RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressive-education-today-1528326470

‘It’s like the [Education Department’s] motto is, ‘If it’s not broken, break it.’” So said state Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, in an apt summary of plans by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to diminish standards at eight high-performing public high schools.

Mr. Dinowitz, who was quoted in the New York Post, is a proud alum of the Bronx High School of Science. In America’s largest school system, where most children are failing proficiency tests in math and reading, only a modern progressive such as Mr. de Blasio could think the solution is watering down standards at the schools where students are achieving.

The mayor is alarmed because Asian students are disproportionately doing far better than black and Latino kids. At Manhattan’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, for example, 2.8% of students are Latino and 0.69% black. But 72.9% are Asian-American.

The disproportion is similar at other high-achieving New York City schools where admission is determined by an achievement test. Mr. de Blasio’s solution requires taking seats at these elite schools from Asian or white students and giving them to less qualified black and Latino children who may not be prepared for the academic demands. Either he’s setting these students up to fail, or he’ll have to ruin the schools by dumbing down their standards.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/changing-subject-15950.html

As he moves to wreck New York City’s eight justly famed competitive-entry high schools, New York mayor Bill de Blasio implies he’s on a mission from God, but it seems more like a mission from the United Federation of Teachers. “Blessed are those who act justly,” the famously self-reverential chief executive declared at Harlem’s Bethel Gospel Academy Sunday, later returning to the theme to describe critics of his plan to impose entrance quotas on the eight schools: “I think scripture also tells us about the naysayers and the doubting Thomases,” he said. “Can I get an amen?”

Well, no. The mayor’s scheme needs to be seen for what it is—an effort to change the city’s public-school-performance conversation rather than a constructive public policy proposal. Plus, it’s a blatant pander to his political base—and a firm notice that a reelected de Blasio has no intention of turning away from progressive obsessions in favor of sensible governance. And he said as much Sunday. “I’ve got a new mandate from the voters. [And] I have a new chancellor who is focused on social justice.” The mayor might have added that the new chancellor, Richard Carranza, is focused on social justice to the exclusion of all else.

Following relatively brief and undistinguished stints heading the San Francisco and Houston school systems, Carranza arrived in New York in April, announcing that his top priority would be desegregating New York’s public schools. True to his word, he almost immediately attacked “wealthy white Manhattan parents” for, he claimed, blocking integration efforts—then instructed a critic to take “anti-implicit bias training.” Carranza has returned to the bias theme repeatedly, ignoring the central shame of the city’s schools: the thousands of students who graduate from its woeful high schools each year unable to do college-level academic work and—perhaps more significantly—incapable of performing in New York’s twenty-first-century economy, either.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/diversity-not-merit-15948.html

For decades, admission to New York City’s eight elite “specialized high schools” has been based strictly on a high-stakes test administered to the city’s eighth-graders. The meritocratic premise is simple: regardless of who you are or how much your parents make, if you hit a certain score on the test, you’re guaranteed a place in one of these high schools, all among the best in the United States. But if Mayor Bill de Blasio gets his way, New York will scrap this venerable system for one that is as close to a race-based quota scheme as constitutionally possible.

Progressives criticize the admissions test as an instrument of “segregation” because black and Latino kids are underrepresented among students accepted at schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Indeed, in 2016, Stuyvesant had only 20 black students among a student body of more than 3,000. Brooklyn Tech, where de Blasio’s son went, is somewhat more racially diverse, with 14.8 percent black and Latino representation. But in a city where blacks and Latinos make up two out of every three public school students, black and Latino enrollment in the most elite secondary schools is undeniably thin—a direct result of student performance on the entrance test.

Yesterday, the mayor, backed by his new schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, announced that he plans to scrap the entrance test for the eight elite schools and replace it with a system offering admission to the kids in the top 7 percent of every junior school in the city. This change, according to the mayor, will make the schools “look like New York City” and answer the “demand for fairness” that supposedly rings across the five boroughs.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In keeping with the logic of Mayor de Blasio and his school chancellor, who both believe that a good solution for black and Latino minorities to get ahead in school is simply to eliminate the standardized test to get into New York’s toughest academies, why not do the same with the La Guardia school for the performing arts? Let’s forget about auditions and portfolios and try to even the number of boys who are admitted since only 26% of the student body is currently male. Why give priority to talent if you believe that intelligence and discipline, as reflected in the ability to ace a standardized test, are not essential pre-requisites for advanced academic work And why not insist that Asians are proportionately represented at La Guardia even if they don’t express as much interest in music and art. Or that girls, who currently account for only 40% of Stuyvesant are similarly favored to even their quota there.

