RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Every era has its grifters, gurus, quacks, and frauds. This is an American tradition, from the snake oil salesmen to the pyramid-schemers to the New Age prophets of the twentieth century. One might be tempted to dismiss them as ethically compromised men, duping the gullible for personal benefit, but they’re something more than that: symbols of each generation’s hopes and anxieties.

The past decade’s examples, who sold us on critical race theory, transgender medicine, and other insanities, are no different. Some Americans wanted to absolve themselves of guilt about race and sexuality and liberate themselves from the shackles of history and biology. Prudent observers could have warned them about the impossibility of this enterprise, but the gurus had, for a time, seemingly unstoppable momentum.

The most significant was Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi. After the 2020 death of George Floyd, Kendi became America’s race guru, selling books, delivering speeches, lecturing corporations, advising politicians, and everywhere preaching the new gospel of “antiracism.” His key idea was that institutions must practice “antiracist discrimination” in favor of blacks and other minorities to make up for past “racist discrimination.” His ideology was rudimentary critical race theory, his agenda rudimentary DEI.

The press heralded Kendi as a genius, scholar, and the moral voice of the Black Lives Matter era. In 2021, the New York Times was particularly fawning, publishing uncritical fare like “Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime,” an article about his reading habits. “You’re at the forefront of a recent wave of authors combating racism through active, sustained antiracism,” the Times opined. “Do you count any books as comfort reads, or guilty pleasures?”

Kendi cashed in. The professor signed a lucrative Netflix contract and switched to designer clothes. He secured $55 million for his “Center on Antiracist Research” at Boston University, which promised to engage in scholarship and activism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-education-trump-reform-universities-funding

Universities occupy a uniquely privileged position in American life. They enjoy tremendous prestige and billions in public subsidies, even as their costs have exploded, saddling the country with $1.7 trillion in outstanding student debt.

Do universities deserve their status? A growing number of Americans don’t think so. Far from delivering on their promises, most universities have devolved into left-wing propaganda factories. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans say that universities have a negative effect on the country, and only one in three independents has “quite a lot” of trust in higher education institutions. The trendlines suggest that the disillusionment has yet to hit bottom.

This is a crisis—and an opportunity. The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform higher education. The president and his prospective education secretary, Linda McMahon, should seize it.

The starting point of any serious higher-education agenda should be to recognize many universities for what they are: ideological centers that have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for partisan activism. They have not earned their position as acclaimed credentialing institutions; rather, the schools have amassed their wealth and power from generous policy decisions bankrolled by American taxpayers, whom they have repaid mostly with contempt. These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse. Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.

But reform will not come easy. The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities, conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.

Here is how it can be done.

At the outset, we should acknowledge the dirty secret of higher education: it has become a creature, or, less charitably, a parasite, of the state. It is no stretch to say that the entire business model of higher education is fundamentally dependent on federal money.

First, consider direct grants. Universities collectively receive more than $50 billion in federal grants yearly. One-eighth of Havard’s annual budget—and two-thirds of its research funding—comes directly from the federal government. Likewise, Washington sends $900 million to Yale and $800 million to Columbia each year.

Some of this money goes to noble causes, such as cancer research. But much of it is devoted to ideological drivel, such as the $600,000 sent to Yale to study the “impacts of mobile technology on work, gender gaps, and norms”; $700,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to study how to allocate Covid vaccines on the basis of race; and $4 million to Cornell University to increase “minoritized” faculty in the medical sciences. And at some schools, administrators get the biggest cut, skimming up to 60 percent of grant funding as “indirect” overhead costs, which Congress once capped at a mere 8 percent.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/the-national-assessment-of-educational-regress/

The headlines last week told the sad story. The New York Times’ title read, “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” while The 74 proclaimed, The New NAEP Scores Are Alarming. Hope Is Not a Strategy for Fixing Them.” The Wall Street Journal announced, “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading, Test Scores Show.

The stories shared lowlights from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given periodically to the nation’s students. The results from the 2024 reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced last week and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

In 2019, 35% of 4th graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard, but that figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31% in 2024. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%. Some 33% of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the exam—a record low.

