RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-regis-high-school-endures

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens grew up middle class in the economically sclerotic England of the 1970s. “If there’s going to be an upper class in this country,” he reports his mother saying, “Christopher is going to be in it.” He won a scholarship to a good “public” school (meaning private and exclusive, in the British parlance), went on to Oxford, and launched a dazzling literary career. Hitchens’s mother did not herself grow up in privilege, but she had figured out how the world worked.

On January 23, Regis High School, a small Jesuit institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, sent acceptance letters to approximately 135 eighth-graders in and around the five boroughs. The letters will change the trajectories of these students’ lives, and perhaps the destinies of their families in the bargain. Regis, which operates tuition-free owing principally to the largesse of a wealthy Catholic philanthropist (known to Regians as “The Benefactress”) who endowed the school in 1912, gives priority in admissions to promising young men who otherwise would not be able to afford a Jesuit education. (The school continues to raise additional money privately.) Its hope is that scholarship recipients will become leaders in their communities—in the words of the school’s mission statement, “men for others.”

Regis achieves extraordinary results. Former Marine officer and recent National Book Award winner Phil Klay is a Regis graduate, as was legendary book publisher Robert Giroux, Nobel Prize in Medicine winner John O’Keefe, several federal judges of the Southern District of New York and Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and current Houston Astros pitcher Declan Cronin. Nearly 20 percent of Regis graduates are accepted by an Ivy League college; many more attend highly ranked “Ivy-adjacent” schools. Such access to elite college education may be purchased elsewhere in New York City for $50,000 a year or more in private school tuition. At Regis, it may be had by achieving a high score on a scholarship exam, along with excellent grades and letters of recommendation—and in no other way. Regis turns away calls from alumni, donors, prominent New Yorkers, and anyone else trying to put a thumb on the scale in the admissions process.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/25/subliterate-readers-and-media-literacy/

Per Assembly Bill 873, media literacy skills must now be taught in California schools. The law requires that it not be done in a stand-alone class but rather must be woven into existing English language arts, science, math, and history-social studies classes.

Assemblymember Marc Berman, who authored the law, claims, “Teaching media literacy is a key strategy to support our children, their families, and our society that are inundated with misinformation and disinformation on social media networks and digital platforms. From climate denial to vaccine conspiracy theories to the January 6 attack on our nation’s Capital, the spread of online misinformation has had global and deadly consequences.”

It’s not only California that has a media literacy law. Texas, New Jersey, and Delaware have also passed this kind of legislation, and more than a dozen other states are moving in that direction. However, according to Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit research organization that advocates for media literacy in K-12 schools, California’s law falls short of its recommendations. The group explains that California’s approach doesn’t include funding to train teachers, an advisory committee, or any way to monitor the law’s effectiveness.

As noted by Berman, the rush toward media literacy is a priority because young adults are more likely to believe information from social media than traditional news outlets. While I am hardly a proponent of getting news from social media, is the mainstream media really any better?

The New York Times, aka the “newspaper of record,” may be, historically speaking, the worst, most deceitful media outlet in the country. Most notably, the Times and its writer, Walter Duranty, colluded to knowingly overlook the Stalin-led starvation of Ukraine in 1931. The newspaper also went all in for the great Duke University lacrosse team hoax of 2006, which centered around an alleged rape that never happened. Additionally, The Times also embraced the disgraced 1619 project in 2019. And in 2021, the newspaper referred to the blatantly satirical Babylon Bee as a “far-right misinformation site.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/23/public_educations_alarming_new_4th_r_reversal_of_learning_1006226.html

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.

It’s as if many of the nation’s 50 million public school students have fallen backwards to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.

“I’m getting concerned that, rather than continuing to do the hard work of addressing learning loss, schools will start to accept a new normal of lower standards,” said Amber Northern, who oversees research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that advocates for academic rigor in schools.

The question is—why did the windfall of federal funding do so little to help students catch up?

Northern and other researchers, state officials and school leaders interviewed for this article say many districts, facing staffing shortages and a spike in absenteeism, didn’t have the bandwidth to take on the hard work of helping students recover. But other districts, including those that don’t take academic rigor and test scores very seriously, share in the blame. They didn’t see learning loss as a top priority to tackle. It was easier to spend the money on pay rises for staff and upgrading buildings.

The learning loss debacle is the latest chapter in the decade-long decline in public schools. Achievement among black and Latino students on state tests was already dropping before COVID drove an exodus of families away from traditional public schools in search of a better education. Although by lowering standards and lifting the graduation rate districts have created the impression that they have bounced back, experts say that’s the wrong signal to send, creating complacency when urgency is needed.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/is-cornell-next-schools-wealthy-donors-call-for-presidents-ouster-13ab9c4d?mod=hp_lead_pos11

Wealthy alumni activists enraged at the leadership of their Ivy League alma maters have helped push out the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Now, a new group of donors are pulling out the same playbook at Cornell University.

Jon Lindseth, a Cornell alumnus, donor and former trustee, asked the school’s Board of Trustees to dismiss university President Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff for allegedly stifling open debate and rational argument. Alumni who support the call for the pair’s ouster also are upset about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the school as well as what they see as growing antisemitism on campus.

“Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” wrote Lindseth, 89 years old, a retired mechanical engineer and entrepreneur, in a five-page letter to the board’s chair.