Community activists argue that the discrimination against minorities is economic as much as racial but this is belied by the very population that is so well represented at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science – how many people know that the minority with the highest poverty rate in our city is Asian? Just as you can’t put the cart before the horse, you can’t pretend that by eliminating the screening for those who have the capacity to do advanced work, others will absorb it magically once they are in the company of advanced students The standardized test is the fairest prognosticator we have of student achievement, certainly more than subjective references from past teachers or even report cards from schools that may inflate their grades to enhance their own reputations and obscure their failures.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270346/politics-and-free-speech-dartmouth-jack-kerwick

A recently conducted Dartmouth University survey supplies some invaluable insights.

According to The Dartmouth, “undergraduates were asked if learning that another student had political beliefs opposite from their own would affect a range of possible interactions with them.” Reportedly, 42% of respondents said that they would be less likely to befriend a person if that person’s politics were contrary to their own. Seventy percent remarked that they’d be less likely to get romantically involved with someone with differing political views. And 30% admitted to being less likely to trust a person with an opposite political perspective.

Yet the report is quick to note that these numbers in themselves conceal “sizable political differences [.]”

Democrats, it’s reported, are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to allow their politics to affect their relationships.

“While 82 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats say they would be less likely to date someone with opposing political beliefs, only 47 percent of Independents and 42 percent of Republicans said the same.”

When it comes to potential friendships, “55 percent of Democratic respondents said opposite political views would make them less likely to befriend another student, compared to 21 percent of Independents and 12 percent of Republicans.”

Judging from these results, students who are Democrats are the most intolerant of political differences while Republican students are vastly most tolerant than Democrats and even more tolerant than Independents—a situation that is the exact opposite of the picture that the left has been painting for decades.

The survey also found that while “majorities” of respondents claimed that knowledge of the political commitments of their professors would not dissuade them from taking classes with those professors, Democratic students were less likely than Independents and Republicans to enroll in courses taught by those with differing political views.

“Democratic students express less willingness to take classes from a Republican professor (38 percent) than Republican students do to take a class taught by a Democratic professor (23 percent).” Moreover, of the four political orientations offered in the survey—Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and Socialist—the 25 percent or so of student respondents who expressed a disinclination to enroll in a course whose instructor subscribed to a political perspective at odds with their own, Republican professors were most unpopular.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/06/04/provocateurs_on_campus_distract_from_real_free_speech_problems_110653.html

This spring, as the last of the college commencements come to a close, let’s recall what these colorful pageants are ostensibly celebrating: the graduates’ completed experience of free inquiry, scientific exploration, reasoned discourse, and challenging instruction.

Yet, on far too many campuses, the occasional invited speaker may provide the only opportunity for students to hear an adult unapologetically and intellectually take on prevailing campus orthodoxy. Given the dearth of viewpoint diversity among faculty and the reluctance of conservative faculty to ruffle the feathers of their colleagues, guest speakers may be the one chance students have to hear an authoritative rebuttal of familiar assumptions or comfortable groupthink.

And students need that exposure, as many of their classmates have become hesitant to speak up. A recent survey reported that 54 percent of students stop themselves from sharing an idea during their college years — and 30 percent of students have “censored themselves” in class — because they feared their ideas would be frowned upon by classmates.

This all leads to a timely question, one that merits a bit of reflection during this summer’s respite from the campus free speech wars: What is the point of free speech on campus? After all, it was never intended to promote the utterance of naughty phrases or merely to shock bourgeois sensibilities. It was meant to protect free inquiry, searching discussions, and challenging instruction.

This purpose has gotten lost amid a muddle of sophomoric provocation, defensive posturing by campus officials, and protests by leftist student mobs seeking to suppress uncomfortable ideas. It has also been undermined by conservative groups and campus Republicans themselves who, frustrated by their status as outcasts, have helped make professional provocateurs the face of the campus free speech debates by inviting controversial speakers whose primary function is to rattle progressives and stick a thumb in the eye of campus administrators. Such speakers have lent credibility to apologists who insist that concerns about free speech are overblown, while distracting from efforts to call out and talk seriously about the left’s campus hegemony.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/im-running-to-restore-yale-values-1528054042

I love Yale. It’s where I pursued a passion for sketch comedy, started writing a newspaper column, came out of the closet, and gained the critical-thinking skills that equipped me for a career in journalism. But recent events leave me worried that my alma mater is changing for the worse.

A sign that something had gone terribly wrong came in October 2015, when a viral internet video revealed a student mob shrieking at Nicholas Christakis, then master of Yale’s largest residential college. That these students were treating a professor with such disrespect was bad enough, but the impetus for their outrage was an innocuous email written by his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, doubting Yale needed to warn students about “appropriate Halloween wear.” Yale’s failure to stand up for the Christakises—he stepped down as master, she left the university—left me ashamed. When the university rewarded two of the mob’s leaders with a prestigious prize, something was deeply amiss.

Further developments have only confirmed my worries. Yale ditched the title “master” on the ludicrous grounds that it is racist; a survey finds half the faculty approves of “trigger warnings” for readings and classroom discussions, and the number of campus administrators continues to swell while the cost of attending has increased to $70,000 a year.

