RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/04/the-immense-education-investment-fraud/

As reported by the estimable Just Facts, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. spent $1.02 trillion on education in 2019. This breaks down to $7,945 for every household in the country. It’s worth noting that these figures do not include land that is purchased for schools and other facilities, some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers, and unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (health insurance e.g.). Here in California, when all costs are considered, the state spends over $20,000 per pupil.

But for Joe Biden, a trillion isn’t nearly enough. In March the President, or whoever is handling him these days, rolled out a $1.9 trillion “federal relief package” which includes $126 billion for schools. What the teachers unions and its allies in the media call an “investment” is really nothing more than the ongoing pillaging of taxpaying Americans who are already facing debt of gargantuan proportions. 

Then last week, Biden piled on with the American Family Plan, a $1.8 trillion giveaway which includes $554 billion for education—payments in-full for community college and preschool, to address the (alleged) “growing teacher shortage,” and a host of other “investments”—a word that appears in some form 58 times in the plan’s fact sheet.

While educrats drool, many with a firm grip on reality are horrified at the government’s tax antics. As policy writer Brad Polumbo points out, tuition at the average community college for an in-district student is just $3,770. “But it’s even less than that for students who qualify for existing grants and financial aid, which cover nearly all the expenses.” Polumbo goes on to say that the majority of students of who attend community college end up dropping out, and research has shown that those students who actually pay for their own schooling tend to work harder and get better grades.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-death-spiral-of-academia/

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

It is important to note that Kaufmann concentrates primarily (but not exclusively) on the social sciences and humanities, in part because that’s where most previous research applies. Data for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) are not as common. There is no a priori reason to believe, however, that these fields are unaffected by systemic biases influencing entire institutions. Sure, one can make the argument that math is apolitical, but one can’t say the same for the many branches of science that now have considerable and controversial policy implications. Even a casual reading of the “educated” literature on environmental science and climatology reveals profound politicization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-7-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#7: University of Minnesota

In an effort to “deconstruct and decentralize whiteness,” the University of Minnesota’s Center for Practice Transformation and School of Social Work recently presented a “12-step program” to make white students aware of their innate “white supremacy.”  This allegedly “anti-racist” course is the ultimate apotheosis of racism, telling whites that as a sole result of their skin color they endorse and promote racist beliefs and policies. 

The course is presented in the form of an online “webinar” titled “Recovery from White Conditioning.” The official program description explains that “The Model of Recovery from White Conditioning, a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is rooted in love and accountability. It involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community…” The AA community has notably rejected this usurpation of their 12-step format for an “anti-racist” crusade.

The webinar is led by therapist and clinical supervisor Cristina Combs, a white woman who states that the program “is designed for white people to challenge and support each other to accept our responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, as it lives in us and around us.”

This is the very definition of racism—telling a group of white people that solely because of the color of their skin, white supremacy “lives in us.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-north-carolina-disgraces-itself-with-latest-faculty-hire/

To land a professorship in American colleges and universities, you have to either have a superb record of academic achievement or espouse radical leftist ideas. The former still prevails in hard sciences (although standards there are beginning to erode), but in many other academic fields, “wokeness” is now the main consideration.

Consider, for example, the decision by the journalism school at the University of North Carolina to offer a professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones. She was the driving force behind the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a piece of propaganda that scholars all across the political spectrum have blasted. Nevertheless, Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it. Now UNC wants her.

In today’s Martin Center article, Jay Schalin examines the hiring of Hannah-Jones and finds it very lamentable.

What’s wrong with the 1619 Project? A lot. Schalin writes, “For instance, she claimed that ‘one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery’ as British anti-slavery sentiment grew. There is almost no hint of that in factual history.” When called out on this false claim, Hannah-Jones has resorted to evasions and personal attacks. What a model for aspiring journalists.

https://mailchi.mp/harvard/into-practice-monikjimenez-1412968?e=b8a501ae37

Dr. Monik Jimenez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, uses different pedagogical approaches to elevate diverse voices and styles of learning. In her Mass Incarceration & Health in the U.S. course, she balances speaking time between a traditional scholar and an impacted community member, and emphasizes to the latter (and to students) that they are an expert. Dr. Jimenez also provides a variety of ways for students to participate and ask questions that include different cultural and neurodivergent learning styles. “It’s important to think about decolonizing the classroom in a layered way,” she reflects. “What are the multiple ways in which systems of power and white supremacy have impacted what we consider to be an ‘optimal’ student through the metrics we’ve been taught?”
 

