RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/critical-race-theory-americas-classrooms-clare-lopez-0/

[Part 1 & 2 of this series can be read :

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/institutionalizing-critical-race-theory-clare-lopez/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/critical-race-theory-americas-classrooms-clare-lopez/

This is Part 3 of a multi-part series on the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in America’s schools. While earlier articles explained how the ideological foundations of CRT are rooted in Marxism and were promulgated by Marxist intellectuals operating out of the leftist faculty lounges of American academia, today’s essay will delve into some of the specific elements of CRT curricula now to be found within Ethnic Studies programs across the country.

California: Incubator of CRT in America

As described in this author’s May 7, 2021 article, “Critical Race Theory in America’s Classrooms”, the incubator for many of these educational concepts was California. There, the State School Board and legislature have wrestled with development of a so-called “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC) for years. The essential purpose of that curriculum is to inculcate California students with a divisive, racist view of American society based on oppositional distinctions drawn among various ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino-Chicano Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians/whites. Coursework, class lectures, Power Points, and textbooks already in use set all the other ethnic/racial groups against whites. This is classic Marxist, Saul Alinsky-style propaganda whose ultimate objective is violent revolution based on an uprising of the “oppressed” vs the “oppressors”. Spread now throughout the U.S. school system, such indoctrination already is yielding the results methodically instigated by enemies of the state who seek a communist revolution in this country.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: how traditional academic rigor is systematically being dismantled and what are some of the elements of the CRT and Ethnic Studies curricula currently in use in American classrooms.

CRT In Schools Around the Country

What is happening at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia is illustrative. A magnet school founded in 1985 as a place for gifted students, “TJ” as it’s called ranked #1 in the country for 2021 according to U.S. News and World Report. Criteria for those rankings include “performance on state-required tests, graduation, and how well they prepare students for college”. The school also boasted a 99.8% graduation rate, as of September 2020.

But no longer. After a unanimous vote by all twelve Fairfax County school board members, TJ will no longer admit students based on academic achievement and a tough entrance exam. It seems that some 70% of the student body at TJ in the 2020 school year were Asians. This has now been deemed unacceptable by the Fairfax County Schools system because competition with such highly gifted students – who typically score in the top 2 percent of high school students nationwide with average IQ levels ranging from about 120-160 – was just not fair to lower achieving students of other ethnic backgrounds. Admissions tests will henceforth be scrapped in favor of a lottery draw from among students who post at least a 3.5 GPA. The objective is not to continue TJ’s record for academic excellence but to draw in more students of African American and Hispanic background, even if their scholastic performance doesn’t match up to that of their Asian counterparts. After all, it’s diversity of skin color that counts most now, not ensuring that America continues to produce the best and brightest engineers, inventors, and scientists in the world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/553668-cutting-costs-and-cultivating-free-speech-will-put-higher

As a 25-year affiliate professor of surgery, as well as a former member of a liberal arts college’s Board of Trustees, higher education has been a long-term concern of mine. The critical task of preparing the next generation of Americans to become leaders is one of the utmost importance. Now, as the ranking member of the House Education Committee Higher Education and Workforce Investment Subcommittee, I am honored to lead on initiatives that improve American colleges and universities.

It is the overwhelming consensus that the cost of college tuition is far too high. At the end of the 4th quarter in 2020, federal student loan borrowers owed $1.57 trillion. This tremendous burden is second only to outstanding mortgage debt. More troubling, the rising cost of tuition in America has far outpaced the rise in the price of other consumer goods in the past 30 years. There are several reasons for this.

Salaries for compliance officers, diversity coaches, and all kind of other administrative staff — which I more appropriately term “administrative bloat” — have soared in recent decades. Between 1993 and 2007, these costs jumped by 61.2 percent compared to an increase of only 39.3 percent in academic instructional costs. Although most students may not use many of the unnecessary amenities offered at colleges and universities, they still foot the bill for it. Cutting these costs would save students money. There are also many new majors that offer little, if any, chance of future employment. While classes in those disciplines may be beneficial for a broad education, they do not need to be majors. Higher education has lost their way on how to spend students’ monies responsibly. This reckless spending spree needs to cease.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/22/columbia-prep-students-parents-reel-from-porn-liter

Parents at the posh Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School are outraged they were never told of a fourth “R” being added to the curriculum: raunch.

In addition to the usual reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the school this month launched lessons on porn — without informing families or allowing them to opt out, parents fumed.

When juniors at the $47,000-a-year Manhattan school showed up for a health and sexuality workshop, most thought it was “just going to be about condoms or birth control,” a student told The Post.

Instead, it was something called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” taught by Justine Ang Fonte, who’s the director of Health & Wellness at another elite prep school, Dalton.

The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls included lessons on how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”

Justine Ang Fonte claims her teachings stem from the social theory “intersectionality”, a component from critical race theory.
Twitter

Fonte’s presentation, some of which was seen by The Post, included a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more.

One slide cited various porn genres such as “incest-themed,” consensual or “vanilla,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM” (which included “waterboard electro” torture porn as an example).

