RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/woke-math-is-coming-to-a-classroom-near-you/?itm_

Not even algebra is safe from the social-justice warriors.

T he British author Douglas Murray has lately argued that intersectional social justice represents the most serious ideological threat to the liberal order since the end of the Cold War. Even a few years ago, his thesis would have sounded overblown, but no longer. Events have conspired to vindicate him.

Take the phenomenon of woke math, for instance. As Catherine Gewertz laid out in a piece for Education Week late last year, more and more teachers in K–12 classrooms are introducing left-wing intersectional agitprop into math lessons. Progressive talking points on subjects like policing patterns and campaign-finance reform are being used to supply students with numerical data that is then used to teach multiplication, division, algebra, and the like. Gewertz describes one such initiative, developed in Seattle, as attempting to supply “a framework . . . that weaves questions of power and oppression into math instruction, along with explorations of ethnic identity.”

This infiltration of leftist dogma into education is troubling for several reasons. First of all, it shows just how seriously intersectional social justice takes itself as a comprehensive agenda for social change. Totalitarian ideologies work by supplying an intellectual filter through which all of life is sanitized and presented to people as something uncomplicated and easily understood. This is why the force and momentum of political ideologies is always centripetal, drafting every extraneous facet of social life into the service of the party agenda. The notion that something might be intelligible or worthwhile independent of how it fits into this agenda — that there might be metrics of measuring truth or beauty other than those prescribed by the regnant ideology — is therefore threatening. To combat the threat, ideologues tend to make war on everything that could be construed as apolitical or politically neutral. For example, this is how the Stalinist commissar N. V. Krylenko responded to chess players in the Soviet Union who wanted to keep politics out of the game:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/cornell-west-and-stealth-anti-semitism-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As evidence of what the late Professor Edward Alexander has called “the explosive power of boredom” in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard’s own Harvard Divinity School professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Cornel West, recently wondered out loud why the university might have denied him tenure. His explanation: that because he is a relentless critic of Israel, and because he thinks so highly of his academic accomplishments and record, it must be his pro-Palestinian leanings that spooked the Harvard committee making his tenure decision. “This is my hypothesis,” West said, “because given the possibilities of why they would not be even interested in initiating a tenure process, what else it could be?”

Ignoring the possibility, of course, that the reason he was not offered tenure has more to do with his uneven academic reputation and credibility than with his criticism of the Jewish state, West conjured up a familiar trope of Jew-haters: that if you condemn Israel and denounce its policies and behavior, you potentially have to pay a high reputational price. “The problem is that [critiquing Israel] is a taboo issue among certain circles in high places,” West said. “It is hard to have a robust, respectful conversation about the Israeli occupation because you are immediately viewed as an anti-Jewish hater or [having] anti-Jewish prejudices.

Criticism of Zionism and Israel is, of course, an issue about which Professor West and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being threatened, in his view, through the suppression of Palestinian solidarity and an unrelenting cataloging of the many predations of Israel. Professor West’s implication is that on this one issue—criticism of Israel—the sacrosanct notion of “academic freedom” is being threatened by those pro-Israel opponents who wish to stifle any and all speech critical of the Jewish state. West goes even further, suggesting that Jewish power “among certain circles in high places”—and those who are afraid of it on the Harvard campus—is so pervasive and influential that it shapes tenure decisions and plays a role on who advances academically and who does not.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/the-brave-new-world-of-children-s-propaganda/

The other day I was sent an Instagram video of a little boy having story time on his mother’s lap. The little boy was precious, the time spent on his mother’s lap special, but the choice of reading material was… “woke.”

The selected story was The GayBCs by M. L. Web. “A is for Ally,” repeated the little boy, “B is for Bi, C is for Coming Out, D is for Drag.” His mother praises him after he finishes the book, asking, “Are you a ‘woke’ toddler?” Parroting her words, the little tot proudly proclaims, “I’m ‘woke.’”