The news was especially bleak for our lowest-performing students, who are “reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Worsening reading skills have wide-ranging consequences. Poor test scores have been linked to the economic success of both the nation and individuals. Students with limited reading skills are less likely to graduate from high school, and as adults, they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark Education, a group dedicated to using the science of reading to promote literacy, asserts, “When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that students who fail to meet this bar are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”

It is worth noting that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on other tests—TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results—explains Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/balanced-literacy-lawsuit-teaching-reading
After decades of failure, the tide is turning in the battle over how American children are taught to read. School districts had long invested in methods that encouraged students to “guess” unknown words rather than break them down phonetically—a flawed strategy that left a generation of students struggling to read. Criticism of these methods has a long history. Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read advocated for phonics-based instruction, followed by Jeanne Chall’s The Great Debate and the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which emphasized the importance of phonics instruction and challenged other approaches. Despite these efforts, Balanced Literacy gained widespread traction. But since the 2022 investigative podcast series Sold a Story amplified how influential education publishers had promoted these unproven strategies as “research-backed,” half of U.S. states have passed literacy laws changing the way their schools teach reading. Now a lawsuit targets some of these strategies’ leading proponents—potentially forcing curriculum creators and publishers to answer for years of false advertising and failed instruction.

In December, two Massachusetts mothers filed a class-action against Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, their publishers, and the board of trustees of Columbia University’s Teachers College, accusing them of promoting “deceptive” and “defective” reading programs that failed their children. The plaintiffs argued that the curriculum was misrepresented in that it relied on discredited practices, and as a result, hindered their children’s ability to learn to read. The focus on curriculum marketing frames the issue as one of consumer protection rather than educational malpractice, potentially avoiding the legal complexities of the latter allegation. In a broader sense, the case highlights curriculum developers’ ethical and legal obligation to ensure their materials align with the evidence-based practices they claim to promote.

Each of the defendants played a pivotal role in transforming America’s approach to reading education. Calkins created the “Units of Study” curriculum, adopted in public school classrooms across the country. Fountas and Pinnell developed the Leveled Literacy Intervention, a small-group reading-instruction program. Both curricula used the three-cueing system, which encourages students to guess unknown words based on pictures, context, and first letters, rather than by decoding them phonetically. This “guessing” method, long discredited by cognitive scientists, was marketed as “research-backed,” without evidence.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in the so-called reading wars. In 2001, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which required federally funded schools to adopt Reading First, a phonics-based approach. NCLB, partially inspired by the 2000 National Reading Panel Report, mandated that students be taught to read using these scientifically grounded methods. Progressives and teachers’ unions, however, rejected Reading First. Instead, they promoted Balanced Literacy, which framed teacher-directed instruction as outdated and focused on a student-centered approach to reading.

Reading First was the superior approach. In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences conducted an impact study on Reading First that demonstrated that students schooled in the approach showed significant gains in the program’s goal areas: phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency. While the study found that the strategy had no impact on students’ reading comprehension, this was not among the initiative’s goals. Media coverage emphasized the reading-comprehension finding, however, ignoring Reading First’s positive effects on core competency areas. This misrepresentation of the data, combined with political pressure from teachers’ unions, a recession, and initiatives to grant local control over curricula led Congress to defund Reading First in 2009. In its place, many public school systems adopted Calkins’s Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention. Calkins’s ties to Columbia University Teachers College and support from teachers’ unions played a significant role in these curricula’s national adoption.

Fast forward to 2022, when the Sold a Story podcast exposed the failures of Balanced Literacy in public education to a national audience. The series revealed how curriculum developers Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell had marketed their flawed methods as “research-backed,” even as national proficiency from the NAEP 2022 reading assessments showed that only 32 percent of fourth-graders read at or above proficiency level. These failures resulted in the Massachusetts lawsuit, which demonstrates parents’ growing demands for accountability within the education system.

How will today’s children be taught to read? The answer to that question depends on parents and policymakers’ actions. Almost 25 years ago, President Bush blazed the path with Reading First, ensuring that every public-school student, regardless of background, was taught using proven, science-based methods. States should draw inspiration from Bush’s crusade by banning discredited teaching methods and empowering parents to challenge schools’ curriculum choices. Every child deserves access to a proven method for learning to read—not to guess.

Jennifer Weber has a Ph.D. in behavior analysis and is the cofounder and co-owner of KIT Consulting, where she specializes in behavior analysis and education. She is an adjunct professor at Teachers College Columbia University and Nicholls State University and a member of the Adam Smith Society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/mounting-disobedience-in-our-schools/

In a December Education Week poll, teachers and administrators disclose that student behavior is worsening. Since pre-pandemic 2019, “there’s been a pronounced spike in behavior problems, ranging from minor classroom disruptions to more serious student fights broadcast on social media.”

The survey results reveal that 72% of educators say that students in their classroom, school, or district have been misbehaving either “a little” (24%) or “a lot” (48%) more than in the fall of 2019, the last semester before the COVID-19 shutdowns began.

The problem in Los Angeles is particularly grim. In the 2023-2024 school year, the district’s School Experience Survey shows that just 58.5% of elementary students, 55.2% of middle school students, and 51.6% of high school students reported feeling safe in their schools—a significant drop from previous years. Their fears are justified as “fighting and physical aggression increased by 16.8% from the 2022-2023 school year to 2023-2024, while threats surged by 28.5%.”

Nevada is ineptly dealing with the issue by moving problem kids to another school, and a former paraprofessional is suing the Washoe County School District over claims that “the system shuffles dangerous students between schools without adequately alerting staff about their behavior and terminated him in retaliation.”

A North Carolina school district tried to improve discipline by implementing a policy for which it paid a non-profit over $800,000 to help it create. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools had fewer short and long-term suspensions for the school year and no expulsions, part of a broader shift toward “equitable discipline.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/01/woke-education-then-and-now/

Of all the Communist thinkers and advocates to have played a role in the reworking of Marx’s crackpot theories in the aftermath of World War I, perhaps none played a greater role yet has received less popular attention than György Lukács.

By all rights, World War I should have been the end of Marx and his utopian fantasy. The workers of the world refused to unite. They decided that they had a great deal more to lose than their chains. And contra Marx and Engels’ expectations, the workers went to war—happily, joyfully, willingly, for country, for family, and for GOD.

The working classes’ willing participation in the Great War essentially disproved Marx and thoroughly undermined his entire worldview. His conception of class consciousness and his belief in the inevitable Hegelian rise of the working class were shattered. But that was merely the prelude to the greater indignity, that which should have ended the Marxist fantasy forever.

The war itself was a deep and practically fatal wound to the Marxist weltanschauung, but the aftermath was perhaps even uglier and more painful for true believers. It was the salt that the Fates rubbed into that wound. For starters, only the backward and largely unindustrialized misfit nation on the continent’s eastern frontier could sustain a people’s “revolution.” And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, the heart of industrial Europe emerged from the war shattered and broken, not just physically but psychologically, emotionally, and most especially, spiritually. The new Europe was exhausted and scarred, increasingly frustrated with the old gods but far from enamored with the new ones. It rejected Marx openly, just as it rejected every theological ethos.

Unfortunately, Marx’s few remaining fans in Europe did not give up so easily, and they spent the next several years rehabilitating his image by revising his predictions and explaining away his failures. In Italy, Antonio Gramsci outlined the need for a “cultural revolution,” one in which anti-Christian Marxists would make what the German Marxist student leader Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.” In Hungary, Lukács re-interpreted Marx’s notions of reification (a special case of alienation) and commodity fetishism (a special case of reification) and, in so doing, developed, in much greater detail, the idea that man’s consciousness is dissociated at a fundamental level from society. In Germany, Felix Weil funded the think tank that would become the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Research at Goethe University Frankfurt), which would, under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, become the spark for Cultural Marxism.

https://tomklingenstein.com/we-need-a-reckoning-on-the-1619-project/

The New York Times launched its torpedo at American history on August 18, 2019. I speak, of course, of “The 1619 Project,” which first emerged as a special edition of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. In the ensuing five years and five months, the 1619 Project outgrew its original 100 pages of newsprint. It became a somber 50 second television commercial on February 9, 2020, that aired during the Academy Awards and featured the singer, song-writer, and actress Janelle Monáe. In 2021, it ballooned into a 590-page hardback book, supertitled “A New Origin Story.” In 2023, Hulu turned it into a six-part “docu-series” with Oprah Winfrey as executive producer.  

During those five-plus years, the New York Times ran thousands of print advertisements for the “project.” It substantively revised the magazine text without any public acknowledgment, which means unless you saved the original copy, you can’t know exactly what it said. 

