RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-debates

One month ago, James Fishback, a former debate champion, wrote a piece for us exposing how high school debate has been hijacked by political and ideological judges. The article went viral. Politicians on both sides of the aisle tweeted their shock at Fishback’s findings. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz invited him to meet with them to discuss the problem.

Most importantly, more than a hundred coaches, debate parents, and debaters (both current and former) reached out to Fishback to share their own experiences, confirming that in high school debate, debate is no longer allowed. That number included people from inside the National Speech & Debate Association, the key institution Fishback investigated, who told him he didn’t know the half of it.

So we asked Fishback to dig deeper. Here’s what he found. — BW

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

This has fundamentally changed the culture of high school debate—or so scores of students are telling me. One of them is former high school debater Matthew Adelstein, a rising sophomore studying philosophy at the University of Michigan, who was a member of the NSDA in high school.

Adelstein told me that, in April 2022, he competed at the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Lexington, Kentucky, where he debated in favor of the federal government increasing its protection of water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-after-the-end-of-affirmative

When he was growing up outside San Francisco in the seventies and eighties, David Malcolm Carson almost never thought about race or affirmative action.

Carson’s mother is Jewish; his father, black. His friends were a racial and ethnic smorgasbord.

In high school he started to cast about for an identity, and became more aware of his blackness.

“I began to understand that in societal terms I would be considered ‘black,’ that America had had a ‘one-drop rule’ for centuries,” Carson told me.

He read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X, and matriculated at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. He stopped going by David, and started going by Malcolm: “Part of it was that it referenced Malcolm X and all that he represented, part of it was just wanting to declare some independence.” He got into “old-school hip-hop, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul.” He wrote his senior thesis on the FBI’s counterintelligence program targeting the Black Panthers.

After college, Carson applied to Stanford Law School and got in. At the end of his second year, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, because he wanted to do a joint degree in city planning. Berkeley said yes.

“It’s likely that I benefited from affirmative action in applying to Stanford and Berkeley,” Carson said, but he noted that he had straight As at Howard and that, when he took the LSAT, he was in the top 1 percent. At a time of growing skepticism around race-based admissions—President Bill Clinton called to “mend, not end” the policy—Carson demonstrated in defense of it. He also joined the staff of the Black Law Journal.

But in 1995, policy at the University of California—the biggest public university system in the country—changed when the Board of Regents barred race-based admissions on its nine campuses.

In response, Boalt convened an Admissions Policy Task Force, and Carson was invited to take part. Berkeley, like many universities, had embraced diversity, and it wasn’t about to give that up.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/government_schools_trans_policies_arent_keeping_children_safe.html

In the week of June 12, 2023, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) published a document titled “Creating a Safe, Supportive, and Affirming School Environment for Transgender and Gender Expansive Students.”   The document instructs teachers that if the student doesn’t want their parents to know that they are transitioning they should hide the information from them.  The document gives a hypothetical example of a student with the legal name Kevin coming out as a transgender girl who asks teachers to call him Kimi but who wants teachers to still call “her” Kevin when talking to “her” parents.  Teachers are instructed to do what Kevin wants in order to keep Kevin safe.

The authors of the document explain:

The paramount consideration in those situations is protecting the health and safety of the student, assuring that the student’s gender identity is affirmed and that their privacy and confidentiality are safely maintained.

The assumption the NYSED is making is that affirming students’ belief that they have a different gender identity than their biological sex, makes them safe and that parents who disagree with such students are heteronormative oppressors who make those students unsafe.

The NYSED document also says that to satisfy the requirements of Education Law §801-A that requires that students receive instruction in civility and respect for others:

…schools will want to consider adding inclusive curricula; for example, teaching about and reading books by authors of diverse identities and including a multicultural representation of images, decorations, and artwork around their classrooms.  If offered, sexual health curriculum must be inclusive of all identities. There are opportunities and avenues for diverse identities to be included in every academic discipline.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/real-problem-facing-black-kids-told-believe

The bestselling young adult book “Dear Martin,” previously required reading in Haywood County N.C., opens with a scene where a half-Latino half-White police officer obviously hearkening to George Zimmerman accosts a young Black boy named Justyce. The police officer is portrayed as a menace and Justyce is portrayed as an innocent victim of his rage and racism.  

