RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274681/leading-left-wing-economist-vilifies-trump-and-joseph-klein

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, hates President Trump. That’s no surprise, considering that he is part of left-wing academia and the United Nations wealth redistribution system.

“Trump is mentally disordered: megalomaniacal, paranoid, and psychopathic,” wrote Professor Sachs. “This is not name-calling. Trump’s mental condition leaves him unable to keep his word, control his animosities, and restrain his actions.”

Sachs is not only an economist, it seems. He is a self-appointed armchair “psychiatrist,” who has taken his own Trump derangement syndrome to the point of siding with Iran and China against the United States.

Sachs thinks that the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran was peachy keen. How dare President Trump withdraw from a deal that lifted sanctions against the Iranian regime and gave it gobs of cash upfront to finance its terrorist proxies around the world and fund its illicit ballistic missile development program?  How dare the president question the value of Iran’s loophole-ridden commitments that will sunset in the not-too-distant future and reimpose sanctions on the hegemony-seeking Islamist regime? According to Sachs, who is also pretending to be a lawyer in addition to a psychiatrist, the sanctions are “tantamount to war, in violation of the United Nations Charter.” Sachs goes on to say that the sanctions “constitute, or at least should constitute, a crime against humanity.” The only crime against humanity here is the Iranian regime’s state sponsorship of terrorists who kill innocent people, which the sanctions are designed to combat. As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “since President Trump introduced sweeping new restrictions on trade with Iran last year…Iran’s ability to finance allies such as Hezbollah has been curtailed. Hezbollah, the best funded and most senior of Tehran’s proxies, has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending, according to Hezbollah officials, members and supporters.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_demise_of_public_education.html

One may believe that those in charge of public education are qualified to administer the task of educating America’s youth.  One may believe they have the best interests of society at heart.  And one may believe they are doing the best they could do, given the conditions under which they have to work.  Abundant evidence, however, points to the conclusion that none of those beliefs is valid.

Public education has become an institutionalized form of child abuse.  Rather than being a tool used to prepare children to become productive adults, public education is being used to indoctrinate them to believe what powerful interest groups wish them to believe.  This process is designed to transform America into a place unfit for human habitation, in which rights are suppressed, powers of government are unlimited, and traditional faith-based values are rejected.

What children in public schools are being told to accept as facts and truth is often nothing more than opinions of those who reject reason and do what they might to prevent students from developing the intellectual skills required for critical thinking so they might embrace their own enslavement and the subversion and degradation of their society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274612/back-school-and-howard-zinn-classroom-mary-grabar

California has scrapped its proposed Ethnic Studies curriculum. The Orange County Register took from the 300 pages of sample guidelines, quotations about “’guiding values and principles’” that would “’cultivate empathy’” and encourage students to “share stories of ‘struggle and resistance’ and ‘critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.’” The editorial board “blasted” the curriculum as “’leftist propaganda’” that included capitalism in “the roll call of oppression.”

According to the Washington Times, the Jewish Legislative Caucus and 83 Jewish and pro-Israel organizations objected to the fact that the curriculum’s minority groups included “Arab Americans, but not Jewish Americans, and identified multiple examples of bigotry, but not anti-Semitism.” The curriculum also promoted the “anti-Israel, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, . . . BDS supporters such as Women’s March co-leader Linda Sarsour,” and included anti-Semitic rap lyrics,.

Kudos to the Orange County Register, the 84 pro-Israel groups lobbying against the curriculum, and to the citizens voicing their complaints in the feedback form.

But citizens should not let down their guard.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/13/california-readies-new-anti-semitic-curriculum-for-high-school-students/

California plans on adding a big fat healthy dose of antisemitism into its high school curriculum. Perhaps this is why the Qatar foundations has been spending millions of dollars in the American education system?

According to Adam Kredo at Free Beacon:

The California Department of Education is facing backlash after permitting a host of anti-Israel activists to build a statewide educational curriculum that demonizes the Jewish state and is said to be fostering hatred of Jewish and Israeli-American students, sources said.

Already, 83 pro-Israel and anti-discrimination organizations have petitioned the state’s education department to reform its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) to remove multiple instances of what they say is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias.

