RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/08/28/how-do-you-spell-mississippi/

Students here long had some of the lowest reading scores in the country — but over the past decade, something changed.

The Magnolia State’s revolution in reading instruction

Columbus, Miss. — The boy’s word is “lap.”

“Let’s sound it out with our finger spelling,” says his summer-camp counselor, counting the sounds with him on three digits: “lll . . . aaa . . . p.”

The boy, who just finished first grade and speaks in a whisper, begins finding letters on Scrabble-like tiles. Consonants are on blue tiles, vowels on yellow ones. He pulls out the blue “l” and then the yellow “a.” Struggling to finish the word, he chooses a third tile, a blue “b.” Not quite right.

Remember, “balloons go up and pigs go down,” the female counselor says, noting the different shapes of a “b” and “p.”

After his one-on-one, the boy joins the other campers on the lawn outside, where teams of kids in matching baby-blue camp shirts are competing in a relay race, with one kid passing a balloon over her head, the next passing it between his legs, and so on until the balloon reaches the end of the line. The last kid excitedly stomps on the balloon, popping it, and then reads the message on the slip of paper inside — “I can see the dolphin in the ocean” — before running to the front of the line and passing the next balloon over his head.

The scene on the lawn looks like any other summer camp around the country. But while fun and games are an important part of the experience, the 20 or so kids at “Camp LIT,” a program of the Mississippi University for Women, are here in late June for a more important reason: to become better readers.

During the one-week camp — a first for the university’s department of speech-language pathology — students between the ages of six and twelve are each paired with a graduate student trained in the Orton-Gillingham method of reading. This involves one-on-one therapy to work on phonic building blocks of reading: letters and sounds, digraphs and blends. Every component of the camp, even arts and crafts, has a literacy element.

“These are typical kids,” says Ashley Alexander, the clinical director of the department. “It’s just reading that is a struggle for them.”

It is this intense focus on what is known as the “science of reading” that has brought so much positive attention to the Magnolia State in recent years.

For decades, Mississippi has trailed the national pack in a variety of critical measures; the state has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation, its infrastructure is lacking, and its health-care system is consistently ranked among the nation’s worst.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-weapons-of-math-destruction-learning-k-12-education-curriculum-students-teachers-instructions-policy-d6f18070?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/student_debating_once_a_bastion_of_logic_has_been_invaded_from_the_left.html

During my 48 years teaching at Towson University, all my classes involved informal or formal debating: the quintessential activity of academic classes outside and sometimes including the sciences and arts. Sadly, like everything else in academia, debating has succumbed to leftist ideology.

I love debate for its focus on credibility and evidence. It should be teaching the up-and-coming generation of thinkers. However, as James Fishback has noted, judges’ political preferences have come to dominate high school debate.

Under its major sponsor, the National Speech & Debate Association’s website, judges post “paradigms.” The purpose of paradigm alerts is to let debaters know in full disclosure judges’ stylistic biases, say, if they are put off by overly rapid speaking or if they approve of debaters’ apprising their audiences of the relative importance of specific arguments.

But in the last few years, Fishback explains, “Judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common…[at] national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.” In general, Fishback argues, high school debate has been degraded “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say….” One of several examples Fishback provides is a debate judge under whose list of “Things That Will Cause You to Automatically Lose” is ‘Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

I can attest that the same is true in collegiate debate, the last place in education I would have expected political bias to interfere with education.

Several colleagues, including one who has both designed debate camps and programs and served as a tournament judge and another who is a major administrator in the National Communication Administration, tell me that, among debate coaches and judges, coaches and judges throw around their biases as a sign of virtue. This is a disheartening and dispiriting sign that we’re seeing the end of the unbiased marketplace of ideas and academic freedom. Worse, this is happening in an activity that, by definition, should be resistant to politically approved outcomes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/floridas-education-triumph-woke-schooling-teachers-unions-dues-textbooks-students-afc26028?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization to impart contextual literacy rather than abstract, content-free reading strategies. This change will have positive effects in teacher training: If familiarity with the Western canon becomes a prerequisite for teaching, education schools will have to emphasize traditional learning.

The Florida Education Association, the state’s biggest union, opposes the new standards for not teaching students “uncomfortable truths” about racism. Anticipating the push-back, Mr. DeSantis sought to gain teachers’ confidence in his reforms by distinguishing between them and their union. His administration has fully implemented paycheck protection, requiring written consent from employees before union dues are deducted from their paychecks, and he has granted teachers unprecedented pay increases—salaries statewide now average about $50,000—to win support. Only 22 of the 67 countywide teacher unions won the 60% approval necessary to gain federal certification in 2023. The number of teacher-union members in Florida decreased by at least 4,500 through 2020-21, the fourth-highest loss in the nation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-harvard-use-application-essays-to-discriminate-by-race-unc-fair-admission-5638086f?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

When the Supreme Court struck down the University of North Carolina’s affirmative-action program in June, the trustees of its flagship Chapel Hill campus were quick to respond.

Embracing the letter and spirit of the law, the board passed a nondiscrimination resolution in July that applies not only to admissions but to hiring and contracting as well. The resolution goes beyond race to prohibit discrimination based on “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, genetic information, or veteran status.”

UNC’s trustees were already trying to move the institution in this direction before the decision. Board member Marty Kotis began advocating a resolution forbidding discrimination in hiring and contracting in 2021. After the Supreme Court ruling, an overwhelming majority of the full board approved a more comprehensive version.