The bestselling young adult book throws nearly every single racial incident, act of violence, and biased insubordination at the poor boy. The entire book is about one thing and one thing only: race; specifically, how America is still a racist country to Black kids. 

Yet this book was named the William C. Morris Book Award winner for best Young Adult literature. At one School Board meeting in Haywood County, a father gets up and explains that this book isn’t suitable for children, citing the numerous expletives and artless details of the protagonist’s girlfriend. That didn’t stop the local paper and parents from questioning whether the father was really a racist. 

The father should push back on the viability of the themes of racial abuse, even if he risks being canceled for it. Think about the intensity of a book like “Dear Martin” and how it would affect young, impressionable minority children.  

In effect, the book trains Black kids to fear White people. A police officer shoots Justyce’s Black friend. A White smart aleck verbally bullies Justyce. Justyce’s own mother warns against dating White women.  

It may be true that books like “Dear Martin” simply reflect in literary form the received wisdom of Black families in the United States. If so, then that received wisdom needs to change in light of the reality that Black Americans no longer face similar levels of racism as they did in the ’50s and ’60s.  

Black Americans are shot by the police at lower rates than Whites when you account for their rates of altercation. 60% of Black Americans believe they are in a better financial condition than their parents.  

Black Americans are more college-educated than they’ve ever been. Our “Black History” courses and our readings that reflect “Black History,” however, still primarily endorse the concept that America is racist to Black people. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/23/california-bill-would-enable-therapists-to-emancipate-12-year-olds-from-their-own-parents/

On Tuesday, Democrats in the state of California advanced a bill that would allow therapists and other mental health “professionals” to have children forcibly removed from their homes and placed into state custody without the consent of the parents.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the State Senate’s Judiciary Committee approved Assembly Bill 665, which passed by a party-line vote. If the bill became law, children as young as 12 would be legally allowed to check themselves into state-run shelters with the unconditional approval of a therapist or counselor, and without the parents’ knowledge.

The bill is authored by State Senator Scott Wiener (D-Calif.) and State Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Calif.). Wiener in particular has a long history of introducing highly controversial, pro-LGBTQ bills that are often passed into law, including a bill making it legal to knowingly infect someone with HIV.

The authors claim that the bill is only meant to provide equal access to mental health services for all children in the state of California, and could only apply to children who are on Medi-Cal, the state-funded Medicaid program that primarily targets low-income families.

“This bill protects children. It makes children safer. It makes children healthier,” Wiener falsely claimed. “It’s unfortunate that this bill, like so many, has been caught up in this right-wing outrage machine.”

However, the bill is already facing widespread backlash. Prior to the committee vote, numerous California residents publicly testified against the bill; various witnesses described it as an “emancipation of 12 year olds,” “heinous,” and “dangerous.”

Under the bill, there would be no obligation for any such therapist or counselor to prove that a 12-year-old is mature enough or in a dangerous enough situation to justify being placed in a “residential shelter.” There is such a requirement for minors who are on private insurance. Similarly, any possible decision to inform the parents or withhold such information from them would be left entirely up to the mental health professional involved, even if it is simply an intern or trainee.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-finally-gets-hooked-on-a-phonics-based-curriculum-school-system-education-students-teacher-public-f019bc45?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

American students continue to suffer the effects of pandemic learning loss, as this week’s miserable National Assessment of Educational Progress scores demonstrate. But school closures and lockdowns explain only so much. If you truly wish to understand the dysfunction plaguing U.S. public schools, consider the remarkable story of Joel Greenblatt. A hedge-fund manager with no training or experience in education, Mr. Greenblatt nevertheless figured something out 20 years ago that New York City’s sprawling $38 billion school system is only now starting to realize—phonics is the key to early childhood literacy.

In 2005, as chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee, I heard about a school in Queens where the proportion of fourth-graders reading proficiently had doubled, from 36% to 71%, in four years. This school, P.S. 65, was using a phonics-based curriculum called Success for All that had been developed in the 1970s by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at Johns Hopkins University. The curriculum’s design was ingenious. It broke down reading skills into bite-sized pieces that children could understand. