RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/open-letter-administrators-mcgill-york-and-u-richard-l-cravatts/

As you are certainly aware, in recent weeks a series of troubling incidents has occurred on your respective campuses. While the events in question were distinct, they all shared a common impulse by a groups on your campuses who believe that they, and they alone, are able to set standards for free speech—in these particular cases, involving the debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how Jewish students and other Israel supporters are treated as part of the university community.

As you well know, the notion that a vocal minority of self-important ideologues can determine what views may or may not be expressed on a particular campus is not only antithetical to the purpose of a university, but is vaguely fascistic by purposely or carelessly relinquishing power to a few to decide what can be said and what speech is allowed and what must be suppressed; it is what former Yale University president Bartlett Giamatti characterized as the “tyranny of group self-righteousness.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/stealth-newspapers-and-posters-expose-jew-hatred-sara-dogan/

In a stealth campaign to expose the malignant threat of Jew hatred that has invaded America’s college campuses, the David Horowitz Freedom Center distributed thousands of newspapers listing the “Top Ten Colleges that Promote Jew Hatred and Incite Terrorism” on three Southern California campuses this week. UCLA, UC-Irvine and Pitzer College were all targeted by the campaign.

All three campuses were named in the Freedom Center’s recent report “From Campus to Congress: Allied with Terror,” on the growing prevalence of Jew hatred and its ties to the Islamic terror organization Hamas.

“Jew hatred is no longer solely the purview of academic outliers, those institutions known for radical activism and absurdist teachings,” the report explains. “The Jew hatred promoted by Hamas through its front group Students for Justice in Palestine has now trickled down to infect less typically activist campuses in the heartland.”

The report also documents how the anti-Israel terror group Hamas funds the BDS movement on American campuses by funneling money to chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) through an intermediary organization named American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

https://alphanewsmn.com/as-colleges-move-to-do-away-with-the-sat-in-the-name-of-diversity-detroit-high-school-valedictorian-struggles-with-low-level-math/

DPS Note: Western civilization is losing on every front. And it is all self-imposed … {“…math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”}

The valedictorian of a Detroit high school is reportedly struggling with basic math in college.

The development comes as colleges have increasingly rejected objective admissions criteria in the name of “equity,” with University of California poised to no longer require the SAT because of the racial impact it has on admissions.

“Marqell McClendon has struggled in the low-level math class she’s taking during her first semester at Michigan State University,” the news outlet Chalkbeat reported Nov. 15. McClendon, the valedictorian of her graduating class at Detroit’s Cody High School, was used to getting all A’s, but found herself asking strangers to help her with her college coursework, it said.

MSU has pushed for admitting more racial minorities in the name of diversity. Its “incoming freshman class is predicted to be the largest and most diverse in the school’s history, with more than 8,400 anticipated students,” the school stated in May 2018, noting that black enrollment was up 24%.

But nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main school district must take remedial courses when they get to college, Chalkbeat reported.

In 2016, MSU removed the requirement that all students at least take algebra in either college or high school. Algebra is taught in eighth grade in many schools. Meanwhile, Wayne State University in Detroit dropped its general-education math requirement altogether.

Bob Murphy, the director or university relations and policy for the Michigan Association of State Universities, told Inside Higher Ed that not requiring math will ideally “lead to more successful graduation outcomes.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/fraud-higher-education-walter-williams/

This year’s education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, “More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).

It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59). 

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/05/despite-common-core-promises-u-s-kids-repeat-poor-performance-on-latest-global-test/
On Tuesday, the latest results from a respected international test showed U.S. students making no progress in math or reading in the past 19 years. It’s the latest puncture in Common Core’s inflated promises.

Add another set of test results to the stack deflating promises U.S. leaders said justified the major arm-twisting required to switch the nation to Common Core. On Tuesday, the latest results from a respected international test showed U.S. students making no progress in math or reading since the last such exam three years ago.

This trend of no improvement on math and reading has persisted since the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) began in 2000, although U.S. kids have improved in science on the exam, which is given to 15-year-olds. Common Core, a set of national curriculum, testing, and instruction mandates the Obama administration pressured states into beginning in 2009, dictates reading and math instruction, not science.