One thing it said, on the inside back cover, was that the 1619 Project was on its way to the nation’s schools as a curriculum, including “a lesson plan that introduces this issue [of the magazine], summaries of the articles, an index of historical terms used, suggested activities that engage students creatively and intellectually and opportunities to connect with New York Times journalists featured in this issue.” 

That declaration came from the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit founded in 2006 that attempts to amplify journalism that it judges to have broad public importance. It describes itself as “the venue for the world’s most innovative and consequential reporting, with journalism as the key element for mobilizing society through audience engagement strategies.” In other words, the Pulitzer Center is an activist organization that eschews the old journalistic ideal of providing the information people need to decide for themselves. It instead seeks to “mobilize” the public. And, as it happens, the reporting it selects for this mobilization is entirely of a progressive character.

Before the New York Times unleashed the 1619 Project, it entered into an agreement with the Pulitzer Center, in which the center became the Times’ “educational partner” for the project.  The center assumed the task of translating the 1619 Project into “programs for K-12 Classrooms, out-of-school time programs, and higher education programs.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/enough-is-enough/

The campus experience at Columbia University over the last week is illustrative of the hell to which America’s students have been consigned since the October 7 massacre.

As students embarked on the spring semester last week, a “band of masked keffiyeh-clad students” intruded on a course on modern Israeli history where they threw “flyers featuring a smashed Star of David underneath a boot, a burning Israeli flag, and weapon-carrying militants at students,” Fox News reported. The vandals continued to distribute literature insisting that “the enemy will not see tomorrow” and announcing their intention to “burn Zionism to the ground,” until this week, when they resorted to insurrection. “We cemented the sewage lines of the entire building,” the Columbia branch of Students for Justice in Palestine announced, “forcing them to shut down business-as-usual.”

It’s almost as if Columbia’s administrators learned no lessons from their efforts to appease the violent professional demonstrators who took over their campus last year when they threatened and harassed Jews, did violence to their campus, and forced the administration to reluctantly sic the NYPD on them.

The same could be said of colleges across the country. Despite the humiliation Republicans duly meted out to a few Ivy League presidents for their conspicuous tolerance of antisemitism, this menace still plagues colleges across the country. The onset of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has had no effect on this tempo of antisocial activism, revealing once and for all that the unrest is fueled not by the war Hamas started but by the existence of the Jewish state.

Something must be done to force American colleges to do their jobs — elementary stuff, such as protecting from physical injury and stultifying intimidation the students who pay exorbitant sums to be there. “This failure is unacceptable,” an executive order promulgated by the president last night read, “and ends today.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/31/test-scores-take-another-dive-will-anyone-be-held-accountable/

Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.

Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”

Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.

Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.

Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.

“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”

“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.

“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.

This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-public-schools-spending-students-ranking

For 18 years, up to and including Governor Kathy Hochul’s most recent proposal, the budget messages of New York’s last three governors have proudly noted that the state leads all others in school-district spending. What they omit is that, over that period, New York has remained in the middle of the pack on the National Assessments of Educational Progress. A recent report from the centrist Citizens’ Budget Commission, amplifying trends that I observed in 2022, presents a sobering picture of Albany’s failed policies.

The CBC observes that New York fourth-graders rank 32nd and 46th, respectively, on reading and math NAEP exams nationwide. Eighth-graders are 9th and 22nd, respectively. The state “now spends $36,293 per student, a 21 percent increase since the 2020-21 school year,” the report observes. “Given these middling results and the $89 billion New York School districts will spend this year—with $39 billion coming from the State budget—it is disappointing that education policy reform efforts have not focused on examining and rectifying New York’s unsatisfactory performance.” Instead, the education debate has “mostly centered on increasing State school aid even more and modestly shifting how dollars are allocated.”

New York’s political leaders continue to pump money into our public schools without regard for efficiency or effectiveness. If California has shown us how to fail at fire prevention, New York is the nation’s paragon of failing at educational improvement.

New York’s families have noticed. Enrollment in the state’s public school districts for grades K–12 fell by more than 320,000 students between 2014 and 2024. The drop-off is even worse in the earlier grades, with K-to-8 enrollment down 17 percent over the decade. Some of the decline is offset by enrollment growth in public charter schools, which grew by nearly 90,000 students in the same years. Yet the state legislature has capped charter school growth in New York City, home to almost 80 percent of the state’s charter school enrollment—even though charters receive less public funding than district schools, while their students score higher on state tests.