Opponents say the new material will foster “an unsafe environment for Jewish and Israeli-American students.”

“We are aware that many individuals and groups affiliated with the Jewish community have already written to you about the ESMC’s shocking omission of information about American Jews and anti-Semitism, its use of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, and its blatant anti-Israel bias,” a coalition of 83 pro-Israel organizations led by the AMCHA Initiative, a watchdog group that combats anti-Semitism in America, wrote to California’s Education Department.

“This includes the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, who wrote to you that they ‘cannot support a curriculum that erases the American Jewish experience, fails to discuss anti-Semitism, reinforces negative stereotypes about Jews, singles out Israel for criticism and would institutionalize the teaching of anti-Semitic stereotypes in our public schools,’” the groups wrote.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/how_whites_became_pariahs_in_academia.html

Likely you’ve never heard of Noel Ignatiev, yet he’s been influential in much of what is going on in culture and politics today.  A left-wing Jewish American author and historian, Ignatiev has been one of the main voices in helping shape and direct what is commonly called “Whiteness Studies,” a subset of Critical Race Theory, which is itself a subset of Critical Theory (basically Marxism by another name).

Normally, when one sees the word “studies” attached to anything, it tends to make anyone not fully enamored of Progressive thought cringe, if not contemplate (metaphorically, at least) getting out the pitchforks and torches.  It means something steeped in a Marxist-tinged ideological understanding of the world, which casts victims and perpetrators within a power-play framework that suits its ultimate vision of a Heaven on Earth once the perpetrators are vanquished from the scene.

As one might guess, in this particular iteration of “studies,” it is the so-called “white” person who has been cast as the villain.  As Ignatiev has said, “The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.  Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.”

Defenders of Ignatiev’s views argue that he was simply being metaphorical.  “Whiteness” here is simply a social construct, not a reference to race or ethnicity.  This becomes harder to defend as one reads more quotes from Ignatiev and realizes that this isn’t just a social construct he has difficulty with; it’s actual flesh-and-blood human beings he sees as intrinsically evil and worthy of eradication.  When reading the following quotes, are you left with the conclusion he is merely speaking of a metaphorical, socially constructed system that he hopes to bring down, or is it something more than that?

https://www.city-journal.org/cuny–objective-testing

“Let’s face it: if more people were aware of how badly the school system performs, there’s no telling what might happen. So the three R’s must be replaced by the three D’s—distraction, deflection, and deceit. The integrity of the City University of New York is just the latest casualty in New York’ ongoing education tragedy.”

The City University of New York has announced plans to eliminate objective testing intended to determine which of its incoming students can do college-level work and which require remediation. Politico reports that CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez plans to move the university “away from high-stakes testing” while “reducing its reliance on placement tests students must take to determine whether they need remedial interventions.”

CUNY has been here once before—and the results nearly killed the university. Adjusted for euphemism, the decision points toward a reversal of 1990s-era reforms that pulled the university out of a long period of stagnation and decline. Abandoning testing would represent an effective return to so-called open-admissions policies from the 1960s and 1970s. Those allowed virtually anybody who could stumble through CUNY’s front door to enroll. Eventually, the university’s classrooms filled up with unqualified students, severely degraded the quality of education, and reduced the once-great university to a national laughingstock. CUNY’s rescue, a joint venture of then-governor George Pataki, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others, was not easily achieved—and it will doubtless take some time for the university’s new admissions policy to start showing damaging effects. But that’s just a matter of time.

The new policy is a huge win for teachers’ unions and unaccountable bureaucrats because it greatly relieves pressure on New York City’s public schools to do better. It was achieved with the silent acquiescence of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the only politician in the state who could have stopped it. Back in 2012, Cuomo declared himself the chief lobbyist for New York’s public school students, and for a while, he really was—promoting and protecting charter schools, strengthening accountability for teachers and school administrators, and—critically—supporting student-performance benchmarks. In recent years, though, he’s been silent, standing aside as the Albany legislature refused to allow New York City’s astonishingly effective charter school movement to expand; as hard-won teacher-accountability reforms were peeled away and discarded; and as the state Board of Regents moved to abandon its 150-year-old practice of proficiency testing of high school students statewide. And now CUNY is following suit, embracing a new open-admissions era.