RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/06/sophists-choice/

The latest anti-school choice rant comes to us courtesy of Diane Ravitch, “a historian of education,” who is the Arthur C. Clarke of her field. When she writes, the reader is treated to science fiction dosed with a substantive amount of snake oil for good measure. In the current New York Review of Books, Ravitch’s “The Dark History of School Choice” is laden with cherry-picked half-truths and a level of fearmongering guaranteed to put a satisfied smirk on the face of every teacher union leader.

Reviewing several books on the subject, she does correctly cite a few circumstances where the push for the privatization of schools was used to promote racial segregation, but her 3,700-word tirade is very light on facts and is instead primarily an excuse to bash Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Christianity, and free-market policies in education.

As director of policy at EdChoice Jason Bedrick notes, there have been seven studies examining the effect of private school choice on racial integration. Six found positive effects and one showed no significant statistical difference. Another important piece of data conveniently absent from Ravitch’s screed is that a recent American Federation for Children poll conducted by Beck Research—a Democratic polling firm—finds that nationally, school choice is very popular with Latinos—82 percent support it, while 68 percent of African Americans are in favor. It is important to note that this poll was taken in January 2020, before the teacher unions strong-armed school districts into ditching in-person learning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/incubating-hatred-how-radical-professors-help-richard-l-cravatts/

While the pandemic greatly disrupted campus activities in 2020, the student governments of at least three universities managed to focus their efforts to pass BDS resolutions, bills that asked their respective universities to divest from holdings of companies doing business with Israel.

At the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, that school’s resolution “called on the university to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd. for what the resolution alleges is partaking in human-rights violations in the Palestinian territories. . . .” Additionally, in a twist that forced Jewish students to choose between supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and condemning Israel, the resolution included concessions for the minority community and a nod to BLM, and “also called for the university to divest from its own police department . . . and for the university to divest from companies involved in the prison system, U.S. immigration enforcement and fossil fuels.”

A successful BDS resolution vote at Columbia University similarly demanded that the school “divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts toward Palestinians that, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), fall under the United Nations International Convention of the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.” 

And, most recently, in November at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a perennial hotbed of anti-Israel agitation, a resolution promoted by the radical group General Union of Palestine Students was passed and called on the University to divest from a list of some 100 companies “that benefit from Israeli Occupation, racism, and colonialism” in Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. “[T]hese investments harm San Francisco State’s Palestinian, Arab, Muslim students,” the resolution read, “many of whom have families who currently live under Israeli occupation, or are descendants of Palestinians who have been killed or forcibly relocated as a result of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” 

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2020/12/30/at_princeton_a_racial_reckoning_and_a_free_speech_battle_110526.html

In 2015, Princeton University became the second higher-education institution to sign the University of Chicago Statement supporting campus free speech. Yet, five years later, Princeton professor Keith E. Whittington wrote that the university stood “on the front lines” of the battle over speech. Those battle lines were drawn this summer by students and faculty demanding the adoption of “anti-racist” policies, which some on campus say run counter to free speech and open inquiry.

“The faculty were willing to write a commitment to academic freedom into the university’s governing documents in 2015 – but now, in 2020, they are being asked to carve out a substantial exception to that principle,” Whittington wrote for RealClearPolitics in August.

Princeton ranked just 29th in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings, an ambitious survey of nearly 20,000 students at 55 schools conducted by RealClearEducation, research firm College Pulse, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). When Princeton’s conservative students ranked the school, it dropped to 42nd. It ranked 47th on ideological diversity and earned a “red” designation from FIRE, indicating a restrictive speech code.

The survey showed that many Princeton students censor themselves in classrooms and social settings. Seventy-six percent said that they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing unpopular views on social media. Fifty-two percent indicated that they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor.

A Racial Reckoning
The two most difficult subjects to discuss at Princeton were Israel/Palestine issues and transgender issues. Affirmative action and race weren’t far behind.

