RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/reining-in-the-chicago-teachers-union

On Super Bowl Sunday, the Chicago Teachers Union announced its intention to return to the classroom. Finally, Chicago’s 347,476 public school students can receive the same in-person instruction that many private and parochial students have already been receiving throughout the pandemic. Why does this seem like such a big achievement?

Other “essential” workers such as grocery clerks, doctors and nurses, and package-delivery workers haven’t enjoyed the same luxury of working remotely—and they’ve kept doing their jobs without the generous pay and benefits earned by Chicago’s public-school teachers.

In 2020, Chicago had 20,927 full-time teachers at a total payroll cost of $2.3 billion, according to a response to a Freedom of Information Act request by our organization, OpenTheBooks.com. Our auditors found that the average Chicago teacher earned $108,730 last year—$81,422 in salary and another $27,307 in benefits. Further, teachers are allowed to accumulate up to 244 sick days for use or pension credit. (A full school year runs only 175 days.)

It’s not just unionized teachers who enjoy excellent pay, perks, and pension benefits. The most highly compensated Chicago Public Schools (CPU) employee was the CEO, Janice K. Jackson, who made $322,839—a $260,000 salary and an additional $62,839 in benefits. Jackson’s salary alone was $61,000 higher than that of the U.S. Secretary of Education, a cabinet-level position. And Chicago’s 522 school principals averaged $194,000 in pay and benefits last year, with the most highly compensated earning up to $219,000. Another 304 acting, interim, assistant, and resident principals averaged $171,315 in pay and perks.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/suicide-of-the-humanities-dan-el-padilla-peralta-classics/

This NYT profile of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a radical Princeton Classics scholar, epitomizes what is wrong with the academic humanities in this radical era, and how dangerous the radicalization is to all of us.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a black Dominican Classics scholar at Princeton. He is also the leading figure in a move to tear down the field of Classics, which is the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. He came to this country as a small child when his mother required medical treatment in New York for complications related to the impending birth of his younger brother. After the brother was born, the family decided to stay in the US illegally. Eventually the father went back to the Dominican Republic; the mother and the children remained in the US, trying to regularize their immigration status.

As a nine-year-old boy living in a Chinatown homeless shelter, Padilla started reading about history. A child’s textbook about the Classical world lit a fire in his mind. An older New Yorker saw the child reading a big book about Napoleon Bonaparte, and decided to help him get a good education. Padilla went to an excellent school in New York, on scholarship, and excelled. Then:

Years passed before Padilla started to question the way the textbook had presented the classical world to him. He was accepted on a full scholarship to Princeton, where he was often the only Black person in his Latin and Greek courses. “The hardest thing for me as I was making my way into the discipline as a college student was appreciating how lonely I might be,” Padilla told me. In his sophomore year, when it came time to select a major, the most forceful resistance to his choice came from his close friends, many of whom were also immigrants or the children of immigrants. They asked Padilla questions he felt unprepared to answer. What are you doing with this blanquito stuff? How is this going to help us? Padilla argued that he and others shouldn’t shun certain pursuits just because the world said they weren’t for Black and brown people. There was a special joy and vindication in upending their expectations, but he found he wasn’t completely satisfied by his own arguments. The question of classics’ utility was not a trivial one. How could he take his education in Latin and Greek and make it into something liberatory? “That became the most urgent question that guided me through my undergraduate years and beyond,” Padilla said.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/the_confucius_institutes_a_study_in_subversion.html

Even in the final hours of his administration, President Trump was working to stop China’s infiltration of American education.  He proposed a rule to force schools to publicly disclose their connection with the Confucius Institutes and classrooms or lose certification for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.  On January 26, “President” Biden revoked that rule.  Now Democrats have voted to give federal relief money to educational institutions that partner with the Chinese Communist Party.

The Confucius Institutes are Chinese government-funded locations on college campuses, primarily in the United States and other western countries, ostensibly to teach Mandarin and Chinese culture.  In reality, the institutes are a communist front for centers of propaganda. 

The first Confucius Institute opened in South Korea in 2004.  A 2017 study by the National Association of Scholars found that the number of Confucius Institutes housed at colleges and universities is more than 1,000 worldwide with 103 in the United States. In addition, over 500 Confucius classrooms are housed in U.S. kindergarten through 12th grade schools.

An agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Hanban, operates the Confucius Institute and provides teachers, institute directors, textbooks, classroom materials, and operating funds. A five-year contract with the host institution gives the Chinese government total control over staffing and curriculum.  Since 2006 the Chinese government has provided more than $158 million to more than 100 U.S. schools for Constitution Institutes. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/icna-school-project-features-individual-who-joked-joe-kaufman/

Last month, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) announced its sponsorship of a school project that would provide grants to Muslim teachers and schools in need, what might seem to be an innocuous and laudable undertaking. However, the group sponsoring the project, ICNA, has ties to overseas terror, and the face of the project, Syed Ammar Ahmed, is a radical who once joked about threatening to blow up a school. And to provide a further grim irony, Ahmed is currently an adjunct professor affiliated with different colleges. Why are American youth being subjected to such groups and individuals without so much as an internet background check?