Trustees for the university in upstate New York are scheduled to meet Friday. In Lindseth’s letter, he calls for the school to eliminate DEI staffing and programming and adopt principles of free inquiry and open debate.

The push is supported by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, a two-year-old group formed to support free expression and viewpoint diversity on campus. Some alumni members of the group who are also wealthy donors have indicated they would withhold donations if college administrators didn’t do a better job of protecting those ideals. Others want to see Pollack removed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-academic-bill-of-rights-to-restore-diversity-of-thought-on-college-campuses/

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were held accountable for the “rampant antisemitism” on their campuses. During the December congressional investigation of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, the sharp line of questioning by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik exposed the evil and moral rot on the campuses of these elite universities and ultimately two of the presidents resigned. Their pathetic answers on whether calling for “genocide of Jews” constituted bullying and harassment in their campus codes of conduct, exposed their utter lack of concern and arrogance, and it’s a good thing they were forced out.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The intellectual and moral rot on our college campuses is much more deep seated than college presidents or boards of directors. The faculty are the real villains. It’s the professors who destroyed higher education in America as a place of free thought and turned these institutions into centers of indoctrination. They are the ones who must be held accountable for suppressing free speech and diversity of opinion, in the pursuit of social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Twenty years ago, academic freedom was essentially sacrosanct. But not today. There’s no more respect for academic freedom. Today professors, mainly in Humanities and Social Sciences, have become radicalized and practice indoctrination in the classroom for political and social change. Their mission is to produce social justice warriors. Israel is now designated the settler-colonialist oppressor in the social justice playbook, and the Palestinians are the oppressed victims. In their playbook they must stand in solidarity with the oppressed and join the crusade to overthrow the oppressor, which is why antisemitism now is raging out-of-control on campus. We saw it in the antisemitic riot at Hillcrest High School where a student mob attacked a Jewish teacher who was seen on social media attending a pro-Israel rally. We saw it in the pro-Hamas protests blocking traffic and cursing Israel, where many of the protestors were college students and faculty. We see it in the rise of antisemitic incidents on college campuses where Jewish students worry about their personal safety. We see the erasure of Israel from Middle Eastern maps in the classroom. It’s not just Jewish students – it’s Republicans, it’s patriotic Americans, it’s anyone who becomes the target of leftist indoctrination.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inflated-grades-increasing-graduation-rates-and-deflated-test-scores/

“But when you are obsessed with equity, quality is an afterthought. We may be raising a nation of illiterates and innumerates, but they will all be equally brainless.At this time, the American Medical Association is embracing equity, and perhaps exams to enter the medical profession will soon cease to exist.God help us.”

Grade inflation is rampant and has been so for many years. Back in 2011, an in-depth study by three Ivy League economists looked at how the quality of individual teachers affects their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and, using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation, and higher adult earnings. The authors of the study define “value added” as the average test-score gain for a teacher’s students “…adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores.”

But to those who believe in equity über alles, quality is an afterthought, and many states are ditching any objective criteria for entry into the teaching field. In California, teachers traditionally have had to pass the ridiculously easy California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) to gain entry into the profession, but the test is now under fire.

Is it because the test is a snap and needs to become more rigorous? Hardly.

Christopher Davis, a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, claims that standardized testing causes “disproportionate harm to people of color.” In an equity-driven statement, John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates, agrees, saying, “CBEST is a barrier for educators of color,” and thinks the test should be eliminated.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/ruth-wisse/harvard-lawrence-summers-claudine-gay/

Forgive me for quoting myself, but there’s no other way to begin: “History rarely issues us a red alert. But the surrender by America’s premier university to its anti-intellectual assailants marked a point of no return. Responsibility was so equally distributed among the administration, Board of Governors, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the main players that I saw no way the damage could be repaired.”

This was my verdict on Harvard when I retired from the university a decade ago after having witnessed the ambush and dismissal in 2006 of Lawrence Summers, whose appointment as president five years earlier had given me hope that the decline I had tracked would now be reversed. From the moment Summers arrived, he showed bold leadership, addressing the main areas of my concern. But his every initiative also alerted his ideological opponents, who proved so skilled in cultural combat that they were able to damage him almost immediately and to bring him down in record time.

There was no inquiry at the time into the factions that mobilized against the president, leaving them free to further influence policy and squelch opposition. Now by curious inversion, we see that Claudine Gay, recently installed as 30th president of Harvard, has been upended by the very crisis in education Summers had tried to avert. Although opinion will vary over what led to Gay’s resignation, several of those controversies—over the university’s role in society, anti-Semitism, academic standards, and affirmative action or “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—were precisely the ones that were “weaponized” against Summers, but for opposite ends.

Currently, at least four groups from inside and outside the university—alumni, faculty, administration, and government—are looking into what has gone wrong at Harvard. While the aborted Gay presidency is but a symptom of that damage, and the resignation itself brings no necessary change, anyone hoping to understand what is at stake in higher education would do well to study the defenestration of Lawrence Summers. He has personally transcended that debacle, but Harvard has not.

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In submitting this testimony, let me clarify my role as participatory witness. Soon after I came to Harvard in 1993 as first occupant of the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, I was made director of the Center for Jewish Studies, which required my presence at faculty meetings I had seldom attended during my previous tenure.