Rebekah Adams, a senior and president of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC), a student group committed to defending free speech and civil dialogue, told RealClearEducation that many students fear speaking freely will bring academic repercussions such as lower grades and “social ostracization.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/the-silent-crisis-the-threat-of-mass-illiteracy/

“There are alarming implications for what could happen to our freedoms if we witness the emergence of a political and legal class who can function with virtually no scrutiny from a population that is too illiterate and therefore too disengaged to understand the language of power.”

Despite enormous efforts, despite a battery of programs and remedial regimes and the emergence of an entire sub-industry of school consultants and marketeers, the capacity to read and write across the English-speaking world shows evidence of steep decline. This should be a cause for community concern. Poor literacy is strongly associated with anti-social behaviour. Very literate people seldom enter the prison system, which suggests that widespread literacy is part of a good inoculation against criminality.

In most Western societies, the prison population has the highest concentration of illiteracy. In an interview with the Shannon Trust, a charity that promotes reading in United Kingdom jails, the journalist Stephen Moss was told that 50 per cent of British prisoners are functionally illiterate. The Literacy Project Foundation in the United States estimates 85 per cent of juvenile offenders have trouble reading, while other research estimates the illiteracy rate in American jails to be at least 75 per cent.

In 2015, the ABC reported that only 40 per cent of Victoria’s prison population had sufficient literacy to cope independently in the workforce. Or, put around the other way, 60 per cent of Victoria’s prisoners cannot read and write well enough to cope in most workplaces.

Lower literacy is related to poorer life choices, worse health, shorter lifespans and poverty. On a grander measure of human value, illiteracy denies people the ability to participate fully in their society. For at least a hundred years, basic literacy has been the necessary qualification for virtually all useful employment and for meaningful community involvement.

Literacy—sufficient to understand and produce complex texts—is even more important for our future. Fluent literacy is essential for citizens in any intellectual democracy that wishes to flourish. Since the beginning of popular democracy, the system has been safeguarded by vigilant citizens. The strength and stability of a democracy rest on the ability of its citizens to debate, understand and engage with complex ideas. Such engagement requires literacy above a basic standard. If much of modern political discourse seems to be emotional, visceral and simplistic, it may well reflect the inability of many in the electorate to handle complex ideas.

https://quillette.com/2020/12/27/a-student-mob-took-over-bryn-mawr-the-college-said-thank-you/

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality, while making it easier for them to part with them.
     ~Vaclav Havel

Last week marked the end of a chaotic semester at Bryn Mawr College, a small women’s liberal arts college located outside Philadelphia. During the final weeks, Bryn Mawr students, including my own child, scrambled to pick up the pieces following a student “strike” that exacerbated the serious preexisting disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. For a period of three weeks, few regular classes were held, activities were suspended, and student life (such as it was) became marked by the same toxic spirit of racism that the strikers claimed to oppose.

Bryn Mawr is affiliated with nearby Haverford College, whose parallel meltdown in November was documented recently by Quillette. These two selective and well-funded schools are part of a so-called Bi-Co arrangement, which allows students to participate in joint classes and activities. Both share a similarly progressive commitment to such causes as diversity, equity, and inclusion. And students at both schools generally are well-steeped in doctrines of intersectionality, “white fragility,” anti-racism, and all the rest. Yet following the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia, activists at Haverford and Bryn Mawr embraced the dubious claim that their extremely progressive campuses were actually contaminated by a dangerous climate of racism that (quite literally) threatened the survival of black students. In many cases, the ire was directed not only at administrators and non-ideologically-compliant faculty, but also at any student suspected of not supporting the strikers’ apocalyptic rhetoric, dramatic postures, and inflated demands. Anyone who sought to attend class, go to the dining hall, or even turn in schoolwork was denounced as a “scab,” and often faced acts of bullying.

As the parent of a Bryn Mawr student (and the parent of a Bryn Mawr alumna), I found this profoundly unsettling. I kept expecting that, at some point, the administration would take decisive steps to restore order on campus (where, as at Haverford, in-person learning was supposed to be occurring, under COVID-19 testing and social-distancing protocols). But that never happened. Instead, a small group of largely unidentified students effectively shut down the campus—not because their views attracted majority support (only about a quarter of the student body seemed to really be on board, from what I could tell), but because the administration simply never pushed back.