American kids were, predictably, the worst at math. In the latest results, just 8 percent of U.S. 15-year-olds rated of excellent proficiency in math, and 27 percent rated of poor proficiency. Both of these results were below the average of comparable students’ performance developed nations.

PISA is considered “is considered a barometer of future economic competitiveness,” as The Wall Street Journal notes, because students’ reading and especially math abilities are linked with their future earnings. Math achievement is a strong predictor of gross domestic product, according to a 2016 Harvard University study. Even small increases in average U.S. math achievement, the study found, could boost American’s incomes and productivity by trillions of dollars. This is just one of many opportunity costs of rushing headlong into unproven fancies like Common Core.

“The U.S. ranking improved in all three subjects to eighth in reading, 30th in math and 11th in science, when compared with 63 other educational systems that reported data in 2015 and 2018. But Ms. [Peggy] Carr[, a U.S. federal education official,] said the improved rankings are due to score changes with other education systems,” reported WSJ.

The less atrocious reading scores are thus not much cause for celebration. And the kids at the bottom were, as always, hit hardest. According to The New York Times, “About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam. Those students, he said, face ‘pretty grim prospects’ on the job market.”

“In the U.S., about 13.5% of students were good at distinguishing between fact and opinion on the reading exam,” WSJ reported. “Most countries have seen little improvement in scores over the past decade, despite increases in education spending, according to OECD.”
This Is Not an Outlier Result for the Common Core Era

It’s been a decade since President Obama announced federal grants in return for states jumping into Common Core before it was even written. Common Core didn’t move fully into place until about 2015, though, so we had to wait a while to see if its critics were right. But since then, just about all the evidence available has shown that at best Common Core has had none of the promised positive effects on student achievement, and likely includes demonstrable negative effects.

On the latest U.S. tests for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, as I wrote in October, “For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.”

This spring, a federally funded study done by pro-Common Core researchers found, to their surprise, “that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores.”

“The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time,” I wrote this spring.

In 2018, we also saw declines among U.S. college entrance exam results:

ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.

In 2017, I noted the achievement decline of American kids on another international test, this one about reading: “The decline was even more pronounced among the lowest-performing American students. On this test, U.S. students have made no statistically significant improvement since 2001. The 2016 slide is especially notable because 2016’s fourth graders have spent virtually their entire schooling inside public schools forced to shift their instruction to fit Common Core.”

In 2015, former U.S. Department of Education official Ze’ev Wurman discussed early warning signs on a raft of other important tests:

The recent 2015 NAEP [Nation’s Report Card national] results showed a first ever significant decline of 2-3 points – about a quarter of a grade-level worth – in mathematics at both grades 4 and 8, and in grade 4 reading. The decline was broad and deep in most states with just a handful of exceptions, and even formerly excellent states like Massachusetts were not immune. But NAEP scores are only the most recent sign of decline.

The ACT scores have been stagnant in the last couple of years, but they show a slight decline since 2009. The SAT scores stayed level since 2007, until they dropped this year on both verbal and math.

AP course taking in AB and BC calculus has been rising steadily over the years, yet the number of students who scored a passing grade this year – 3 and above – has plateaued in BC calculus and actually declined in AB calculus for many demographic groups.

We Were Scammed, America

In 2009, President Obama described Common Core as “higher and clearer standards and assessments that prepare a student to graduate from college and succeed in life.” He promised that his package of reforms centered on Common Core would “raise the quality of education from kindergarten through senior year” and that “America’s children, America’s economy, and America itself will be better for it.” Almost a decade later, the results are in, and the promises broken.

In 2010, Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan promised the nation that Common Core and it’s associated tests would be a “game-changer in K-12 education.”

“High standards and high expectations are the first step toward higher performance,” he assured a convention of newspaper editors in 2013, giving the example from Tennessee to support his contention that Common Core would reduce achievement gaps between the United States’ top and bottom students. The opposite has happened: On PISA, the latest National Assessment for Educational Progress, and other test results, the gap has only grown since Common Core.