The benefits: “Creating a space that demonstrates everyone’s voice is valued allows students to engage with one another in ways that are far more authentic and that last.” Students open themselves to learning, engaging more deeply with the material, and practice challenging stigmas in a carefully cultivated space. Emphasizing that voices outside the traditional scholar have deep value, permits students to feel comfortable thinking of themselves as experts. Dr. Jimenez notes that her students are often more interested in what impacted community members have to say.
 

“We’re challenging who you can be in this space and that your presence – your whole presence, everything that brought you to this point – is valued, not just where you went to school, but all your lived experience and distance travelled.”

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/05/03/why-school-vouchers-matter-and-how-to-get-them-right/

After a year of missed schooling and inadequate online learning, after months of teachers unions delaying the return to classrooms, it is time to reconsider school vouchers. Many “red” states are already doing so. Indiana is the most recent, and Florida, with one of the largest programs in the country, is about to undertake a major expansion. As these programs are implemented, we should learn which policies work best and build on those lessons.

The pro-voucher debate so far has focused on two features shared by all voucher programs. They offer more choices to parents and kids. And the schools supported by them appear to perform a bit better, on average, than existing public schools (after taking into account differences in student populations).

We need to refocus the debate on two other points that are crucial to designing effective programs. One is whether the payments are actually large enough to benefit poor families. Vouchers are useless to the poor unless they cover nearly all the costs of tuition, books and transportation. (The federal government already covers food costs.) The other issue is whether the programs foster genuine market competition, forcing schools to do their best for students or pay a high price for failure.

Well-designed voucher programs should accomplish the following:

Encourage new schools to enter the market,
Drive out schools that don’t meet students’ and parents’ needs, and
Shift public resources swiftly and decisively toward the best schools and away from the worst, as determined by the parents themselves.

These goals can be achieved only if resources follow the students, not the schools, teachers or administrators. They happen only if voucher programs are large enough and if bad public schools aren’t kept on life support. Right now, we don’t have that kind of vigorous competition, and it shows. Our children suffer for it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-prof-were-cutting-you-off-11619974459?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

The current political uniformity of college faculty illustrates the point. It meets the needs of the substitute purpose very well, but only by annihilating the authorized one. Analytical thinking requires exploring a range of alternatives, but political crusades require the opposite: exclusive belief and commitment. That’s how far off course academia has gone in its capricious self-repurposing.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/biden-administration-cites-1619-project-as-inspiration-in-history-grant-proposal/2021/04

The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.

In describing the basis for the new grant priority for American History and Civics Education programs, the administration cites the scholar and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that highlights slavery and its legacy as a central element in America’s story.

“It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions,and experiences of all students,” the April 19 notice in the Federal Register states. 

https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/college-professor-berates-student-for-calling-police-heroes/

An adjunct professor teaching her first-ever course at a California college was placed on leave this week after she ripped a student during a class presentation because he said he regards police officers as  “heroes.”

The unidentified Cypress College educator was apparently triggered Wednesday during 19-year-old business major Braden Ellis’s Zoom presentation on cancel culture in the US, in which he noted how even animated kids TV shows such as “Paw Patrol” have come under fire from unhinged cop-haters, Fox News reported.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-1-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#1: Harvard University:

Harvard University is widely regarded as America’s most prestigious university. It is also one of its most racist, deliberately using discriminatory and stereotypical ratings of Asian applicants’ personalities as “lacking” and “one-dimensional” to reduce their chances of obtaining admission to the prestigious university.

In 2014, Harvard was sued in federal district court by a coalition named Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits all schools which receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race. The suit charged that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants in undergraduate admissions decisions, using an admissions formula that hinders Asian applicants’ chances of admission by consistently giving them a low “personal rating”—a subjective measure of personality traits such as kindness, courage, and likeability. Through an examination of Harvard’s previously secret admissions data, SFFA was able to show that Asian-American applicants to Harvard face rampant racial discrimination.

Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University who testified in court on behalf of SFFA, concluded that Asian-American applicants have the lowest chance of admission to Harvard out of all races despite scoring highest in all objective measurements of achievement.

“Race plays a significant role in admissions decisions,” Arcidiacono wrote in his expert report. “Consider the example of an Asian-American applicant who is male, is not disadvantaged, and has other characteristics that result in a 25% chance of admission. Simply changing the race of this applicant to white—and leaving all his other characteristics the same—would increase his chance of admission to 36%. Changing his race to Hispanic (and leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 77%. Changing his race to African-American (again, leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 95%.”