RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kipp-study-college-graduation-enrollment-mathematica-charter-schools-5f22e610?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

From pandemic learning loss to racial achievement gaps, many U.S. education ailments can be addressed by schools outside the traditional, union-dominated system. More evidence comes from a new report showing that the largest charter school network in the country helps students get into college, and then to get a degree.

Students who attended schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) for both middle and high school were 18.9 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college five years after finishing high school than students who didn’t attend KIPP, according to a Mathematica study published last week.

“An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap for Hispanic students or entirely close the degree-completion gap for Black students in the United States,” the authors write.

The study compared students who enrolled in more than a dozen KIPP schools in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with similar students who had applied for the charter schools but weren’t selected in KIPP’s lottery admission system.

KIPP students were also more likely to enroll in college—and stick with it—than non-KIPP peers. Seventy-seven percent of KIPP students enrolled in a four-year college compared to 46% of non-KIPP students. Forty-one percent of KIPP students stayed in college through the first six semesters compared to 22% of non-KIPP students.

“These findings may be driven by the college preparatory culture at network high schools,” the report notes. “KIPP provides access to rigorous, college preparatory coursework (including Advanced Placement courses), as well as counseling and other college and career-related supports.”

KIPP students also tend to do better on standardized tests. The nearly 30-year-old network enrolls roughly 120,000 students across 280 schools, and most are low-income and black or Hispanic. The best way to help disadvantaged kids is by giving them the choice of schools that provide a quality education and practical guidance for college and career.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/californias-war-on-parents

A promising revolt has begun in California. Seven school districts there have recently passed parental-notification policies. And not a moment too soon. As many parents are discovering, the local school board is the one place where they can effect positive change in their children’s public schools—if, that is, the state doesn’t find a way to stop them.

Notification policies require that school officials inform parents in a timely fashion about certain occurrences in their children’s lives. These typically include a child bullying someone or being bullied, giving evidence of suicidal ideation, or identifying with a nonbiological gender. It is this last point upon which a storm of reaction has ensued by state officials. In July, during policy deliberations by the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD), the first of the seven districts to pass such measures, Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent of schools, made a personal appearance to warn the board against its passage. Fortunately, and under the leadership of board president Sonja Shaw, the board passed the policy by a vote of four to one. A month later, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an action against CVUSD in Superior Court for declaratory and injunctive relief. Additional lawsuits are all but certain. In the meantime, vitriol and death threats have been leveled against an embattled school board member for exercising what was once regarded as common sense.

What’s behind California’s hostility to parents being apprised of their children’s gender identity? It stems from two central presumptions.

The first is that nonbinary gender identification is an essential good that must be encouraged. As stated on California’s Department of Education’s Health website, “gender and sexuality are a continuum, they are often fluid, and they do not fit neatly into categories.” This belief is official state orthodoxy with roots that go back more than 20 years—much further than most people realize.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/20/west-point-sued-over-race-based-admissions-process/

On Tuesday, an anti-affirmative action group filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point over its race-based admissions process in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning such practices.

As reported by Axios, the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Students for Fair Admissions (SFA), the same advocacy group that ultimately ended affirmative action through two cases it had filed before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. In both cases, SFA successfully argued that affirmative action unfairly benefits black and Hispanic students, while disproportionately discriminating against White and Asian students.

Although the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action – the practice of admitting students based on their race rather than their qualifications – was an unconstitutional practice, the court did allow an exception for military academies such as West Point. The lawsuit by SFA declares that military academies should also have to adhere to the same standard as public and private universities.

“West Point sets benchmarks for the percentage of each class that should be filled by ‘African Americans,’ ‘Hispanics,’ and ‘Asians,’ and it meticulously tracks its compliance with those figures,” the lawsuit states. “These racial benchmarks vary by year, based on the ever-shifting demographics of the enlisted ranks.”

In the Supreme Court’s decision in June, the 6-justice majority specifically noted the “potentially distinct interests” that military academies might have in maintaining a level of racial diversity, and thus allowed such schools to be exempt from the ruling. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to denounce this exemption, saying that “the Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”

In either case, the outcome of SFA’s new lawsuit could also apply to other prestigious military academies in the United States, including the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/1539869/

Just weeks before the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admission policies in late June, an influential professional body known as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) was busy reassuring its members that medical schools across the country would remain committed to diversity, regardless of the case’s outcome.

The organization’s president, Thomas Nasca, released a note to the “Medical Education Community,” explaining that existing ACGME requirements ensuring medical schools “engage in ongoing, mission-driven, systematic recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive workforce,” still stood. Nasca explained that “nothing in the ACGME’s standards is intended to require programs or institutions to violate the law.”

