RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/31/some_american_students_can_only_spell_f-a-i-l-u-r-e_791974.html

The U.S. Department of State is giving $275,000 in grants to organizations in Bolivia and Guatemala to teach people English.

The United States has a vested interest in having more people around the world speak English and the $100,000 for Bolivia and $175,000 for Guatemala isn’t exorbitant. However, many students in America can’t pass remedial reading tests.

The national average for fourth graders in public schools in 2019 is having 65% of students reading at or above basic levels and 34% at or above proficient.

Not exactly a high bar, students in 28 states test above the national average.

That includes in New York, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island, where 66% of students read at or above basic levels and in Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina and Indiana, where 67% of students read at or above basic levels.

The lowest levels of basic reading skills are seen in Alaska and New Mexico (53%), Louisiana (55%), Washington D.C. (57%), Alabama (58%), West Virginia (60%), and Texas, South Carolina, and Arizona (61%).

No state tops 45% of fourth graders reading at or above proficient.

Alaska, New Mexico, Louisiana and Alabama all have below 30% of their fourth graders reading at proficient levels.

Eighth graders fared better, with the national average being 72% of eight-grade students reading at or above basic levels. The national average for proficient dropped to 32%.

While 32 states have eight-grade students reading above the national “basic” average, only one state, Massachusetts, enters the 80 range (81%). Again, no states exceed 45% of students reading at proficient levels.

It should be an embarrassment that American children are struggling in reading.

https://www.city-journal.org/dc-prep-schools-embrace-diversity-equity-and-inclusion?wallit_nosession=1

In August 2020, the faculty and staff of Sidwell Friends, the Washington, D.C. area’s top private school, convened to hear a special talk hosted by the school’s director of Equity, Justice, and Community. The speaker was Ibram X. Kendi, no stranger to the podium at posh private schools. “We’re either educating our children to be racist, or we are educating them to be anti-racist,” Kendi said. According to the school’s press release, Kendi charged teachers with the task of creating “an anti-racist world, both in the School and in the world at large, because to not do so is to be complicit in maintaining racist policies.” A few weeks later, Kendi gave another talk for the students at Sidwell, who, like the teachers, had read his book in preparation. “Kendi emphasized that change can—must—happen on a personal level,” the press release says.

Private schools around the nation have adopted Kendi’s message, and Washington is no exception. The top five D.C.-area private high schools—Sidwell Friends, Georgetown Day, Holton-Arms, the National Cathedral School, and St. Albans—committed to this vision in the form of strategic plans. Similar plans may have generated backlash in New York, but so far, the D.C. schools have embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) without notable dissent. D.C.’s top schools now require every corner of their institutions—from chemistry classes and athletic departments to boards of trustees—to demonstrate fealty to “antiracism.”

Some of the pressure for change has come from the students. Last summer, on “BlackAt” social-media accounts that emerged at nearly every top private school in the country, anonymous students alleged incidents of racism and demanded action. Similar accounts sprang up at all five of the top D.C. schools, and their strategy proved successful. A June 2020 letter from Georgetown Day School’s head of school and DEI director thanked the students running the “BlackAt” account for raising awareness, called for feedback to help the school effectuate “institutional and ideological change,” and concluded with a quote from Kendi: “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse.” Two months later, Georgetown Day’s administrators made good on their promise with a 14-point plan. Meantime, National Cathedral School explicitly cites the “blackatncs” account in its DEI plan overview. And in a letter in November, the head of school at Holton-Arms said she was grateful for the “Black@HAS” account.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/academia_reaches_its_terminal_stage_of_rot.html

“Those who can do; those who can’t teach.”

Most people who were born prior to the socialist infestation and eventual takeover of our education system probably remember that quote.  It was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903, a line from his four-act drama Man and Superman.  It has been upsetting teachers and professors ever since, many of whom had a valid complaint about being included among the alleged non-achievers. 

Many fine teachers throughout history have helped positively shape young minds — there’s no doubt about that.  But some educators who whined about the quote were mediocrities who inspire few if any students; others are subversive ideologues who spend their entire careers indoctrinating impressionable kids in their relentless pursuit of a utopian fantasy.  The effort is ongoing, and the warning signs have been there for decades.  But anyone who sounded the alarm was ridiculed and called a conspiracy nut, a wacko, or a Nazi.  Some things never change…especially in the tried-and-true Marxist playbook.  Saul Alinsky would be proud!