Such “woke” reading selections are par for the course as educators, politicians, and society at large seek to lead children through our world’s challenges. The recent release of Renaissance Learning’s “What Kids are Reading” report underscores that educators and authors are now seeking to teach young children about “social equity issues, climate change,” and other political trends. As such, the report promotes “woke” titles like Black Brother, Black Brother, which deals with inequitable treatment people with different skin colors, and other books dealing with charged political issues such as immigration and gender identity, including Come On In: 15 Stories About Immigration and Finding Home and Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard.

Judging by these examples, it seems the “woke” steamroller is actively coming for the next generation. But it doesn’t have to run over our children. Knowing its methodology is one of the first steps to preventing its destructive ways.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/new-york-public-school-urges-parents-be-white-sara-dogan/

A public school in New York City has provoked a firestorm of outrage by asking parents to become “white traitors” and promote “white abolition” in an effort to allegedly fight racism.

The controversial letter was sent by Mark Federman, principal of the East Side Community School in New York City. It included an “ethnography of whiteness” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse who ranks all whites on a color-coded scale of “The 8 White Identities” which range from “White Supremacist” to “White Abolitionist.”

““There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities. People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse explains in an introduction above the list.

The 8 “White Identities” are then helpfully defined.

A “White Supremacist,” Hesse asserts, believes in a “Clearly marked white society that preserves, names, and values white superiority,” whereas an individual belonging to the category of “White Voyeurism” would not “challenge a White Supremacist” but still “desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting, pleasurable” and has a “fascination with culture (e.g., consuming Black culture without the burden of Blackness”).

https://www.city-journal.org/the-left-wont-debate-critical-race-theory

The critical race theorists are feeling the heat. Over the past decade, they have had remarkable success in perpetuating the concepts of systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, and white fragility in American institutions, beginning with universities and moving on to schools, government agencies, and multinational corporations. Their campaign began mostly without opposition, as most conservatives were either ignorant of what was happening or dismissed it as a campus fad.

That changed last year. The intellectual movements around the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette magazine, and the 1776 Unites coalition of dissident black scholars had laid down a theoretical case against critical race theory (CRT). President Trump elevated the debate into the mainstream, denouncing CRT by name at the National Archives, signing an executive order banning CRT-based training programs from the federal government, and sparring on the topic during a televised presidential debate. Since then, investigative journalists, including me, have reported on the negative impact of CRT in government, schools, and corporations; states such as New Hampshire, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and Oklahoma have introduced legislation seeking to ban CRT programs that promote the concepts of race essentialism, collective guilt, and race-based harassment in public institutions.

This shift in momentum against the new racial orthodoxy, which has now grown beyond America’s borders to England, France, Italy, Hungary, and Brazil, has rattled the American Left. Their first argument against this change is that conservatives are using state power to “cancel wokeness.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently followed this line, attacking my work “leading the conservative charge against critical race theory,” declaring that the Right wants to ban critical race theory because it is afraid to debate it. This is false, of course. For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-generation

Nothing — not the botched vaccine rollout; not the forced small business closures; not the fact that we’ve watched until the end of Netflix — deserves more of our collective outrage than the fact that thousands of American public schools remain closed a year into this pandemic.

Over the past 12 months, an estimated 18 million American kids haven’t set foot inside of a classroom or have just started coming back for one day a week. That’s about one-third of all public school students, which number about 50 million. What’s most enraging is that this was entirely avoidable. The country’s teachers unions are committing a generational crime against the nations’ young. 

When President Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, he pledged that in-person education would resume for most children within his first 100 days as president. To support school reopening efforts, the president asked Congress to allocate $130 billion in new funding for protective equipment, better ventilation, more space inside classrooms, and whatever else educators need.

Fast forward to today. The White House has all but given up on the goal of reopening schools. Last month, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, clarified that the president would consider the goal met if more than half of all schools were open for in-person instruction at least one day a week. To say that one-day-a-week in-person instruction is a reopening of schools is to lie.

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.