ICNA is the American arm of South Asian Islamist group, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). JI’s militant apparatuses have caused much murder and mayhem. One former JI death squad leader, Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, who was sentenced to death himself, in absentia, for multiple murders in Bangladesh, is currently active in ICNA and has served for years in ICNA’s top leadership. ICNA has used the web to promote terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban, and in December 2017, ICNA organized an event featuring Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a US-banned front for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Syed Ammar Ahmed is the Public Relations and Government Affairs Coordinator of ICNA Relief USA, ICNA’s US-based social service division and the group leading ICNA’s school project. In February 2010, following a debate he participated in at a school, Ahmed wrote, “I hate white people”; he called himself a “terrorist”; and at the suggestion of an acquaintance, he joked that he “should have threatened to blow up the school.” Prior to ICNA, Ahmed was an Organizing Director for Emgage, an Islamist group attempting to disguise its agenda as political advocacy, whose founder and co-chair Khurrum Wahid was reportedly placed on a federal terror watch list.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/02/15/prominent-university-college-london-scholar-resigns-after-academic-board-rejects-leading-definition-of-antisemitism-you-are-all-going-to-hell/

DPS Note: This is in the UK. But if you’re in America and have access to news other than from the legacy media, you know it’s here and getting worse. In fact, if you happen to be in Congress, you can be a real Jew hater and get to be vice chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on Africa and global human rights issues which covers Israel amongst other countries.

A prominent scholar at University College London has resigned in disgust after the institution’s Academic Board demanded the administration rescind its adoption of the leading definition of antisemitism.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition, which has been adopted by governments and educational institutions worldwide, is opposed by some in academia for including antisemitic ideas and rhetoric that attack Israel and Zionism.

The Board called on the university to “replace the IHRA working definition with a more precise definition of antisemitism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/14/dont-give-money-to-your-alma-mater/

A couple of months ago I wrote about my esteemed alma mater, Elon University. 

At the time, I was miffed about the administration’s decision to hire far-left radical Megan Squire, a purported educator and a fellow at America’s most prestigious hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center—a woman whose sole purpose in her sad life is to deplatform young conservatives from the internet over alleged thought crimes. For the record, I remain miffed about that. 

But I regret to inform you that my alma mater is at it again. 

Last week, I read that Elon University was, until recently, segregating “white-identifying individuals to engage in conversations that unpack race and systemic oppression . . . in a way that does not burden or re-traumatize people of color.” 

This form of segregation, I learned, is called a “white caucus,” and it gives “white people a space to learn about and process their awareness of and complicity in unjust systems without harming their friends of color.”

After this report became widely circulated and ridiculed, the school said it canceled the “white caucus.” 

Maybe you’re wondering how white students at Elon will learn to hate themselves for their immutable characteristics—an exercise that’s considered essential in today’s academy—now that the “white caucus” has been dismantled. 

If that’s the case, please don’t be alarmed. 

In July, Elon President Connie Book sent an email to all alumni informing us she had created a new position called the “Vice President and Associate Provost for Inclusive Excellence,” which she filled immediately. She also vowed to assemble the faculty brain trust, minuscule though it might be, to “require students in all majors to take courses that drive [a] deeper understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Faculty and staff will now be graded and considered for raises and promotions based on how well they promote the school’s social justice agenda.

After all, white students couldn’t possibly learn biology without also learning how biology is racist. They couldn’t possibly obtain a degree in say, mathematics, without also being taught that long division is somehow “racist.” 

If all of this is sounding a bit bizarre to you, that’s because it is. But it’s not unusual. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cancel-culture-comes-chaucer-mark-tapson/

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the 15th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/02/10/the-decline-of-intelligence-in-the-west-n1424731

Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”

Horowitz argues that the plummet in cognitive abilities “could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also… fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Flynn himself, who did the original research on the eponymous effect, has stated that “The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered.” Flynn’s more optimistic Are We Getting Smarter: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2012; his subsequent findings led in an opposite direction.*

The brainchild of French psychologist Alfred Binet, the IQ construct is a controversial issue with many different interpretations and applications. Charles Spearman proposed the variable notion of a g factor, or general intelligence measure, responsible for overall performance on various mental ability tests such as memory retention, spatial processing, and quantitative reasoning. The g factor has been compared to general athletic ability which allows a person to excel in different fields and activities. There has been vigorous debate over the strict equivalency between IQ scores and intelligence, but there is broad agreement on a general waning of intelligence or, from a clinical perspective, an ebbing of IQ scores. Of course, smart people can sometimes do poorly on IQ tests and obtuse people can sometimes rank high on aspectual tiers of these tests. But the consensus appears to be that the correlation approximately holds while allowing for scalene anomalies. In effect, the g factor is eroding.

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

The 2020 election and the events of January 6th, 2021 have convinced many of the need for better civics and U.S. history teaching in K-12. Bolstering this feeling is how poorly students perform in multiple tests and studies when it comes to U.S. history and government. Unfortunately, teachers are inadequately prepared to educate pupils in these subjects. Rigorous, coherent, and carefully structured certificate programs can provide the training teachers need to successfully instruct the next generation of American citizens.

In a 2019 RAND study, 80% of teachers did not think they were “very well prepared” to teach a course on the United States government. The same study also showed that “between a third and just over half of both elementary (K–5) teachers and secondary (grades 6–12) teachers who taught social studies reported they had not received any training on civic education.” These numbers are troubling and indicate the need for professional development programs to address this lack of preparedness. 

Teachers are not the only ones struggling when it comes to civics and history. Students are failing to learn American history, or its founding principles, including their roots in the Constitution. The 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that, when it comes to civics, 36% of students tested did not test at a basic attainment level. Eight years later, the 2018 assessment showed only 24% of students performed at or exceeded a proficient level. Worse, there was no significant improvement compared to 2014 or 1998. 

The situation is worse when it comes to U.S. history. The 2018 scores decreased from 2014, from a meager 18% of students performing at or above NAEP proficient down to 15%. The grim reality of student performance when it comes to history requires action.