RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids?

There is a document getting around called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, a guide put together by a group of educators. It has a black boy on the cover.

The idea is to show us how our racial reckoning of late ought change how we expose black kids to math. I suppose the counsel is also intended for kids of other types of melanin, but this is in essence a document that could be called “Math For Black Kids.”

The latest is that state-level policy makers in Oregon are especially intrigued by this document. There is all reason to suppose that its influence will spread more widely.

And this is to resisted, as this lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math. To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.

Of course the authors have it that “The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visualizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.” But translated, this means that math as we have always known it is racism. That’s a rich claim, and if correct, it is of earth-shattering urgency. But is it correct? Let’s see how it holds up.

http://Chttps://spectator.us/topic/school-parents-mad-hell-teachers-unions/harles Lipson

This week, Matt Meyer did what many parents long to do. He dropped off his kid at school. That’s unusual in Berkeley, California, where he lives, because the schools there have been closed for a year, and the teachers’ union adamantly opposes their reopening. Parents like Mr. Meyer who can afford private schools, which are mostly open, send their kids there. His child has been there since last June. So he dropped off his child and drove off to his job.

His job is head of the Berkeley teachers’ union. His main task there is to keep the public schools closed for everyone else.

Matt’s job and that of other teachers’ union bosses is getting harder — and not just because the hypocrisy is so obvious. It’s getting harder because parents and kids across the country are fed up. The national cry is Howard Beale’s from the 1976 film, Network, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore. Things have got to change.’

Until now, that cry has been mostly silent, but it is growing more vocal and more urgent. Returning kids to school and returning parents to work are America’s two most important dinner-table issues. The issues are closely linked, of course, because many parents can’t leave home for their jobs if the kids can’t leave home for their schools.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/28/a-trojan-horse-for-woke-education/

A massive new national project called “Educating for American Democracy” will be launched on Tuesday with the explicit aim of “redefining” and then “harmonizing” American civic education nationwide.

From the days of Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, Horace Mann, and the McGuffey readers to Ronald Reagan’s farewell address and the controversy over national history standards, citizenship education (broadly understood) has always been a vital function of American schools for the perpetuation of the American way of life. That’s about to change for the worse.   

Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is a coalition of educators that aims “to transform teaching of civics and history to sustain our constitutional democracy and meet the needs of a diverse 21st century K-12 student body.” EAD in 2019 received start-up funding of $650,000 from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 

Under a cooperative agreement with the federal agencies, iCivics will lead an EAD collaboration in partnership with four other organizations: Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE); Tufts’ Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life; and Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.     

https://www.wsj.com/articles/academic-freedom-is-withering-11614531962?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses. Last year, the National Association of Scholars recorded 65 instances of professors being disciplined or fired for protected speech, a fivefold increase from the year before. Yet many of academia’s defenders brush aside worries about dismissal campaigns and the lack of ideological diversity as little more than a collection of anecdotes cherry-picked to feed a right-wing moral panic.

My new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology gives the lie to these claims. Based on eight comprehensive surveys of academic and graduate-student opinion across the U.S., Canada and Britain, it buttresses the findings of numerous studies to provide hard data on the absence of viewpoint diversity and presence of discrimination against conservative and gender-critical scholars. High-profile activist excesses are mere symptoms of a much wider problem of progressive authoritarianism. Roughly 1 in 3 conservative academics and graduate students has been disciplined or threatened with disciplinary action. A progressive monoculture empowers radical activist staff and students to violate the freedom of political minorities like conservatives or “gender-critical” feminists, who believe in the biological basis of womanhood—all in the name of emotional safety or social justice.

Political discrimination is pervasive: 4 in 10 American academics indicated in a survey this summer that they would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job. In Canada, the share is 45%, while in Britain, 1 in 3 academics wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter. Between one-fifth and half of academics and graduate students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning grant applications, journal submissions and promotion cases. On a four-person panel, this virtually guarantees that a conservative will face discrimination.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/youll_never_believe_what_made_bill_mahers_audience_clap.html

The headlines were about the fact that, when Megyn Kelly appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show on Friday, she complained about the way her children’s pricey private schools in New York were indoctrinating them with pro-transgender values and anti-white animus. Bill Maher to his credit, agreed with Kelly that matters are getting seriously out of hand, at least when it comes to the anti-white hatred that’s becoming the norm in education. Maher’s always been a bit of maverick, though. The real surprise was the enthusiasm his audience showed for that sentiment.

For conservatives, nothing that Kelly said about her children’s experiences in New York’s toniest private elementary schools came as a surprise. Kelly said that, while she and her husband identify as “center-right,” she was okay with the fact that the schools were on the left side of the political aisle. That changed, though, when “they went hard left, and then they started to take a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.”

One of the hot-button issues was the schools’ efforts to normalize transgenderism, a form of body dysphoria that’s recognized as a mental illness when the subject is anorexia, not sex. Kelly told Maher that, when one of her sons was in third grade – that is, 8 years old, the school “unleashed a three-week experimental trans-education program.”

https://www.aol.com/entertainment/megyn-kelly-says-she-pulled-her-children-from-schools-for-teaching-social-justice-stuff-170832568.html

Megyn Kelly says she pulled her children from private schools for going ‘hard left’ with ‘social justice stuff’

Megyn Kelly removed her children from private school because administrators “took a really hard turn toward social justice stuff,” the former Fox News host revealed to Bill Maher on Friday.

While appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Kelly revisited her November decision to pull her children, sons Edward, 11, and Thatcher 7, and daughter Yardley, 9, whom she shares with husband Douglas Brunt, from their elite private schools in New York City.

