RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05/9-years-common-core-test-scores-indoctrination/

It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam.

“If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said in July 2009.

He went on to state his faith that Common Core — at that point unwritten — would “not only make America’s entire education system the envy of the world, but we will launch a Race to the Top that will prepare every child, everywhere in America, for the challenges of the 21st century.” Race to the Top was a $4 billion money pot inside the 2009 stimulus that helped bribe states into Common Core.

So here we are, nine years later. Common Core has been officially rolled out into U.S. public and even many private schools for at least three to five years now. Are American children increasingly prepared for the “the challenges of the 21st century”? We’re actually seeing the opposite. They’re increasingly less prepared. And there’s mounting evidence that Common Core deserves some of the blame.
Student Achievement Largely Down or Flat

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271822/pinko-nostalgia-bruce-bawer

Full disclosure: the one time I met Martin Duberman – who, now aged 88, could arguably be identified as the dean of Queer Studies – he was a jerk. It was 1994, and he was already a “distinguished gay historian,” and I was this young upstart who, the year before, had published a successful book, A Place at the Table, that challenged the longtime effort by Duberman and others to keep the wagon of gay rights forever hitched to the mule of the far left. We met on the set of Charlie Rose’s program, where we took part in an episode commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots. He was unconscionably rude and condescending. Re-watching that episode recently – on which Duberman’s most memorable line was something about “celebrating diversity” in a “conformist society” – I was reminded of what an intellectual lightweight he is.

Not that you’d know it from his list of accomplishments and accolades. The founder of CUNY’s Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies, he’s won a bushel full of awards and honorary degrees. His two dozen or more books include a reverential biography of the Stalinist singer Paul Robeson and an equally reverential biography of another full-fledged Commie, Howard Zinn (whose People’s History of the United States is more responsible than any other single book for the contempt in which many young Americans today hold their own country). As those last couple of items might suggest, Duberman is a hard leftist. And it’s his stubborn refusal to grow beyond the fatuous politics of his youth and middle age that forms the foundation of his new book, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

It should really be entitled Has the Gay Movement Failed the Left? Or maybe, since the author is so staggeringly self-absorbed: Has the Gay Movement Failed Me? Duberman’s answer: you betcha. A quarter of a century ago, along with the rest of the gay left, he deliberately presented straight Americans with an image of gays as marginal, promiscuous rebels – unalterably hostile to capitalism, the family, religion, and every other bourgeois convention. For Duberman and friends, the unforgivable thing about gays like me was that we told straight America – correctly – that most gay Americans were ordinary, politically moderate, law-abiding folks who just wanted to be able to lead our lives in peace.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/trigger-warnings-and-mass-psychogenic

Contrary to the tradition of free inquiry, many college students now demand the suppression of ideas they find offensive. As if to raise the stakes by transforming the issues in play into medical ones, many also claim that such ideas traumatize them. Implying as it does that offensive material doesn’t just insult decency or pollute the public realm but wounds the very psyche of those exposed to it, the term “trauma” as deployed by the critics of free inquiry has indeed taken the argument to a new level. What are we to make of the contention that students are so vulnerable that the syllabus of a lit course should carry a “trigger warning” to the effect that their psyches might suffer damage merely as a result of the reading?

A medical argument calls for a medical reply.

Suppose rumors begin to circulate in a small town that the insulation stuffed into local walls and attics contains a toxic substance. Literally surrounded by toxicity, the residents begin to report symptoms like nausea, headache, dizziness and poor concentration, with each new case producing others in a cascade effect. The Emergency Room overflows. Upon investigation, however, no toxic source can be found. According to the medical literature, we have here a case of mass psychogenic illness (or mass hysteria): a social phenomenon in which people suddenly fall ill, and inspire others to do so as well, in the belief that they have been exposed to a toxic agent, though in fact the belief itself is making them sick. Such an outbreak poses a spurious emergency.

So too, I argue, does the trigger-warning movement. A mass reaction to an imaginary toxin and an over-reaction to the perceived dangers of toxic ideas represent parallel events (except that the threat allegedly posed by toxic ideas lacks the local and limited character of a classical psychogenic incident). Just as the former has the suddenness of a panic, the latter flares up instantly on the slightest provocation, as documented recently by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their critique of the trigger-warning movement, The Coddling of the American Mind. In both cases an incident can become an immediate cause célèbre, with ambulances, fire trucks, investigators, and reporters hastening to the scene of a psychogenic outbreak, and the news media, social networks, student populations, and university authorities swept up in a comprehensive reaction to students’ claims of injury.

Schools appear to be the most common venue for psychogenic outbreaks, perhaps because a population concentrated in a tight setting makes an ideal conductor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/college-assignment-compare-trump-administration-nazi-policies/

That comparison is offensive to everyone who suffered at the hands of the Nazis

A University of Arizona student reports that her class was asked to compare President Donald Trump administration and the Nazis’ policies as part of an extra-credit assignment for a course on the Holocaust.