“While political and legal decisions may create uncertainty regarding the ‘how’ we accomplish our responsibility, there is no doubt about the ‘why,’” he signed off the June 13 public letter.

Exactly how ACGME can maintain its efforts to promote diversity without running afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision is unclear. Diversity efforts are now baked into all aspects of medical-school evaluation, according to a family-medicine professor at a prominent medical school who asked not to be identified for fear of professional reprisal.

“The new definition of what it means to be a family physician includes that they advocate for social justice.” Specifically, ACGME could ask prospective medical schools what “your program is doing to advance social justice.”

Do No Harm, a group of medical professionals seeking to remove “radical, divisive, and discriminatory” ideologies from health care, issued a report in August 2022 calling attention to the ways in which medical schools are trying to get around federal anti-discrimination law. One commonly used tactic involves application essays aimed at teasing out ideological commitments and possibly even the race of the applicant.

Duke University’s School of Medicine, ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, underscores to applicants the institution’s “commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.” Application essays feature questions such as: “Describe your understanding of race and its relationship to inequities in health and health care.”

https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/13/academic-whose-work-was-cited-as-proof-of-systemic-racism-is-fired-for-falsifying-research/

‘The narrative of police genocide of African Americans turned out … to be complete nonsense,’ said Wilfred Reilly.

A Florida State University professor whose work was foundational to perpetuating the false narrative that there is widespread “systemic racism” infecting American society has been fired for falsifying data in his academic research on the subject.

In a recently resurfaced report from last month, the New York Post revealed that Eric Stewart, an FSU criminology professor, had been fired by the university “on account of ‘extreme negligence’ in his research,” as well as “incompetence” and producing “false results” in his nearly 20 years of work.

“I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy,” FSU Provost James Clark wrote in a July 13 letter formally notifying Stewart of his firing.

According to the Post, Stewart has had six studies published in major academic journals between 2003 and 2019 that were “fully retracted,” including a 2019 study claiming the historical legacy of lynchings “made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives.”

https://quillette.com/2023/09/14/history-matters/

“Rediscovering our history of achievement and seeking to improve upon it are critical if that history is to inform new generations, just as it did in Italy nearly a millennium ago. Recovering and embracing the past in all its complexity is our special gift to posterity.”

History has moved to the front line of social conflict, but rarely has it been so poorly understood and sketchily taught. After decades of declining interest, only 13 percent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject today. The New York Times reports that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” This phenomenon can be seen across the West. The study of and interest in the past, noted the Economist in 2019, has largely disappeared in the UK. Study of the 19th century, meanwhile, seems to be vanishing from European classrooms. “We are in danger of mass amnesia, being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history,” noted the late Jane Jacobs in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead. When I show my students a picture of Lenin, barely one-in-ten of them recognize it.

Universities should be beacons of dispassionate learning, so it is particularly unfortunate that they have also been increasingly complicit in obliterating much that is valuable to historical instruction and understanding. In a 2013 article for the Guardian, Ashley Thorne lamented that university curricula were largely ignoring the literary classics. At many US colleges, Thorne noted, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students. This breaks a vital link with the past that allows students to identify with their ancestors as part of an ongoing human story, rather than simply dismissing their thoughts and actions as alien, unintelligible, or even intrinsically evil.

The problem is further exacerbated by the much-discussed decline in academic viewpoint diversity, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. The history profession was once famously disputatious, but over the last generation or so, a diminishing number of conservative or even centrist historians has produced monocultural groupthink. A national survey of faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, conducted in 2005, found that liberals were already seven times more numerous across history departments than conservatives. Without the cut-and-thrust of lively historical debate, history risks becoming an ideological discipline, as was the case in the Soviet Union or China today, taught by rote and incapable of generating excitement and interest.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ranking-colleges-by-free-speech-commitment

It’s September, students and teachers are returning to classes, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), in partnership with the survey research and analytics company College Pulse, has released its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. The statistics are as disheartening as ever. Of the 248 colleges and universities surveyed (plus six “warning colleges”)—up from 55 in 2020 and 203 (plus five) last year—only four are ranked “Good”: Michigan Technological University, Auburn, the University of New Hampshire, and Oregon State.

These rankings are “based on a composite score of 13 components, six of which assess student perceptions of different aspects of the speech climate on their campus” and the “other seven assess[ing] behavior by administrators, faculty, and students regarding free expression on campus.” For example, students were asked to say how easy or hard it is to have open and honest conversations about such issues as abortion, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. As for administrators, FIRE devised a set of metrics that penalizes an institution for sanctioning its scholars while rewarding it for supporting scholars, students, or student groups involved in a free-speech controversy.