“The schools have always been far-left, which doesn’t align with my own ideology, but I didn’t really care, most of my friends are liberals, it’s fine,” she said that month on her podcast The Megyn Kelly Show. “I come from Democrats as a family. I’m not offended at all by the ideology, and I lean center-left on some things.” Kelly also cited a blog post she said traveled through the parent community, allegedly at the suggestion of the school, titled If You Really Want to Make a Difference in Black Lives, Change How You Teach White Kids. “But they’ve gone around the bend. They have gone off the deep end,” she said.

During her Real Time appearance, Kelly admitted that she loved her children’s schools which were “definitely leftist” compared to her “center right” views. “But then they went hard left,” she told Maher. “Then they started to take a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.” Kelly described a “three-week experimental trans education program” that took place in her son’s third-grade class. “And it wasn’t about support,” she said. “We felt it was more about trying to convince them, like, ‘come on over.’ And the boys started to get confused.” Kelly said that she and other parents objected, which prompted an apology from the school.

Perhaps you are confused by so much talk lately about racism being all around you, particularly talk about variants going by names like “systemic racism” or “structural racism.” You yourself don’t seem to see much behavior that you think is racist, at least not in any overt or observable way. Are you missing something?

The answer is, you are not looking nearly closely enough at the world of left-wing colleges and their professors and administrators. That is where the really, really bad racism is pervasive.

But wait a minute, you say. Isn’t academia the central headquarters of the high priests of the woke, “anti-racist” religion? Aren’t these professors and college presidents the very same people who presume to lecture the rest of us endlessly about how to be “anti-racist” and how to atone for our sins of “oppression” and “white supremacy”? What makes the Manhattan Contrarian think that these left-wing academics and their institutions may be the worst racists of all?

The main reason we can be sure that these left-wing academics are the worst racists is that they admit it. Indeed, they regularly fall all over themselves either to confess their own grievous racist sins, or to accuse their colleagues and institutions of such sins. Also, these institutions and their leaders and faculties are constantly accused of vile racism by the black, indigenous and people of color (“BIPOCs”) in their midst, and when so accused, they invariably offer no defense, abjectly concede the wrongdoing, and promise forms of penance that become ever more extreme with each new accusation. This is not the behavior of innocent people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/25/end-the-systemic-racism-of-affirmative-action/

The U.S. Supreme Court has a real chance to deliver a grievous blow to a system that blights one of the nation’s leading institutions. Let’s hope it doesn’t blow it.

As the nation’s incipient racial reckoning following last May’s killing of George Floyd morphed into the summer’s riotous anarchy, the term “systemic racism” emerged as a fixture of our public discourse. What began as a somewhat arcane dialogue about purported police “militarization” and the “qualified immunity” legal doctrine soon took on a much more insidious tone. America, those like the New York Times‘ “1619 Project” fabulists told us, was rotten to its very core, blemished by the indelible taint of “systemic racism.”

In reality, as many courageously pointed out amid unprecedented “cancel culture” headwinds seeking to stifle all dissent, there is no such thing as “systemic racism” that afflicts all of America’s leading institutions. Despite the claim attaining mythological status, there is no factual basis to support it. There will, sadly, always be individual racists from all backgrounds and all walks of life, but American society in the 2020s simply does not have anything remotely resembling a legally enshrined regime under which its racial majority “systemically” oppresses its racial minorities. America in the year 2021 is not Germany in 1936; it is not South Africa in 1985; it is not—after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the Jim Crow South. This ought to be astoundingly obvious.

But while the notion of sprawling, multi-institutional “systemic racism” is a lie, there is at least one major American institution that does suffer from legally codified racism that tarnishes the institution’s integrity, sullies its legitimacy, and is so widespread that it might earnestly be dubbed “systemic.” I speak, of course, of affirmative action admission policies in American higher education.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/moral-vacuity-pro-palestinian-social-justice-richard-l-cravatts/

In August, Florida State University was one of several universities to have adopted the now widely accepted IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, signaling that university leaders and others outside of academia have begun to see the wisdom of having guidelines by which to identify and, hopefully, eliminate hate from their respective institutions. Not surprisingly, some progressive groups—including even Jewish ones—have condemned the IHRA definition, claiming that it will chill their speech and punish their ideology, even though the use of the definition does nothing of the sort. Israel-haters and anti-Semites can still continue to defame the Jewish state and single it out for opprobrium, condemnation, and slander but now they can be called out for their behavior.

Something called the Progressive Israel Network (comprised of Ameinu, Americans for Peace Now, Habonim Dror North America, Hashomer Hatzair World Movement, Jewish Labor Committee, J Street, New Israel Fund, Partners for Progressive Israel, and Reconstructing Judaism and T’ruah, left-leaning groups all) felt compelled to announce that, while, of course, they were all for defeating the world’s oldest hatred, they found the IHRA definition to be particularly unhelpful in their relentless quest to demonize Israel and critique the Jewish state. The IHRA definition, they announced ominously, is actually being weaponized to suppress progressive efforts to attack Israel, that the definition “is being misused and exploited to instead suppress legitimate free speech, criticism of Israeli government actions, and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”

IfNotNow, another group whose mission seems to be to hector lawmakers into distancing themselves from Israel and embracing the Palestinian cause without question or conditions, even hosted an event in January to discuss “how the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has been destroying the progressive movement” by “criminalizing the BDS movement and “squashing free speech” of progressives obsessed with signaling their loathing of Israel and their tireless efforts to fight for social justice for the ever-aggrieved Palestinians.

That has meant that students, and left-leaning faculty, as well, are urged to advocate for social and economic goals described in decidedly liberal intellectual formulations such as “social and economic justice,” “distributive justice,” and “the global interconnections of oppression,” this latter view ideal for conflating, at least in liberal imaginations, the shared complicity of America and Israel in their long-term oppression of the indigenous people of the fictive nation of Palestine and the alleged “occupation” of their land.