RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-schools-ace-another-test-11570143771

Is the success of charter schools an illusion? Critics claim charters merely skim the best students, whose parents care enough to apply, while pushing out troublemakers. So it’s worth noting a new study showing that often test scores improve for all students when charters increase their market share.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute examined 21 urban school districts with at least 2,500 black students per grade from 2009-2015. As the “black charter market share” rises in the study to 50% from zero, the associated educational gain is 0.8 grade level in English and 0.7 in math. This bump is for all black students in the district, whether they attend a charter or not.

Results are similar for the 27 urban districts with at least 2,500 Hispanic students per grade. As the “Hispanic charter market share” rises to 35% from zero, it’s associated with a gain of 0.7 grade level in English and 0.7 in math. For comparison, the overall racial achievement gap is roughly “two to three grade levels,” the study says.

Other results in the paper aren’t as dramatic. After adding more than 200 smaller urban districts, those with at least 100 minority students per class, the gains are 0.3 or 0.4 grade level, although Hispanics show no bump in English. In large suburban districts, the data show mostly null results for minority pupils.

Also noteworthy: “There is no evidence that higher charter market share is associated with achievement gains for white students.” There are even some declines as charters build market share. The largest drop, about 0.4 grade level, is in white suburban math scores. The reasons aren’t obvious. Maybe suburban charters are more likely to be Montessori or Waldorf schools less focused on testing. In any case, most of these students turn out fine. But for students in poor urban districts, solid English and math scores can be a ticket to the middle class.

New York, NY (October 3, 2019) — The National Association of Scholars (NAS) reacted with disappointment to the decision by a United States District Court upholding racial discrimination in admissions by Harvard University. NAS had previously filed an amicus brief in the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in favor of the plaintiff. We noted that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process discriminates against Asian applicants in order to achieve racial balancing.

 
“Racial discrimination is wrong,” said NAS President Peter Wood. “Unfortunately, Judge Allison D. Burroughs engaged in mental gymnastics to find Harvard’s behavior legal. Burroughs acknowledged that Harvard considers race ‘as a positive attribute’ for some races, but refused to admit that this results in intentionally negative outcomes for non-favored races.”
 
Wood continued, “Race should play no role in college admissions. Colleges and universities should concern themselves with life of the mind, not the color of their students’ skin. Academic achievement, proven ability, ambition, and commitment to learning should form the basis for college admissions decisions.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/youth-and-ignorance-walter-williams/

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who’d restrict free speech. She’s a libertarian. As to modern ideas that include “gender-inclusive pronouns” such as zie, sie and zim, Paglia says it is lunacy. In a 2017 interview, Paglia was especially irritated by the thought police running college campuses today. In defending University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has become a pariah for his refusal to cave in to nonsensical gender-inclusive pronouns, Paglia said that the English language was created by great artists such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Joyce. She added: “How dare you, you sniveling little maniac, tell us how we’re gonna use pronouns! Go take a hike.”

On feminism, Paglia criticizes what she calls the “antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism.” She calls it “victim feminism” and complains that “everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.” Everyone must yield to it “in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.” Paglia adds, “What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life.”

Paglia’s bold statements got her in a bit of hot water last April. University of the Arts students demanded that she be fired over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/09/27/yale_alumni_stage_intervention_110360.html

When a somber-looking group of family and friends tell you to sit down because it’s time for a serious heart-to-heart conversation about your drug addiction or some other destructive behavior, we call it an intervention. Imagine you are Yale University, and the man telling you to sit down is Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz. Behind him are a host of other concerned alumni, each wearing the look of tough love. 

Rosenkranz is currently campaigning for a seat on the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body. Backed by a grassroots effort of alumni, his campaign comes in the wake of several high-profile controversies at Yale in the areas of racial politics, free speech, and academic freedom. Perhaps the best known of these controversies resulted in Nicholas Christakis, a prominent member of the Yale faculty, resigning his position as a college master after becoming the target of an angry student protest over views he and his wife expressed on the censorship of Halloween costumes. Mr. Rosenkranz agreed to a brief email interview with RealClearEducation to discuss his bid to become a Yale trustee, his ideas for reform at Yale, and his vision for higher education more broadly. 

Can you tell readers a little about yourself, your career, and your interest in higher education? 

I teach constitutional law at Georgetown. For many years, my primary extracurricular activity has been my work to support free speech and intellectual diversity at American universities. I serve on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is the preeminent defender of free speech on campus, and on the Board of Directors of the Federalist Society, which is the leading proponent of intellectual diversity and debate in legal education. In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and I co-founded Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity of university faculty and unfettered debate on university campuses.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/n-j-schools-pushing-far-left-indoctrination-what-the-hell-is-betsy-devos-doing/

Melissa Barnett, a supervisor of English Language Arts in the Washington Township School District in New Jersey, caused outrage on Twitter by tweeting out a photo of hundreds of books in dumpsters. “This week, dumpsters were filled with books that should have left decades ago @TWPSchools and replaced with engaging, relevant, culturally diverse literature.”

This led to cries of “book burning” by critics and crowdsourcing to identify the books in the bins.PJ Media reached out to the Washington Township School District to find out more. “I was not unaware they were cleaning out a book room,” said Steve Gregor, director of secondary education. “Many of them were in poor condition and unreadable, dating back to the 1960s or earlier. We intended to replace [relevant] books with new copies.” Among the books that were reordered are Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, 1984, by George Orwell, Slaughter House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, Dante’s Inferno, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.

https://pjmedia.com/faith/trump-administration-to-unc-and-duke-quit-promoting-islam-on-our-dime/

Will the Trump Administration move against the radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination and Islamic proselytizing that our nation’s colleges and universities have become?

On Friday, it made a small, long overdue step in that direction: Associated Press reported that “the Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, claiming that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance ‘ideological priorities’ and unfairly promote ‘the positive aspects of Islam’ but not Christianity or Judaism.”

The U.S. Department of Education wrote to the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies, no doubt interrupting these cosseted pseudo-academics as they swapped stories about how oppressed they are, and told them they had three weeks to revise their course offerings or else they could lose federal funds that were intended for instruction in foreign languages.

The Education Department letter came after Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.) noted that the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies had held a taxpayer-funded conference featuring “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” which made it like virtually every other conference on Israel and the Middle East held in every college and university over the last few years, but never mind. The Education Department found that instruction in foreign languages (which, remember, the money was for) and national security had “taken a back seat to other priorities,” and that the Consortium was spending taxpayer money on courses that were “plainly unqualified for taxpayer support.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/09/17/woke_history_is_making_big_inroads_in_americas_high_schools_120363.html

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: “whiteness.” Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects.

At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project. They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students.

 
“Breakup letters” with oppression: Classwork at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, Calif.
YouTube/echslawndale.org/videos/ 

Students at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale are assigned to write a “breakup letter with a form of oppression,” such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, Eurocentric curriculum or the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students are asked to “persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic.” 

Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms. Some conduct a grand jury investigation to determine who was responsible for the genocide of the state’s Native Americans. And one class holds a mock trial to determine which party is most responsible for the deaths of millions of native Tainos: Christopher Columbus, the soldiers, the king and queen of Spain, or the entire European system of colonialism.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dxUVm3P5HPY&feature=youtu.be