“Now that you have studied the Vichy Anti-Jewish Laws, the German Ordinances, and pre-Vichy laws imposed on the Jews (French, immigrant, and refugee) and the repercussions that they had for Jews in France, examine and analyze more current anti-immigrant laws in the United States,” states the extra-credit assignment, a copy of which was obtained by Campus Reform.

One Jewish American student, L’wren Tikva, told Campus Reform that she was offended by the assignment, saying that it was “insensitive” and that it felt “extremely one-sided and [like] full-on indoctrination.”

“As a Jewish American who has ties to those who survived the Holocaust it’s pretty trivializing comparing Trump’s policies to the Holocaust,” Tikva reportedly wrote to her professor. “Almost all of these policies are in no way comparable and the President is in his legal authority to implement these policies.”

Apparently, the professor responded and stated that she was also a relative of Holocaust survivors, that “her intent was not to compare Trump to Hitler,” and that she was “not [at] all comparing what eventually transpired in Vichy, France to what is happening now in the U.S.A.”

“I am certainly not cheapening the Holocaust by looking at the laws emphasized in pre-war France and examining the focus and rhetoric of certain immigration laws in the recent past and current moment in the States,” the professor continued.

Here’s the thing, though: That is exactly what she’s doing. She can try to defend herself and say that she wasn’t trying to compare what the Nazis did to what Trump is doing, but simply reading the assignment is enough to show that that was clearly her intent. She wasn’t simply asking students to examine Trump’s policies, she was asking them to examine Trump’s policies through the lens of what happened in Nazi Germany, which clearly insinuates that she is looking for students to draw some similarities between the two.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-columbias-statement-on-pittsburgh/

In the Columbia student’s vocabulary, few labels are more damning than the word “problematic.” The Western canon central to our school’s curriculum is problematic (an affirmation of whiteness and the patriarchy). As is our free-speech supporting, union-skeptic university president (ditto). And the endowment’s investment in fossil-fuel companies (ditto). Succinctly put,“problematic” — to the average student and, in my experience, to some instructors — is the antonym of“woke.” Never mind that this is a grammatically tenuous use of the word: At Columbia, this definition is gospel.

Our campus paper, the Columbia Spectator, reported this morning on an email the Office of University Life addressed to the Columbia community following the anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh. What makes this article worthy of attention? The university’s statement omitted the words“anti-Semitic” and “Jewish.”

Here’s the text of the message:

We are deeply saddened by the senseless violence at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday morning. Violence in our nation’s houses of worship is an affront to the freedoms our community holds dear. We stand strongly against these efforts to create fear and terror.

For some in our community, this is a particularly frightening time as we have seen a growing number of highly visible attacks directed at faith and identity – on worshippers and people of faith as they go through their daily lives, on groups gathered to celebrate an LGBT Latin night at Pulse Nightclub, on civil rights and anti-racist protesters in the streets of Charlottesville, and in so many other places, as occurred in last Wednesday’s shooting of two African-American shoppers in Kentucky. Please know that you are not alone, and that you are a part of this community founded on the fundamental dignity and worth of all.

The Columbia Spectator reports that following pushback from Columbia students and alumni, the Office of University Life issued a revision to this initial statement that characterized the attack as anti-Semitic and acknowledged that the attack specifically targeted the Jewish community.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2018/10/29/finley-anti-semitism-fight-begins-campus/1806326002/

If you’re hunting for the places where anti-semitism thrives in America, you’d be better off looking on its college campuses than in the White House.

Just two days after the slaughter of Jewish worshippers inside a temple in Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan staged a teach-in dedicated to the nationwide drive to prod universities to shun Israel.

The Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction (BDS) Movement condemns the Jewish state as an apartheid government for its treatment of Palestinians, and pressures colleges to break ties with Israel.

It has a vigorous presence at UM, and that’s caused discomfort for Jewish students who have traditionally found a welcoming environment on the Ann Arbor campus. It’s a thin line between demonizing Israel and dehumanizing Jews.

Former student Molly Rosen, writing in The Tower magazine in 2014, said when she arrived at UM, “I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel. I was not prepared to be told that my community was racist.

“I was not prepared to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs.”

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/181027

Increasingly we who love this United States of America and the Constitution are alarmed at thehate and violence prevailing in today’s Democrat party with its extreme leftism, globalism, identity politics and open borders that threaten our future. What we are witnessing now is what George Orwell foresaw in his dystopian world to come. But what he envisaged in his dread 1984 novel was in reality not new, but rather a return to what had prevailed in earlier centuries. It seems that history is repeating itself, but has reached a new low.

During the early to late medieval era the omnipotent Kings and Queens lived their lives surrounded by fawning sycophants and protected by mercenary armies. They ruled and owned vast lands, but the people who served them lived in a very different world indeed. For centuries royalty signed treaties, forged alliances, wrote laws, made war, and made peace. And this continued without the consent of untold millions of people, especially in Europe, whose lives were often adversely impacted by those unilateral decisions.

