RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/ny-city-diversity-committee-says-programs-for-gifted-students-are-racist/

A school diversity committee formed by Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to eliminate programs for gifted and talented students, claiming they perpetuate racial inequality because they’re comprised mostly of white and Asian students.

The committee also recommended scrapping all forms of screening for students across the city.

The report has no binding power, but de Blasio can implement the panel’s recommendations if he wishes.

New York Post:

De Blasio only said of the report Monday, “Every child, regardless of ZIP code, has the right to attend a school where they can thrive.

“I thank the School Diversity Advisory Group for all their hard work to promote equity and excellence across our system, and I look forward to reviewing their recommendations. ”

Carranza added, “We’re going to review their recommendations and take action to ensure all students have access to a rich and rigorous education.”

After the lip service to quality education, what’s really at stake here? Perhaps we should be asking about the legitimacy of these programs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14561/unsafe-spaces

Incoming innocents, entering into such an unsafe space as the first day of school, are increasingly less likely to encounter any requirement for inner strength as they face, for the first time, the perils of the world without maternal protection.

Yearned-for amendments to the facts of life, previously intended to equip a child against the rough and tumble of the “school of life,” have been replaced by the notion that refusing to hear anything that might offend one is not a choice, but a right. Why argue with creatures who have an opposing view when you can simply shut them down?

The tech giants, big government, the media, and their willing executioners, are trying to push all opposition to the periphery.

Fragile sensibilities and the desperate need to have them catered to now appear the number one priority of the pampered, guilt-ridden offspring of the people who found a way to lower them gently into the best universities.

Incoming innocents, entering into such an unsafe space as the first day of school, are increasingly less likely to encounter any requirement for inner strength as they face, for the first time, the perils of the world without maternal protection.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/college-creates-ai-to-identify-hate-on-campus-discover-minority-students-are-the-worst-abusers/

Radical far left students at the University of California, Berkley held a protest and formed a human chain to prevent white students from going to class in a 2016 demonstration.

A new study by Cornell Univesity using artificial intelligence found that minority students were much more likely to spread abusive racist language on twitter.

Campus Reform reported:

A new study out of Cornell reveals that the machine learning practices behind AI, which are designed to flag offensive online content, may actually “discriminate against the groups who are often the targets of the abuse we are trying to detect,” according to the study abstract.

The study involved researchers training a system to flag tweets containing “hate speech,” in much the same way that other universities are developing systems for eventual online use, by using several databases of tweets, some of which had been flagged by human evaluators for offensive content.

“The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates.If these abusive language detection systems are used in the field they will, therefore, have a disproportionate negative impact on African-American social media users,” the abstract continues.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274697/drag-queen-story-hour-branches-out-danusha-v-goska

A hundred community members crowded my local library’s public meeting space. Thirty or so toddlers nestled in the laps of their moms and dads in the rows of folding chairs. Teachers and administrators from local schools sat front row center.

A man in tattered clothing and a ragged cap appeared on a makeshift stage. He gave his name as “Jim Crow.” His white face was covered with black paint. A large circle of white paint surrounded  his mouth, making his lips look twice their size. “Jim” arched his back so that his buttocks protruded; in fact, his buttocks appeared to be padded with pillows worn under his colorfully patched and threadbare trousers. He waved his hands about wildly – “jazz hands.” The children in the audience laughed with delight at Jim’s screwball antics. Moms and dads smiled indulgently. School administrators took notes on their cell phones. I could just tell that some were already planning to book Jim for their next school assembly. Heather Truwright, our librarian and hostess, wore a triumphant grin.

Next. Mr. Bones and Mr. Interlocutor entered. Whereas Jim wore the rags of a plantation slave, Bones and Interlocutor wore exaggerated suits, with wildly colored, outsized, and clashing vests, jackets, hats, and gloves. They were clearly costumed as the flashy nouveau riche, too gauche and ignorant to know how to dress properly. Like Jim, their faces were covered with black paint, except for the exaggerated lips. In their case, they used red to emphasize their lip size.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/22/education-speech-new-yorks-attempts-control-private-schools-unconstitutional/

Courts will not be able to ignore the reality that education is speech and that states are imposing unconstitutional content and viewpoint discrimination.

New York State recently announced regulations that would add sharp teeth to its policy of requiring private schools to be “substantially equivalent” to public schools. Although this initially sounds reasonable, on closer examination the regulations impose a stifling conformity on private educational speech.

This problem exists in many states. The New York regulations should therefore provoke a reconsideration of the threats to educational speech across the country.

A vast literature explores the freedom of speech of grade-school students against their teachers and schools, but curiously, there is very little recognition of the free speech rights of parents and schools against the states. These rights now need attention.

What Is Substantial Equivalence?

A long-standing New York State statute generically obliges private schools to offer education “substantially equivalent” to public-school education. Not content with something so open-ended, the state’s Department of Education specifies in regulations how substantial equivalence is to be enforced. It thereby accentuates the threat to freedom of speech.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/decades_of_intensifying_leftwing_influence_on_high_school_students.html

“…..Fast-forward about forty years to 1997.  I had transferred into a high school for gifted students in New York City, one of those specialized high schools with high Asian and white enrollments, and ever diminishing black and Hispanic enrollments.  It was one of a group of schools that require students to pass a difficult examination for admittance.  At that time, the enrollment of black and Hispanic students ranged at around 30–35%, whereas today it is in the 10–12% range.