To reverse these worrying trends I have decided to mount a petition campaign to join Yale’s Board of Trustees.

Yale instilled in me the two basic values that guide me as a writer: freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge. I have traveled to many countries where people are physically attacked or imprisoned for speaking their minds. That taught me never to take America’s freedoms for granted.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/02/duke_erodes_liberal_education_137167.html

On May 8, the Duke University student newspaper published a stirring letter addressed to the school community that was co-signed by 101 students and former students. The letter protested the decision of the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy to decline to renew the contract of Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice of public policy and political science, and called on the provost to reverse the decision.

To no avail. On May 23, incoming Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley informed Charney that Provost Sally Kornbluth rejected his appeal.

Duke’s termination of Charney, a productive scholar with wide-ranging interests in ethics and politics who has taught at Duke for 19 years (and with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was an assistant professor), has all the earmarks of faculty and administration acquiescence to the swelling forces of campus intolerance and anti-intellectualism. At the same time, the legions of grateful students who have rallied around Charney show that a reservoir of love for learning survives at Duke — among the young.

“Professor Charney’s teaching style is wonderfully thought-provoking and challenging,” according to the Duke Chronicle letter. In his classes, the students explained, “ideas are vetted and sharpened through rigorous debate and discussion on issues ranging from physician assisted suicide to the legalization of sex work.” Charney treats all opinions equally: “No thought goes unexamined; no assertion goes unchecked.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-catholic-school-difference-1527894168

For the thousands of nuns who have served as principals at Catholic schools, their emphasis on self-discipline must seem like common sense. But a new academic study confirms the sisters are on to something: You can instill self-discipline in students, a virtue that will help them in their studies and later in life.

The study was conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute by University of California-Santa Barbara associate professor Michael Gottfried and doctoral student Jacob Kirksey. The authors analyzed two waves of national data on elementary school students collected under the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study for the National Center for Education Statistics. They compared children in Catholic schools with those in public schools and other private schools, religious and secular.

The authors found statistically meaningful evidence that students in Catholic schools exhibited less disruptive behavior than their counterparts in other schools. “According to their teachers, Catholic school children argued, fought, got angry, acted impulsively, and disturbed ongoing activities less frequently,” the authors write. Specifically, students in Catholic schools “were more likely to control their temper, respect others’ property, accept their fellow students’ ideas, and handle peer pressure.” In other words, they exhibited more self-discipline.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/11/yale-racial-grievances-university-bows-diversity-enforcers/

On the university’s latest kowtow to the diversity enforcers

Once again, a college president has chosen to fan the flames of racial grievance rather than to calm them. This time, that president is Yale’s Peter Salovey. No surprise there, since Salovey has rarely missed an opportunity to signal his racial virtue by declaring that he presides over a campus harboring “hate,” “exclusion,” and “discrimination.” Yale’s response to a recent incident of petty dormitory tyranny is a textbook example of how not to lead a university.

On May 8, at 1:40 a.m., a female graduate student at Yale turned on the light in the graduate-dorm common room and found another woman sleeping there, amid books, a laptop, a pillow, and a blanket. The first woman allegedly told the second woman that she didn’t have the right to sleep there and called the Yale police to report an unauthorized person in the common room. Three Yale Police Department officers showed up five minutes later.

For the next 15 minutes, two of the officers and the erstwhile sleeper, Lolade Siyonbola, a 34-year-old MA candidate in African studies, interacted warily on the landing outside Siyonbola’s dorm room, as the cops tried to corroborate her identity. On another floor, the third officer questioned the caller, Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. Confirming Siyonbola’s identity took longer than usual since the name on her campus ID did not match the name she had chosen to use in Yale’s student database. Once the discrepancy was resolved, the officers admonished Braasch that Siyonbola had every right to be in the common room and left.

As captured on Siyonbola’s smartphone video, Braasch appears to be an officious control freak, believing herself empowered to enforce her own private code of dormitory conduct. Ordinarily, this trivial incident would have passed without notice. But because Braasch is white and Siyonbola is black, the episode has become an international scandal, and Yale has gone into crisis mode.

First out of the gate with a racial mea culpa was the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken. In an email to the “Law School Community” on May 10, Gerken claimed that the police check of Siyonbola represented a “corrosive” pattern: “We are well aware that this is not the first time that people of color, and African Americans in particular, have been questioned about their right to be in a building on the Yale campus. Similar incidents have happened over the years here at the Law School.” Gerken is right: Such questioning has happened at the law school — to black and white students. Several black law students complained on Facebook after the Braasch episode about being asked for identification when their family was visiting and taking pictures. A white Yale law student has had the identical experience: “I’ve been asked for my ID at the law school when I had my family enter the building with me to take pictures,” he told me via email. He has been asked for his ID when a substitute security guard was at the building’s front entrance and when walking into the library. All of these potential “incidents” occurred during the day, not in the middle of the night.