“We were all like, ‘What?’” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.’ Everyone knows about porn. The worst part of it was that it took place not long before the AP tests and I had to miss both my AP classes for this.”

One part of the porn presentation involved something called the “marketability of Only Fans,” the hot new app used mostly for sex work. One slide included a photo of a pretty young woman who appeared to be promoting OnlyFans-type work.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/nikole-hannah-jones-at-the-summit/

Nikole Hannah-Jones was having a very good year. She reached the summit on April 28, when it was widely reported that she had been appointed with tenure, effective July, to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The news came a week after the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Hannah-Jones was among some 259 “outstanding individuals” elected to the Academy in 2021. She led the list of eight chosen in “Journalism, Media, and Communications.” 

A year ago May 4, Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Between those bookends, she has been invited to present numerous prestigious lectures at universities and other august venues. She received the George Polk “special award” in 2019 after receiving it in 2015 for “radio reporting” for “The Problem We All Live With.” She also received a 2015 Peabody Award for “The Case for School Desegregation Today.”

Of course, she was also a 2017 recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.”

But her appointment to a named chair at the school from which she received her master’s degree in 2003 had to be among the sweetest distinctions. She was being recognized as a top figure in her chosen profession. 

But on May 18, the bottom fell out. 

The Fall

That day the UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees took the unusual step of refusing to grant Hannah-Jones tenure. The board offered her an alternative: a five-year appointment as a “professor of practice,” with the option of a tenure review down the road. In higher education parlance, this would be a “probationary appointment.” In Hannah-Jones’ world, it might be called a humiliation. She sees herself as one of the most authoritative voices in journalism today. The news that she would still have to prove herself worthy of a tenured academic appointment must have hit her hard.

Be that as it may, it certainly hit the American higher education establishment hard. “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous” roared Silke-Maria Weineck, a University of Michigan German professor in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle also features an essay by staff writers Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason, who explain, Hannah-Jones’ “‘1619 Project’ Is a Political Lightning Rod. It May Have Cost Her Tenure.” Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed headlines her account “A Blatant Intrusion.” She leads with a quote from an anonymous source who says UNC’s trustees acted under “pressure.” 

I would hope so. If there were ever a time when university trustees should be called upon to live up to their responsibilities to maintain the integrity of academic appointments, this was it.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/texas-senate-passes-bill-that-ban

The Texas state Senate passed a bill Saturday that prohibits schools from mandating the teaching of critical race theory (CRT).

House Bill 3979 doesn’t mention CRT by name, but apparently aims to ban the controversial quasi-Marxist ideology in public and open-enrollment charter schools.

According to the bill text, teachers, administrators, or employees from state agencies, school districts, and open-enrollment charter schools are prohibited from teaching students that one race is inherently superior to another race or sex or that an individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, by virtue of his or her race or sex.

A teacher “may not [be] compelled to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” in social studies curriculum in Texas history, U.S. history, world history, government, civics, social studies, or similar subjects, according to the bill.

If teachers choose to discuss the above topics, they must explore those topics from diverse and contending perspectives and can’t give deference to any one perspective.

The bill also requires the State Board of Education to adopt civic education to help students’ understanding of the moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American, U.S. history and tradition, and the founding documents of the United States.

The Lone Star State’s lower chamber passed the bill on May 11 but will have to approve it again in alignment with revisions made by the state Senate.

CRT—which espouses the idea that race is not natural, but socially constructed to oppress and exploit minorities—is an offshoot of the quasi-Marxist critical theory social philosophy that was promoted by the Frankfurt school of thought.

Then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning CRT training in federal agencies in September 2020, with the White House describing it as “anti-American propaganda.”

However, the socialist ideology has been embraced by President Joe Biden and his administration. Biden reversed Trump’s September 2020 executive order after entering the White House and pushed CRT training on all fronts.

The Biden administration’s efforts triggered widespread pushback from federal and state Republican lawmakers, conservatives and related organizations, and parents.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education

Among all human endeavors, mathematics stands alone in terms of its beauty, universality, and innumerable applications. Though its role is often obscured by esoteric language, mathematics is behind almost all of humanity’s major advances in science and engineering.

Bridges stand, planes fly, rockets carry us into space, and MRIs can see into our brains thanks to precise mathematical calculations performed by powerful computers, invented by mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Behind tasks performed by computers—predicting the weather, performing complex financial transactions, or encrypting billions of messages each day—lie sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Artificial intelligence, for example, is but a happy marriage between powerful computers and abstract mathematical models that sort and analyze massive amounts of data.

Before our discipline became the universal global enterprise it is today, great mathematical discoveries passed from ancient civilizations to medieval ones and then to modern ones. One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous racist policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America. One of them was Albert Einstein, whom Time magazine would declare Person of the Century in 1999. Science in Germany hasn’t returned to its former glory to this day.

The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession. David Hilbert’s ‘‘mathematics knows no races’’ is the living motto of the community of American mathematicians. Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world. The availability of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals, highly trained in mathematics, has been crucial to our success as a nation. 