Even at the five institutions that FIRE rates most highly (the four ranked “Good” plus Florida State), an awful lot of students find outrageous conduct acceptable: only 45 percent of students say that it is “never acceptable” to shout down a speaker on campus, only 54 percent say this about blocking other students from attending a campus speech, and only 79 percent say this about using violence to stop such a speech. You can probably imagine the situation at the bottom five institutions: Fordham (the lowest of the sixteen that FIRE ranks as “Poor”); Georgetown, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Pennsylvania (all “Very Poor”); and Harvard (“Abysmal”). But in case you don’t want to imagine, here are the statistics: 27 percent say it’s “never acceptable” to shout down a speaker, 46 percent say this about blocking other students, and 68 percent say this about using violence.

Let’s talk about Harvard. The nation’s oldest and most prestigious university was given a score of zero out of 99. To put this in context, Michigan Technological University scored 78.01, while the second-worst institution for free speech, Penn, scored 11.13. And even that does not describe just how abysmal Harvard is these days. To quote from the report: “0.00 is generous” since Harvard’s “actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below” Penn’s.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/12/senator-kennedy-reads-from-gender-queer-during-judiciary-committee-hearing/

Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) read excerpts from the pornographic children’s books “Genderqueer” and “All Boys aren’t Blue” during a Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday, prompting a Democrat witness who opposes “book bans” to admit that the words were “disturbing.”

Democrats decried the banning of such books during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to examine “How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature.” The Democrats’ three witnesses included Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who crafted legislation in his state to outlaw book bans on pornographic books for children, and Cameron Samuels, a 17-year-old student activist who uses “gender neutral pronouns they/them” and compared those who oppose pornographic books in schools to “the secret police in Germany.”

In his opening statement, Giannoulias declared that “libraries have become targets by a movement that disingenuously claims to pursue freedom, but is instead promoting authoritarianism.” Characterizing  objections to the contested LGBTQ children’s books “these radical attacks on our libraries,” the Illinois Sec. of State claimed that the nation’s librarians have been “harassed, threatened and intimidated simply for doing their jobs.”

Republican witness Max Eden Research, a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that the books in question haven’t actually been “banned,” despite their inappropriate content. “We are talking about books with passages about fisting, butt plugs and rape,” he pointed out.

“Take the previously mentioned Gender Queer,” Eden continued.

That graphic novel famously includes a picture of a strap on dildo blowjob. Is this okay for kids? Some think it is. Some think it isn’t. You know something weird is going on, though, when parents try to read passages of these books at school board meetings, and the school board cuts them off because they insist that the material is too obscene to be read out loud. I guess kids could be listening? Great for them to read, but unacceptable to for them to hear? That’s the principle?

“Genderqueer” and “All Boys aren’t Blue” are consistently two of the most challenged books in school libraries across America—and for good reason.

Quoting from “All Boys are Blue,” Kennedy read:  “I put some lube on and got him on his knees and I began to slide into him from behind. I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated. He asked me to turn over while he slipped a condom on himself. This was my ass! And I was struggling to imagine someone inside of me. he got on top and slowly inserted himself into me. It was the worst pain I think I ever felt in my life. Eventually, I felt a mix of pleasure with the pain.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/13/colleges-flunk-out/

The woes plaguing our government-run K-12 schools now show themselves on the college level. Classes, many of which are useless and often come with a far-left slant, have led to sinking confidence in our formerly esteemed universities.

A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll reveals that most Americans don’t feel a college degree is worth the cost. The survey finds that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is not worth the time and money involved, compared with just 42% who retain faith in the institution.

Most importantly, the strongest skepticism is found in men and women between ages 18 and 34 and people with college degrees. Their opinions have soured the most, which portends a major shift for higher education in the coming years.

College enrollment had risen for decades, peaking at 70.1% in 2009, but then it began to ebb. Between 2019 and 2022, there was an 8% decline, according to the Associated Press. “The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, especially for men.”

Also, a YPulse survey asserts that 55% of current Gen Z undergraduate students and 38% of Gen Z graduate students found their classes not relevant to their lives — in part “because college doesn’t teach practical skills…” 

Similarly, a Gallup poll released in July finds that “Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior surveys in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).

In addition to their classes not being relevant to their lives, colleges are failing because of their blatant political bias. If you are right of center or apolitical, going to college can be a very disturbing experience. The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that more than half of students (56%) “expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done, and just over a quarter of students (26%) reported that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. Twenty percent reported that they often self-censor.”