Sadly, we are now on the cusp of seeing that twisted dream become a reality.  Orwellian doublespeak, a socialist staple, is a Democrat favorite: those who brazenly violate the Constitution accuse the opposition of violating the Constitution…those who loudly decry racism pound race-hatred into the minds of our children…tyrants who twice impeached President Trump without a scintilla of evidence support the delusional hack in the White House while he commits numerous impeachable offenses…apparatchiks rant “follow the science,” all the while encouraging troubled children to pretend they’re members of the opposite sex.  I could go on, but you get the point.

The federal government encourages and often mandates the indoctrination in our schools, the primary tool for destroying young minds.  There are myriad reasons why this cancer continues to metastasize, but even a cursory look at who controls the reins of power in the federal behemoth provides a good part of the answer.

– Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, has had a lengthy career as a “public servant and educator,” according to her bio on Wikipedia.  In fact, it appears that she has done nothing except lecture at the academy and work for various bureaucracies.  She is lauded as a great economist but has never really worked in the private sector.  Yellen did serve as chair of the Federal Reserve, but the Fed is a quasi-government institution that manages currency supply and interest rates about as well as Congress manages the budget.  Hyper-inflation, anyone?

– Miguel Cardona, secretary of education, taught fourth grade through college, then worked as an appointed bureaucrat at the state and federal levels.  Period.  Apparently, he has never worked a day in the private sector.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/critical-race-theory-suicide-whites-crt/

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one.

There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.

‘The white race is the cancer of human history,’ Sontag wrote in Partisan Review; ‘it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself’.

The purpose of CRT is to ‘prove’ why this is and how it affects nonwhites, not only as applied to law but every aspect of life. Healthcare, classical music, climate change, dating markets, the great outdoors, botanical nomenclature and math class — all are touched by the stain of racial bigotry. In a world where everything is racist, CRT is the cipher disk that reveals the how, why, and who.

The real reason CRT is intolerable, then, is also the one many people have trouble saying aloud: it is explicitly anti-white. For people like me, this is not merely a game of semantics.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/24/the-woke-crusade-against-western-civilisation/

Cambridge University’s archaeology museum is to display signs explaining the apparent ‘whiteness’ and lack of ‘diversity’ among its ancient sculpture plaster casts – all as part of an anti-racism campaign.

This sounds like satire, but it’s not. Cambridge University’s Classics faculty really has chosen to focus on ‘the role of classical sculpture in the history of racism’. In effect, this ancient seat of learning is undertaking an act of cultural vandalism. It is seeking to recast Greek and Roman civilisation as the cradle of modern racism.

The museum says the sculptures give a ‘misleading impression’ of the whiteness and ‘absence of diversity’ in the ancient world. Aside from the philistinism of this approach, the important question to ask is why it is being adopted now.

It seems that all it took for the Classics faculty to decide ancient sculptures were a bit racist was an open letter to the faculty chair, written in 2020, from students, alumni and staff. This letter called for a ‘public acknowledgement of the problems of racism within Classics and… for active anti-racist work within our discipline’. And, just like that, this august institution gave in – it effectively said that the ancient world is something of which we should be ashamed.

The Classics faculty has since declared it will ‘turn the problem into an opportunity’. This will entail drawing attention to ‘the diversity of those figured in the casts’, and to the ways that the sculptures’ ‘colour has been lost and can be restored’.

In addition to all this, the Classics faculty has now published an action plan showing how it will deal with racism in Classics more broadly. This includes providing training for Classics tutors on how to discuss sensitive topics, and a review of all the language used in course titles and materials.

For some, the decision of Cambridge’s Classics faculty to portray Classics as racist is just another example of the dominance of identity politics in universities. But there is much more at stake here.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/a_virus_more_potent_than_covid.html

This one actually is tearing the country apart, and the cure is not apparent.

Shame and blame are animating features of the Critical Race movement.  The latest example of Critical Race Theory can be found in the article from Inside Higher Ed and is titled “Camera’s On: Surveillance in the Time of COVID-19.”  Author Margaret Finders “(pronouns: she, her, hers) is former chair and professor in the department of education at Augsburg University and Joaquin Muñoz (he/him/his pronouns) is assistant professor in the American Indian studies department at the university.”

The authors claim that asking students to keep cameras on during synchronous online class sessions is actually “indicative of an attitude toward teaching that positions students as docile bodies in need of constant surveillance.”  In fact, though “sharing an empty box or just a name seems to make many instructors uncomfortable … feeling such discomfort does not give them the right to demand entry into students’ private spaces.”

Who is “demanding entry into students’ private spaces”?  The Zoom screen does not meander into other rooms.  It shows the face of the student. 