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/public_affairs/2021/05/06/skewed_history_textbook_coverage_of_early_america_and_the_new_deal_775956.html

Bottom Line: Six reviewers critique portions of five popular history and civic textbooks, finding that, despite some good qualities, they contain serious flaws. Overall, these textbooks fail to lay out a coherent historical framework, offer a truncated understanding of political theory, exhibit a bias in favor of a progressive interpretation of history, minimize the importance of religion (especially Protestantism), favor New Deal economics, and devote insufficient attention to the formation of republican virtue among students.

National Association of Scholars director of research David Randall, along with professors and scholars Bruce Frohnen, Kevin Gutzman, Jason Ross, Amity Shlaes, and William Pettinger, review portions of five popular textbooks used in history and civic education.

The textbooks under discussion are:

“American History,” 2018 edition, HMH Social Studies
“United States History,” 2016 edition, Pearson
“United States History and Geography,” 2018 edition, McGraw Hill
“The Unfinished Nation,” Ninth Edition, McGraw Hill
“America’s History,” Ninth Edition, Bedford St. Martin’s

Though the scholars worked independently, they found that the same general problems permeated each textbook. In straightforward and even-keeled prose, they catalogue problems such as too much graphics impeding student learning. They also found that the textbooks favor a progressive version of U.S. history, minimize the influence of religion – and Protestantism in particular – and feature a reductive understanding of political theory (for example, offering two-dimensional, flat sketches of Enlightenment thought and the tenets of New Deal-era liberalism). The textbooks also seem to agree with the presuppositions underlying New Deal economics. Finally, they neglect the importance of character formation, an especially glaring problem because students need to be taught the virtues of republican self-government.

In order to improve history and civic education in the United States, the reviewers argue that students need better textbooks that, in David Randall’s estimation, are “fair-minded, fact-based, and not subject to ideological bias.” Through the publication of this report, NAS aims to provide guidance to school boards and significantly improve the College Board’s standards.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trumps-1776-commission-to-reassmble-tackle-critical-race-theory-in-history-education_3825673.html

Members of the 1776 Commission, which President Joe Biden disbanded on his first day in White House, are reportedly set to meet again with a renewed focus on combating the teaching of U.S. history based on the Marxist critical race theory.

The advisory commission was established by the Trump administration in November 2020 to celebrate and promote the principles enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. It is commonly seen as a response to The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, which argues that the United States was founded as, and remains today, a racist nation.

Nearly four months after its dissolution, the commission regained attention when a leading member spoke against a Biden administration’s proposal to prioritize funding education programs that promote the 1619 Project and critical race theory, an ideology rooted in Marxist class struggle but with an emphasis on race, with the goal of dismantling all institutions of American society, which it deems as tools of racial oppression.

“The Proposed Rule should be withdrawn, just as individual states, which actually have the authority over the nation’s K-12 educational system, should oppose race-based pedagogy as part of their curricula and even if attempted to be imposed by the federal government,” Matthew Spalding, the executive director of the 1776 Commission, wrote in a letter to the Education Department.

“On behalf of my fellow Commissioners, I submit and draw your attention to Appendix III of The 1776 Report,” Spalding added. The appendix explains why race-focused narratives like the 1619 Project and critical race theory are “fundamentally incompatible” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which connects liberty-loving Americans everywhere regardless of their race.

“Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them,” the document reads. “While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities.”

In an interview with Washington Examiner, Spalding said that members of the 1776 Commission will convene next week in Washington on the campus of Hillsdale College. One of their topics will be critical race theory, which sees racism in all aspects of American life.

“When we start going about dividing people by groups, by social identities, and especially by identities that deal with race, and we’re starting to make those kinds of divisions, all Americans should get very nervous,” said Spalding. “It’s a departure away from the historic grounding of civil rights in America, which is that we all are equal.”

The commission’s first and last report, commonly referred to as the 1776 Report, was taken down after Biden’s inauguration. It can still be found on the publicly archived Trump White House and Hillsdale College websites.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/marylands-largest-school-district-spent-454k-in-taxpayer-money-on-anti-racist-system-audit/

Maryland’s largest school district spent over $454,000 for an “anti-racist system audit,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch, while the district’s middle school students were taught that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was an example of “covert white supremacy” that ranks just below “lynching,” hate crimes,” “the N-word” and “racial slurs.”

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, says it obtained 685 pages of records on Montgomery County Public Schools’ (MCPS) “anti-racist system audit” and critical race theory classes.

The district hired The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium to conduct the audit, a company that claims its “expertise in using intersectionality as part of its theory of change makes us uniquely positioned to conduct the Anti-Racist Audit and mitigate the root causes of systemic barriers.” 

The documents include Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium’s “anti-racist system audit” proposal, which describes intersectional theory as “people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, native language, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Intersectionality recognizes that identity markers (e.g. “female” and “Black”) do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the others, often creating a complex merging of oppression.” 

Meanwhile, students in Thomas Pyle Middle School’s social justice class who were taught that MAGA is an example of white supremacy were also taught that “white privilege” means being favored by school authorities, having a positive relationship with police, “soaking in media blatantly biased toward my race” and “living ignorant of the dire state of racism today.”