It wasn’t just Democrats making these false promises about a generation of children and billions in taxpayer spending. Jeb Bush frequently described Common Core as “higher standards for reading and math” that were key to improving student achievement nationwide. Top Republicans like Senate Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, Mike Pence, Ronald Reagan Education Secretary Bill Bennett, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (now a U.S. senator), and numerous other GOP governors, publicly supported the initiative. The Wall Street Journal’s biggest editorial complaint early on appeared to be not that Obama’s education ideas like Common Core were unsupported by good evidence, but that he might not have enough leverage to get states deeply enough into them.

And then there were the dozens of special interest groups, largely flush with huge amounts of cash from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, paid to promote the idea. Michael Petrilli of the supposedly conservative Thomas Fordham Foundation is representative of this group. He went around to especially red legislatures telling, for example, Tennessee lawmakers when they had qualms about Common Core that ” the faithful implementation of these standards will help many more young people—including Tennesseans—be prepared for success in college and career.” False.

He told the Indiana legislature when it also had the same concerns, a “reason to stay the course with the Common Core—perhaps the most important reason—is to raise student achievement. I can’t guarantee that—it depends on aggressive implementation at the local level. But I can tell you that what you were doing before Common Core (and your raft of recent reforms) wasn’t working.” Well, we threw that spaghetti against the wall, and it failed to stick. Whoops!

All these people used their power to promote the idea that Common Core would be a good use of taxpayer funds and institutions and the next generation of American children. They were all wrong. And being wrong has cost them just about nothing. Petrilli’s next project, for example, is coediting a book out in 2020 and backed by more conservative foundation money titled “How to Educate an American: A Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools.” Bush still puts on big “education reform” conferences every year that bill plenty of the same education soothsayers whose prophecies have failed American kids. They’re underwritten by donors who apparently don’t look for a track record of success from the people they write huge checks to.

This failed project may not have put a dent in the careers of its biggest boosters, but Common Core has cost American children, and the nation, not only a huge amount of wasted time and money, but precious opportunities to actually achieve more, better, and faster. We’ve been scammed. Who will pay for the losses inflicted upon the nation by people who owed us a return on our investments and instead gambled it all away?

“Taxpayers and families deserve real results for their money,” Petrilli told the Wisconsin legislature reconsidering Common Core in 2013. Yes, yes we do.
Joy Pullmann (@JoyPullmann) is executive editor of The Federalist, mother of five children, and author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids.” She identifies as native American and gender natural. Her latest ebook is a list of more than 200 recommended classic books for children ages 3-7 and their parents.
Photo U.S. Air Force / public domain

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/31/take-back-america-take-back-s

The fact that socialists are openly running for public office in America — that socialists actually hold public office in Congress — should serve as enough wakeup call that the nation’s moral and political compasses are skewed, in dire need of correcting.

That it doesn’t only screams this: America’s public school systems have become utter failures.

So the one thing patriots in this country should throw all their efforts into right now is taking back the schools from the far-leftists who’ve been able to dominate the direction of administration and teaching in recent years.

Look at America’s schools in years past versus years present.

“As recently as 20 years ago, the United States was ranked No. 1 in high school and college education,” Jon Guttman, a research director for the World History Group wrote at History Net. “In 2009, the United States was ranked 18th out of 36 industrialized nations. Over that time, complacency and inefficiency, reflective of lower priorities in education, and inconsistencies among the various school systems contribute to a decline.”

That’s partly to blame.

So’s this: administrative bloat.

Between 1950 and 2009, the student population of America’s public schools grew by 96%. The growth in teachers during that same time was 252%. But the growth of administrators and other office staffers? That jumped 702%, American Enterprise Institute reported.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/03/umass-chancellor-applauded-over-bds-criticism-university-president-urged-to-act/

The president of the University of Massachusetts system is being urged to condemn academic boycotts of Israeli universities, after the chancellor of the Amherst campus faced criticism for acknowledging that such boycotts damage academic freedom.

In a letter sent to President Martin Meehan last month, the heads of the Academic Engagement Network and the AMCHA Initiative — both of which oppose the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign in academia — applauded Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy of UMass Amherst for an October 21 statement condemning a “one-dimensional” and “polarizing” BDS panel that was set to take place on campus on November 12.