During the first week of the school year before classes began, teachers gathered in departments to review plans for teaching their subjects.  The U.S. history teachers gathered in a room.  It was my first week, and within a few minutes, it came to my attention that the teachers in the room all planned on regularly distributing excerpts from Howard Zinn’s bestselling college textbook A People’s History of the United States.  Suddenly, I realized I was in a dark coven of male commies.  Collectively, purposely, and without hesitation, they were agreeing on teaching that American history was a betrayal of the people by the power-mad white capitalist elite.  Our history was presumably a history of oppression, suppression, and exploitation of “the people.” 

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/scholastics-new-school-catalog-hawks-books-to-indoctrinate-kids-with-identity-politics/

The world’s largest publisher and distributor of books to kids, which hosts the No. 1-visited site for U.S. elementary school teachers, has gone full-on woke. You won’t believe the garbage they’re selling to public schools.

This year’s back to school catalog for grades three to six from Scholastic, a children’s publishing giant, features books selected through a partnership with the identity politics pressure group We Need Diverse Books. The results are about what you might imagine.

The catalog’s front page features books about a Pakistani-American girl whose Milwaukee mosque is vandalized in a “hate crime,” a girl who finds out “her dad is secretly dating her best friend’s mom,” and a book about “Native American Heroes” who of course include political activists. Delightful. Third through sixth graders — who are approximately ages eight to twelve — definitely need this kind of broadening of their childish perspectives.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/

Teach-ins’ at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian and in New York City promise anti-historical indoctrination from socialist Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’

Long ago, during my childhood, school began right after Labor Day, and Columbus Day, commemorating the date Christopher Columbus discovered the New World on Oct. 12, 1492, was the first holiday of the school year.

Not anymore. Columbus Day of late has been marked by defacement of statues and hordes of angry adolescents demanding an end to the holiday. Leading young people in the hate-fest are teachers who have been educated with Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

This semester, the Smithsonian Institution is helping. Teachers will learn new teaching strategies and receiving continuing education credits at two “teach-ins” — on Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and on Sept. 28 in New York City.

Both “teach-ins” are efforts of our national museum, the Smithsonian, and D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, “a project of Teaching for Change.” The invitation promises to feature “classroom resources for K-12 from Native Knowledge 360 [Degrees]” and from “the Zinn Education Project, including the campaign to abolish Columbus Day.”

The Zinn Education Project’s Infiltration

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/shortcircuiting_the_natural_love_of_learning_in_young_people.html

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allow them to grapple with a strenuous and comprehensive curriculum of study.

They have been deprived of genuine instruction in the academic disciplines, indoctrinated in the political shibboleths of the time, and coddled into a state of self-assured autonomy of judgment. This is common knowledge.

Grasping the rudiments of grammar and style, learning how to write coherently (by which I mean both the cursive of penmanship and the cursive of thought), and reading with comprehension in history, literature, philosophy and politics have become dead letters, quite literally. The state of juvenility and ineptitude in which they loiter bodes ill for the culture.

The default procedure among administrators and teachers is to ignore the obvious, to install largely useless computer instruction in the acquisition of writing skills and language proficiency, insist that “fairness” justifies weakening admission standards at the expense of quality, and that ‘social justice” rather than scholarly achievement and disciplinary merit is the aim of education.  

While these institutional debits and failures remain in place, the crux of the issue lies elsewhere. Nothing can supplant early reading — that is, actual reading and being read to — in the home. This is an advantage that cannot be overestimated. Education, as the adage has it, begins in the home with loving and responsible parents. According to Aristotle in the Politics, a child’s character and potentialities are formed by the age of seven, and there is considerble truth to that. Failing such parental supervision, students enter the education system at a deficit. Reclamation is always difficult though differentially possible, assuming native and untapped inclination in the student, a curriculum stressing the basics and expanding outward, an administration concerned with education rather than entrenchment, and teachers who are themselves well-educated and professionally accountable — a Sisyphean proposition.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/common-core-screen-overdoses-ruining-american-kids-intelligence/

Between ineffective teaching methods at school and an overdose of screen time at home, our children are becoming intellectually deficient. We need to reverse the trends.

By every metric (SAT, ACT, and even IQ), the intelligence and aptitude of American students has declined in recent years. As Joy Pullmann documents in an article about the results of using Common Core, student performance on state standardized tests has also gone down — that is, when the scoring isn’t changed to show better results.

Before casting blame on who’s responsible, it’s important to understand what these numbers actually mean. All of these tests attempt to measure higher-order thinking skills as they relate to abstract scenarios, nothing more or less. They do not measure the level of practical skills people might have, their emotional intelligence, or even their actual knowledge of things.

Rather, they assess students’ critical thinking (the ability to analyze), problem solving, and knowledge application. People who have these higher-order thinking skills are generally more adaptable to any kind of learning, particularly the kind of learning that happens in higher education.

Higher-order thinking is also important in a time most activities are computerized and information comes in abstract forms such as images and text. American students who lack these skills will struggle much more when most jobs and other domains in life (communication, management, choosing a lifestyle, etc.) demand this of them.