But the more important point according to Finders and Muñoz is that “the ideologies of  ‘cameras on’ are incredibly problematic due to their racist, sexist and classist [emphasis mine] undertones.”

And so Marxist ideology is front and center in the article.  The clearly combative words and alleged high moral stance are the first indication that the left is on the march.  After all, the leftist machine is adept at manufacturing outrage.  Strategic ambiguity and changing the meanings of words to suit its nefarious purposes are never-ending.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/critical-race-theory-loudoun-culture-wars-systemic-racism-education-teachers-union-11629837816?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Leesburg, Va.

Shouting matches, tears and overwhelming frustration dominated the Loudoun County School Board’s meeting on June 22. Sitting on the dais, I had a front-line view of the fundamental challenges facing our nation’s education system.

Before I was elected to the school board, Loudoun County Public Schools in early 2019 spent $400,000 on an “equity consultant” to analyze graduation rates and other data to determine how racist the school district was.

After breaking down the data by race, the consultant found tiny differences in the graduation rates of black high-school students and white ones. These gaps, often only 1 percentage point, weren’t statistically significant.

Yet the LCPS superintendent deemed them sufficient evidence to bring in other outside groups, which declared that Loudoun County was systemically racist, and that the administration needed to embrace critical race theory’s concept of equity.

Critical race theory’s proponents claim America’s entire social structure and fabric—you and me, our laws and rules—are irredeemably racist and must be dismantled. LCPS and school systems like it support CRT by recommending books and teaching resources.

According to one strongly recommended book, “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, “a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.”

This is a glimpse of what roughly 15,000 teachers are reading and using in their lesson plans for the estimated 85,000 students of Loudoun County.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/teaching_critical_race_theory.html

As irate parents and taxpayers turn up in large numbers at school board meetings across the nation to express their opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT), school districts are backpedaling as fast as they can, claiming “we don’t teach Critical Race Theory in our district.”  Although districts are not teaching classes titled “Critical Race Theory,” they are incorporating CRT ideology into programming and curricula, and hiring people whose job is to insert CRT into every aspect of school life.

The following is one example of how CRT principles and practices are being supported by Pennsylvania’s Downingtown Area School District (DASD), where earlier this year the board hired Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI), Jason Brown, who wrote a book, Ugh! Not Another Diversity Book in which he misrepresents the history of Thanksgiving to portray all early European immigrants as bad. Please note, the disparagement of people based on their skin color (white), and ethnic background (European), is a key aspect of CRT ideology.

At DASD public meetings, the Board does not allow community members to make comments about DASD employees. Speakers are silenced when they attempt to provide personal experiences and observations of how CRT ideology is being implemented — as was this woman and this woman — making it very difficult to reveal the CRT/DEI agenda. Therefore, it is vital for DASD residents to communicate beyond the bounds of school board meetings to the broader public. 

In Ugh! Not Another Diversity Book Brown plays fast and loose with history to promote an anti-white narrative about the origins of Thanksgiving. To elucidate both what Brown is doing and what the DASD Board considers acceptable scholarship for a member of the “Senior Leadership Team,” it is helpful to look first at the historical record. The passage below is one of the only two existing firsthand accounts of the first Thanksgiving in America, written in 1621 by Edward Winslow.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.  And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us…

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/confusion-blame-shifting-and-inaccuracy-academia-reacts-to-the-fall-of-afghanistan/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=sixth

You may or may not be surprised by how the ‘experts’ are reacting to Afghanistan’s fall.

he nation’s foreign-policy and Middle East “experts” have blown it again, and academics are part of the problem. In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, many are simply silent while others are expressing surprise. Still others can’t transcend their default position of blaming America.

Let’s start with silence. What is the Middle East Studies Association up to? Its Committee on Academic Freedom is very active when it comes to writing letters to governments that restrict access to education. Where is the letter to the Taliban demanding that women be allowed to learn how to read and write and universities should remain open?

What about the academics who have been teaching Afghans? What will happen to the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF)? Founded in 2006 with a grant from USAID, it bears the name “American” on its façade and claims to be devoted to “implementing an American higher education model.” Academics certainly thought highly of it — even more highly than they thought of American involvement there in the first place. According to Victoria Fontan, a professor of peace and conflict studies at AUAF, “the university is really one of the only positive U.S. legacies in Afghanistan that has no dark corners.” If Fontan is willing to speak about the U.S. effort in Afghanistan so caustically to CBS, one can only imagine what maligning might occur in her peace-studies seminars.