The event, which came on the heels of another major pro-BDS panel on the Amherst campus in May, exclusively featured supporters of the BDS campaign, which has been criticized by Jewish groups worldwide for denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and advancing antisemitic tropes. Among the participants was BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, who has rejected the notion that Jewish people have a right to self-determination by claiming that they are not a nation, as well as activist Linda Sarsour, who has spoken at a rally hosted by antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and recently claimed that Israel “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

The lack of ideological diversity on the panel, Subbaswamy noted at the time, would do “little to increase the understanding of such a complex topic like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project

In 1858, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated the nature of America’s soul. Douglas argued that the Founders believed that the claim in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—applied only to whites. They were indifferent to the perpetuation of slavery, he said. Lincoln argued that the Founders foresaw an end to slavery, that the words in the Declaration meant what they said, and that no one before Douglas had ever suggested otherwise.

After a bloody civil war and a decades-long civil rights struggle were fought to vindicate Lincoln’s position, the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center are urging teachers, with the 1619 Project and attendant K-12 curriculum, to take Douglas’s side of the argument.

In her lead essay announcing the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues, per Douglas, that the “white men who drafted those words [in the Declaration] did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” Hannah-Jones’s essay has come under withering attack from eminent historians such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson for its historical distortions. But the 1619 Project’s curriculum does more than encourage teachers to ignore key elements of the historical record; it asks students to blot them out.

One recommended “activity to extend student engagement” asks teachers to lead students in transforming historical documents through “erasure poetry,” which, the curriculum explains, “can be a way of reclaiming and reshaping historical documents; they can lay bare the real purpose of the document or transform it into something wholly new. How will you highlight inequity—or envision liberation—through your erasure poem?” Students could, the guide suggests, erase parts of the Declaration in order to make it fit Hannah-Jones’s essay or amend the Thirteenth Amendment to make it harmonize with an essay arguing that “mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/prestigious-scholarships-conservatives-need-not-apply/

Or, if they do, they (unlike progressives) better keep quiet about their political beliefs.

When British businessman Cecil Rhodes passed away in 1902, he couldn’t possibly have imagined what the world would be like in 2019. Over 117 years ago, his brain couldn’t have conceived of commercial air travel or the Internet or how great Jennifer Aniston would still look.

Further, Rhodes also would not recognize what has become of the prestigious scholarship he founded in the year of his death. For one, he would be confused that the Rhodes Scholarship was being granted to women and minorities — he was an avowed white supremacist and specifically excluded women from winning the award. (Women didn’t become eligible until 1977.)

But Rhodes would also be perplexed about the academic paths chosen by Rhodes winners and by the criteria applied to the applicants.

Last week, the Rhodes Foundation announced its 32 American scholarship recipients. The third paragraph of the statement accompanying the selections reveals the foundation’s true goals:

For the third consecutive year, the class overall is majority-minority, and approximately half are first-generation Americans. One is the first transgender woman elected to a Rhodes Scholarship; two other Scholars-elect are non-binary.

If Rhodes were to rise from the grave in 2019, he might die all over again.

https://www.jns.org/brown-university-committee-on-corporate-responsibility-votes-in-favor-of-bds/
 
The vote occurred months after students voted overwhelmingly in favor of a referendum, calling on the school to separate itself from companies that conduct business with Israel.

The Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) at Brown University in Providence, R.I., voted on Monday in favor of the BDS movement that aims to boycott Israel.

The final tally of the committee was six in favor, two against and one abstention.

The ACCRIP, which consists of university students, faculty, staff and alumni, vote on resolutions surrounding “ethical and moral issues or issues of alleged social harm with respect to the activities of corporations in which the University is an investor,” according to its website.

The resolution consisted of the following language:

“We recommend that the Brown Corporation exclude from Brown’s direct investments, and require Brown’s separate account investment managers to exclude from their direct investments, companies identified as facilitating human rights violations in Palestine. In addition, the Investment Office will share with all investment managers the University’s desire to adhere to this investment philosophy. We recommend that the Corporation and Brown’s separate account investment managers maintain the withdrawal of investments from said companies until they cease to engage in social harm … ”