversy, have been very actively involved. Maybe we could start by you telling us a little bit about the controversy and about your role in it and where things are standing now on that set of issues in New York City.

WAI WAH CHIN: Thank you, Glenn. It was great to be with you in Dream Factories. We, of course, didn’t meet at that time because the shooting of the film happens quite separately in different pieces. But I think it captured a lot of the emotions of a very important topic. And the important topic is about excellence in our schools, meritocracy, and also the anti-Asian discrimination that’s happening in the schools here in New York, as well as in many other areas in education across this country.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-kids-education-parents-rep-elise-stefanik-rep-virginia-foxx

When Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue during a heated debate.

Just days later, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused to accept that parents should be the primary stakeholder in determining educational programing for their children.

And last week, in an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice directed the FBI to investigate and prosecute concerned parents at school board meetings, without citing even one bit of evidence that these alleged “threats” are beyond the capacity of local law enforcement. Nor did the DOJ disclose that Attorney General Garland’s family has a profit interest in marinating the presence of racist theories in schools.

It is a naked ploy to suppress parental dissent.

These actions have made clear that today’s Democrat Party is on the side of the school bureaucracy instead of students and families.

Democrats seem to believe that America’s schools and schoolchildren are better off with parents on the sidelines – a position that is dangerously detached from reality. It also reveals just how far the Left will go in pursuit of government control over every aspect of American life.

The deep frustration we are seeing at school board meetings is the expression of parents’ unsatisfied with the direction of their children’s education, while simultaneously aware that they are left with no other options.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/10/17/virginia-parents-announce-not-domestic-terrorists-march-in-washington-n1524549

By the time Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland realizes what an incredibly stupid memo he wrote to the president accusing parents of ‘”harassment and intimidation” of school board members, his boss will probably be a lame-duck president ready to be put out to pasture.

Republicans couldn’t have drawn it up any better. What’s the best way to show how radical the Biden administration is? How about threatening parents with a federal investigation because they want a say in what their children are being taught?

That parental pushback will take substantive form on October 17, when there will be a “Not a Domestic Terrorist” rally in front of the Department of Justice Building.

The parental pushback issue has roiled the Virginia gubernatorial race. Democrat Terry McAuliffe made the gaffe of the race — so far — when he said he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” His opponent, Republican Glenn Youngkin, is firing with both barrels, blanketing the state with $3 million in ads about education.

That, along with Garland’s stupidity, has given a sizable edge on the issue to Republicans.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/16/our-kids-cant-read-write-or-do-math-but-are-no-1-in-critical-race-theory/

America’s crumbling education system is in the news. On October 5, Joe Biden managed to disgorge some dismal indicators as to the future prospects of America’s youth compared to the rest of the developed world. 

Joe didn’t quite say it, but America’s kids, the product of an obscenely well-funded school system, rank last in the developed world in reading, writing, and math, making homegrown stupidity a far more pressing problem in modern-day America than homegrown terrorism. 

Yet conservatives have continued to insist, throughout the COVID lockdowns and quarantines, that kids are missing out on an education. 

To paraphrase Joan Rivers, how can you miss out on a rash? (When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her music, the great, late, lady Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.) 

A particularly startling fact caught my attention in the Economist. “At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at math, that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up.” 

This last fact is enormously telling and alarming. It tells you that America’s best schools and students can’t compete with the world’s best.

As the author further quipped cynically, “American children came top at thinking they were good at math, but bottom at math.”  

There’s no doubt that American kids are drowning in self-esteem. As someone who had warned, in the early 2000s, about unrealistic, dangerous levels of self-esteem, I would contend that inflated self-esteem and narcissism not only mask failure, but create pumped up nihilists, ready to unleash on their surroundings, unless met with palliative praise. 

Yes, self-esteem is the royal jelly upon which America’s children are raised. Our child-centered, non-hierarchical, collaborative, progressive schooling has produced kids who do not believe they can or should be corrected; and when they are corrected, they lash out in anger or bewilderment. 

Indeed, to listen to our university students speak is to hear a foreboding amalgam of dumbness and supreme confidence combined. Yet they are often high achievers in the kind of schools “tailored” for just such sub-par output. The achievement bell curve has been skewed. 

With welcome exceptions, the young can hardly string together coherent, grammatical sentences. They open their mouths and out tumble nothing but inane, mind-numbing clichés and banalities spoken in gravelly, grating, staccato tones. Vocal fry, the linguists call this loathsome sound. 

Once upon a time, linguists would have sent our Eliza Doolittles for elocution lessons. Make her sound less rough, more refined. 

Eliza, of “My Fair Lady” fame, was treated paternalistically, no doubt. Pedagogic paternalism can be fixed; not so a student’s studied ignorance. And these days, the Kardashian-style guttural growl is considered precious. Linguists name it and study it, instead of crushing it.