Many academics are simply reluctant to say or write anything at all critical of Islam or Islamism for fear of being branded an “Islamophobe.” Amazingly, this even applies now to the Taliban. According to ABC 6 Rhode Island News, Faiz Ahmed, an associate professor of modern and Middle Eastern history at Brown University, said that “it will take more than just one side to begin recovery efforts, including the U.S. and neighboring countries as well as the Taliban to honor universal and Islamic values.” Newsflash to Ahmed: The Taliban are quite confident they are restoring Islamic values to Afghanistan after 20 years of Western influence.

Of course, the default academic position for well over two decades has been to blame America for everything. Irfan Noorudin, director of the South Asia Center and professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, says that collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government and takeover by the Taliban is “an indictment of U.S. policy under four American presidents dating back to 2001” and that our allies “increasingly must grapple with an America whose bark is stronger than its bite . . . and that lacks the ability to mobilize consensus around extended international engagement.” Ah yes, “international engagement,” the key to securing, er . . . American interests.

Some academics still can’t get beyond blaming Donald Trump for Afghanistan. Admittedly, negotiating with the Taliban has always been something of a fool’s errand, but every president since Bill Clinton has done so. We don’t know how Trump would have handled the withdrawal, but we know how Biden has mishandled it. That didn’t stop Ronald Stockton, professor of political science at University of Michigan–Dearborn, from saying that the fall of the Afghan government “was inevitable as soon as the Trump administration signed the Doha document agreeing to withdraw all U.S. forces if the Taliban would promise to behave themselves. . . . At that point, our allies within the country knew that it was only a matter of time.” The difference here (to use Stockton’s term) is that Biden didn’t make the Taliban promise anything. Stockton further admonished that “hyperventilating members of Congress are allowed to hyperventilate against Biden if they also hyperventilated against Trump. Otherwise, it is just shameless partisan treachery.” Stockton misses several points here: first, that nearly everyone wanted out of Afghanistan after 20 years of propping up a corrupt and inept government; and second, that for 20 years no major attacks on U.S. soil were plotted, directed, and launched from Afghanistan. He also overlooks Biden’s epic bungling of the withdrawal, which is precisely what everyone is “hyperventilating” about. Even a rank amateur knows to evacuate civilians before military personnel and to remove war materiel from the war zone instead of leaving it to the enemy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/odious-campaign-sexualize-children-public-schools-richard-l-cravatts/

The current debate about critical race theory (CRT) being promoted in public schools by diversocrats and educators intent on indoctrinating students with one particular view of race revealed one important thing: that teachers, and the powerful unions which represent them, feel it is their right and obligation to inculcate students with a questionable, toxic view which accuses all white students of being complicit in systemic racism and assumes all black students are victims of that oppression and bigotry.

Educators have pretended that the effort to promote CRT is purportedly to make children more tolerant and less race aware, although it is obvious to CRT’s many critics that it does precisely the opposite by making children focus on their skin color and making assumptions about themselves and others based on theirs. More importantly, public schools have decided that they, and they alone, can decide to teach children a radical and discredited view of racism and that this area of teaching should have a prominent place in public school education.

But educators have not limited themselves to indoctrinating students about controversial theories about race and bigotry. Long before CRT had shown up on anyone’s radar, public schools had been widening the focus and content of what was commonly referred to as “sex education,” but which now has blossomed from a single course one might encounter in high school about hygiene and reproduction to reading materials, curricula, lesson plans, activities, and even the incorporation of aspects of sexuality into courses such as history where mention of such topics was normally absent.

The 13-million-member National Education Association, just as it has with CRT, has been vocal in promoting a wide and radical curriculum about sexuality, something it feels, as it does with race, that it has a right and obligation to do. A 2016-2017 NEA resolution, for example, “B-53 Sex Education,” announced that the organization, “. . . believes that the developing child’s sexuality is continually and inevitably influenced by daily contacts, including experiences in the school environment . . . [and] that the public school must assume an increasingly important role in providing the instruction.”

Ignoring the reality that many of the students being taught by its members are elementary and middle school-aged children with little or no prior knowledge about sexuality, the resolution continued that it would assiduously defend every student’s right to knowledge about sexuality, asserting that “The Association also believes that to facilitate the realization of human potential, it is the right of every individual to live in an environment of freely available information and knowledge about sexuality . . . .”

And such instruction, of course, would not be a mere perusal of the “birds and bees” of yesterday’s public education. No, in the infinite moral wisdom of the NEA, “Such programs should include information on … diversity of culture and diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity . . . sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and HPV, incest, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and homophobia . . . age-appropriate, medically accurate information including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) issues. This should include but not be limited to information on sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender expression.”