RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/parents_on_both_the_left_and_the_right_are_battling_public_schools.html

America is awash in kind, caring teachers, who want their students to acquire real skills and knowledge. Collectively, though, public schools too often are rigid bureaucracies that ignore individual children. Conservative parents would add that public schools push a hard Left agenda on students captive in their classrooms.

Some parents are starting to fight back. One set of parents, frustrated by public schools’ inflexibility when dealing with handicapped students, is fighting fire with fire by forming a union:

Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez said they were so appalled by the low standards of America’s public school teachers unions, they formed the National Parents Union (NPU), so families could have a greater say in their children’s education.

Rodrigues, a mother of three from Boston, and Marquez, a mother of one from Los Angeles, are no strangers to public-sector unions. Rodrigues worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), while Marquez grew up in a union household and worked for Green Dot Public Schools — a public charter organization.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/academias_leftism_becomes_more_aggressive_and_more_stupid.html

Conservatives have long been concerned about the stranglehold Leftists have had on academia in North America.  Recent news from academia should give them more reason than usual to be worried about what’s happen to students trapped in these institutions.

The most recent outrage — and it is outrageous — came on Tuesday from the University of Calgary, in Canada.  Professor Ted McCoy, the coordinator of the Law and Society Program in the university’s sociology department, sent out a tweet clarifying rumors about his classroom polices: “I heard it rumoured students will fail my class if they cite Jordan Peterson and I’d like to clarify that this is absolutely correct,” he tweeted.

https://spectator.org/the-zinn-education-project-teaching-trump-hate-and-other-dogma/

In December, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), a non-profit co-founded in 2007 by William Holtzman, one of Howard Zinn’s Boston University students (class of 1974), to spread the lessons of Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, excitedly announced in a fundraising appeal that his goal of signing up 100,000 teachers had been reached.

The effort to appear to be a legitimate educational organization supported by small donors was enhanced by Holtzman’s pledge of up to $15,000 in matching donations. Later, Dave Colapinto (class of 1982) promised to do as he had done in 2018, pledging $10,000. But the latest tax records on file show that for fiscal year 2016/2017 over $117,000 came from Holtzman and $100,000 came from the New Venture Fund, which hides donors like George Soros.

Nor is the organization educational in any meaningful sense, as evidenced by the solicitation’s claim that “Many of the students in high school today will be voting in 2020.” ZEP’s lessons are as un-political as Zinn’s tract, which for forty years has been spreading communist disinformation through wildly distorted quotations of sources, omission of critical evidence, and plagiarism, as I discovered in writing Debunking Howard Zinn. While Zinn lazily cut and pasted paragraphs from the historically suspect works of fellow radicals, he praised the Viet Cong by twisting the words of foreign service officer Douglas Pike to mean their opposite. In his book, Pike described the Viet Cong’s strategies as “agitprop” and accused them of “genocide.” Zinn said Pike claimed the Viet Cong were community builders helpfully teaching “communication” skills. My search through contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles revealed that Zinn’s claims that the U.S. kept secret the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and that Vietnam War protestor Mary Moylan “was never found” after she refused “to surrender to the FBI” were patently false. It’s just a sampling of what I found.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/1619-project-top-historians-criticize-new-york-times-slavery-feature/

The dissenting historians are performing an important public service by making the dishonesty of The New York Times Magazine’s feature a matter of record.

The reviews of the 1619 Project are in.

It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”

This is what top historians have said of the splashy New York Times feature on slavery in the U.S. that aspires to fundamentally reorient our understanding of American history and change what students are taught in the schools.

Given that the Times can’t necessarily be trusted to give a straight account in its news pages of Mitch McConnell’s latest tactical maneuver, it wouldn’t seem a natural source for objective truth on sensitive historical matters, and sure enough, the 1619 Project is shot through with an ideological radicalism that leads to rank distortions and laughable overreach.

The project has been controversial since it was first published in The New York Times Magazine last year, but its architects sneered at the critics as troglodyte conservatives (or “white historians”) unwilling to grapple with the country’s racial sins. Then the World Socialist Web Site — of all things — begin publishing interviews with eminent historians slamming the project.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/colleges-dupe-parents-and-taxpayers-walter-williams/

Colleges have been around for centuries. College students have also been around for centuries. Yet, college administrators assume that today’s students have needs that were unknown to their predecessors. Those needs include diversity and equity personnel, with massive budgets to accommodate.

According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college. According to “The Campus Diversity Swarm,” an article from Mark Pulliam, a contributing editor at Law and Liberty, which appeared in the City Journal (10/10/2018), diversity people assist in the cultivation of imaginary grievances of an ever-growing number of “oppressed” groups. Pulliam writes: “The mission of campus diversity officers is self-perpetuating. Affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic preferences in admissions) leads to grievance studies. Increased recognition of LGBTQ rights requires ever-greater accommodation by the rest of the student body. Protecting ‘vulnerable’ groups from ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’ requires speech codes and bias-response teams (staffed by diversocrats). Complaints must be investigated and adjudicated (by diversocrats). Fighting ‘toxic masculinity’ and combating an imaginary epidemic of campus sexual assault necessitate consent protocols, training, and hearing procedures — more work for an always-growing diversocrat cadre. Each newly recognized problem leads to a call for more programs and staffing.”

https://tinyurl.com/y7e6z63d

Private colleges are in serious financial trouble.  According to Bloomberg, they may have to merge with others or close their doors.  The seeds planted by the “homeless, tempest-tossed” academics from Frankfurt, Germany, 84 years ago, are now bearing fruit.                                         

The private colleges are yet another casualty of the plot against American values and exceptionalism initiated by those outcasts from the Frankfurt School of Social Theory who arrived in New York, in 1935.  The theorists began their trek through the Institutions, including higher education, changing the system that was among the best in the world, and poisoning the wells as they advanced.  Whether fools or rogues, they soon realized that the Judeo-Christian West’s superiority could only be destroyed from within, by having their operatives join the machinery of the old institutions, and by collaborating with Third World liberation movements and other dissident minority.  It would take some generations, but the prize of the most envied capitalist country in the world – America and the Free West — was worth their patience.             

The learned academics within the private colleges readily complied with the new Common Core curricula, textbooks, teaching films and scripts, recognizing the Frankfurt stamp of approval.  They introduced identity politics, which now requires a six-figure professional to help the children cope with the resultant tribalism and victimhood – sorely needed funds down the drain.     

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/education_and_business_an_incestuous_relationship.html

Why in Sam Hill would a sentient parent send his child to any school of higher learning in America today when “colleges across the country are altering admissions requirements and curricul[a]” in order to “improve diversity ratios on campus”?

Mind you, it is not to increase standards.  No, the changes involve “lowering of standards and a very clear implication that students from certain backgrounds cannot score as high on tests as their peers of a different melanin makeup.”

When will this madness stop?

Instead of rooting out the reasons why students of color are doing so poorly, the Left continues to use them as cannon fodder to control the education of young American minds.

Why is it that the public education system has failed so many of its black and Hispanic students?  How is the following possible?

[I]n America’s public high schools, 45% of black students and 43% of Hispanics (as compared to 22% of whites) drop out before their classes graduate.  Dropout rates are especially high in urban areas with large minority populations, including such academic basket cases as the District of Columbia (57%), Trenton (59%), Camden (61.4%), Baltimore (65.4%), Cleveland (65.9%), and Detroit (75.1%).