The resolution includes language from Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion to specify that “the University shall not ‘establish through application essays or other means’ any regime of or encourage heuristics and/or proxies premised upon race-based preferences in hiring or admissions. If the University considers the personal experience of applicants for admission, each applicant ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.’ ”

“This is a moment of humility,” said the board’s vice chairman, John Preyer. “For nine years, we’ve spent in the neighborhood of $35 million to lose a high-profile case. Why did we do that? Was that the right thing to do?”

Meanwhile, Harvard, UNC’s co-litigant, has looked for ways to keep discriminating, and so have many other institutions. They focus on one sentence of the court’s ruling: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

Harvard responded to the decision by citing this line in isolation, suggesting it would treat it as a loophole. The university said it would comply with the law but reaffirmed its commitment to diversity, commenting, “we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.”

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-arc-of-reform?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

 The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/conservative-donors-wake-up

The Supreme Court struck a symbolic blow to Harvard University this June by declaring its racial admissions preferences illegal. It remains to be seen what stratagems Harvard will use to try to continue engineering racial diversity. One thing is certain, however: the university will pay no price in reputation or in philanthropic support for the Court’s rebuke.

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history. Griffin’s cumulative giving to the school now totals over $500 million, spread between the education, law, and business schools, as well as other entities. In exchange for this latest gift, Harvard renamed its graduate division the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Business as usual, you may think; another billionaire plowing treasure into an institution whose values are, at best, in tension with American traditions and, at worst, antithetical to them. But Griffin is not your usual high-value donor—not a George Soros, Bill Gates, or David Geffen, say. He is a conservative.

Griffin believes that the United States still offers the American dream—opportunity, free markets, and individual freedom. He has called the U.S. Constitution a “sacred document.” (In 2021, he purchased an original copy for $43 million, to make that founding text widely available for “all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate.”) Griffin supports law enforcement. He opposes identity politics.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/brave_university_of_chicago_student_speaks_out_against_the_leftist_war_on_whites.html

An anti-white racial inquisition is poisoning America.  If you don’t believe it, read my new book, The War on Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport.  The inquisition received support from the prestigious University of Chicago when it decided to offer a new course entitled “The Problem of Whiteness.”  This is not surprising when you realize that the left has taken complete charge of academia and can get away with overt anti-white racism.

By a margin of more than ten to one, left-leaning professors outnumber conservatives at our colleges and universities.  New professors are required to sign a diversity pledge, a ruse that guarantees leftist control on campus well into the future.  A friend of mine who is a professor at a prominent university told me that he is forced to keep his conservative views to himself or risk being ostracized by his peers.

Ironically, campus commitment to diversity excludes the all-important diversity of ideas.  “They are openly hostile to mainstream conservative values,” said Rita Panahi at SkyNewsAustralia.  If you are a conservative student in America, you’d better keep your mouth shut.

One brave student at U-Chicago refused to keep his mouth shut.  Sophomore Daniel Schmidt called out “The Problem of Whiteness” for what it is.  “This is clearly racist and anti-white,” said Schmidt.  “What the heck is that suggesting, that there is a problem with white people or whiteness and there is a solution?  It is the most egregious example of anti-white hatred I’ve ever seen.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/welcome-to-trans-kindergarten/

School districts across California are on a recruitment spree, doing what they can to enroll the state’s 4-year-olds into their year-old pre-K or “transitional kindergarten” (TK) program. Districts are trying to sell parents on TK by using school banners, bus bench ads, billboards, and texting and robocall campaigns. The $2.7 billion plan aims to have 400,000 4-year-olds enrolled by 2025, but it has been off to a sluggish start. Estimates from the Legislative Analyst’s Office put average daily attendance for the 2022-2023 school year at about 91,000, well short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s estimates.

The idea of having the government in charge of educating 4-year-olds has been promoted for years. Most recently, in his State of the Union speech in February, Joe Biden asserted that “children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree.”

Right before he became governor in 2019, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told supporters in San Francisco, “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.”

President Obama touted the preschool idea in his 2014 State of the Union address, claiming research has shown that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is “high-quality early education.”

The National Education Association extols the virtues of TK on its website, claiming that children in early childhood education programs are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to be identified as having special needs, more prepared academically for later grades, more likely to graduate from high school, and be higher earners in the workforce.

But all the rah-rah talk falls apart when the data are examined.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/where_woke_math_goes_to_die.html

The Mathematical Association of America, founded in 1915 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is one of the most prominent math societies in the country. The MAA focuses on math education and research at the undergraduate level and higher, and its math journals are among the most highly circulated in the world. Unfortunately, the MAA has gone woke. Its publications and blogs have been flooded with writings supporting BLM, CRT, DEI, and LGBTQ+.

As an example of the latter, in an article on pages 34-35 of the December 2020- January 2021 issue of its newsletter, MAA FOCUS, the author, who describes herself as bisexual, quotes another professor discussing intersectionality who finds it objectionable that the set theory section of a basic textbook on finite mathematics contains the following example:

Let M = males, F = females, D = doctors. What is D ∩ Fc [that is, D intersect the complement of F]?

The answer, of course, is male doctors. But the professor feels “this question is problematic in that it alienates students in my class who feel strongly against the binary in gender identification.”

The MAA’s annual meeting, MathFest, takes place this week, August 2-5, in Tampa. As evidenced by a letter from the MAA, there has been a lot of handwringing about holding the meeting in Florida:

Dear MAA Community,

We know that the location of MAA MathFest this year is a source of concern in our community. Supporters of Gov. DeSantis in the state legislature have passed laws eliminating DEI efforts and restricting the free exchange of ideas in educational settings, limiting the rights of historically marginalized groups to protest, and restricting the choices of women and non-gender conforming individuals’ freedom to make deeply personal decisions regarding healthcare and even restroom use. However, Florida is not homogeneous, and the Tampa community does not reflect the perspectives expressed in these laws.