And then in 1776, a mere 242 years ago, came the Declaration of Independence signed by a new nation that arose with a divinely inspired document that challenged directly the assumed power of a king. It did so by abolishing the very status of royalty itself. The Constitution secured and protected the Natural Law Rights and sovereignty of each individual by limiting the authority and power of a centralized government.

For years that was our America. But what of it now?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-prep-kavanaugh-confirmation-media-circus-damage/

The media circus is gone, but mess they left behind remains.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 13, as parents arrived at our school to pick up students, a journalist from a major network camouflaged herself among them, avoiding identification at our front gate. She was subsequently found snooping around the halls of our main building and was escorted off campus. She later apologized.

But others soon followed. One reporter from a national newspaper deceived his way into our library so that he could rummage through old yearbooks. Some of our alumni had news crews staked out in front of their houses. Reporters were even harassing their elderly parents, tracking down home addresses and banging on doors, demanding interviews.

Journalists phoned us by the dozens, mostly demanding to know how long we had presided over a circus of drug and alcohol abuse, misogyny, and criminality. At least these reporters gave us the courtesy of a call. Many other national media outlets simply ran archly critical stories without bothering to contact us at all.

This was all necessary for American democracy, some of them explained, since one of our graduates had become a Supreme Court nominee. In a sense, that’s understandable. But as I learned firsthand, the lens trained on Georgetown Prep was warped, obscuring details that ran counter to preferred narratives, and the resulting portrait of our community was grossly distorted.

We were garishly described as an institution that “celebrated heavy drinking,” “a troubled, morally questionable symbol of a snobby elite [where] alcohol was an integral part of the school’s identity,” and a place where “disregard or mistreatment of women [was] widely accepted.” A “debauched . . . scene of cloistered young men.” And those are just a few such insults from the more than 60 articles that appeared about Prep in the Washington Post alone.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/professor-accused-of-racism-for-asking-his-student-to-try-harder/

Campus insanity is headed toward The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art that, according to its website, is dedicated to Peter Cooper’s “radical commitment to diversity and his founding vision that fair access to an inspiring free education and forums for courageous public discourse foster a just and thriving world.” Only, when a professor insisted that his students show up for class, one student decided it was time to post a manifesto decrying the white professor’s racism against her as a “POC” (person of color). The student posted this letter on a public board at the school.

The letter reads, in part:

Geoff Kaplan sent me an email expressing his concern about my attendance. I knew that I was going to be late on the morning of the next class and felt anxious about attending because of the concern that was already present. I was going back and forth about whether I should just be late or if I should miss the class. I really did not want the extra attention and arrived to school with enough time to attend the class but decided not to go, which I understand is irresponsible.

When Kaplan took her to task for missing class again, the student wrote:

He was interrogative throughout the conversation, as though I wasn’t telling him what he expected to hear. He opened the conversation with asking me what was wrong. I told him that nothing was wrong… He said, “You’re a young woman of color, so you have to try harder than everyone else, which isn’t fair, but you know…'”

Boy was that the wrong move for a white guy! How dare he try and show sympathy and acknowledge that all those other kids with white privilege will never have to work as hard as this young lady of color. (Isn’t that what the new racial line is? Not according to this chick.)

Hearing him try to explain or mention what he thought my experience was felt unproductive and made me feel like he is holding me to a certain standard based on my identity. I wasn’t comfortable with how patronizing the direction of this conversation was going.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271717/newtons-anti-semitism-problem-ilya-feoktistov

Ilya Feoktistov is Executive Director of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Newton, Massachusetts, a large Boston suburb, has an anti-Semitism problem in its public schools. Some Newton high school teachers, trained by Saudi and Qatari-funded curriculum mills, teach about the history of the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways that the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights defines as anti-Semitic.

Influenced by anti-Semitic classroom portrayals of the Jewish state, some Newton students have bullied their Jewish classmates with Nazi comparisons; and swastikas have appeared at a couple of schools.

In response to the situation, local activists have been engaged in grassroots campaigns to remove the anti-Semitic elements in the Middle East curriculum. The campaign, initiated by APT, strongly supported by CAMERA, and recently joined by the group Education Without Indoctrination (EWI), has included an in-depth investigation of the curriculum by APT, a short APT documentary about the events, a scholarly report by CAMERA analyzing curricular materials, numerous published articles, as well as correspondence with the school committee, the school superintendent, and Newton’s mayor. More recently EWI initiated a lawsuit against the Newton School Committee over an illegal lack of transparency. National news stories have emerged about biased teaching in Newton schools.

Now, after seven years of grassroots campaigns, Boston’s establishment Jewish leaders, who were for a long time reluctant to address the problem, have finally acknowledged it. On October 9, at a public meeting hosted by the Israeli-American Congress (IAC), the Jewish Community Relations Council, the New England branch of the ADL, and the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), all discussed the biased Middle East curriculum at Newton schools. All the groups, including the IAC, agreed that the curriculum and the teachers who use it are promoting anti-Israel lies to Newton students. The event further augmented the mounting negative publicity and pressure on the schools and teachers to act. Instead of addressing the problem, the very next day the educational establishment in the city struck back.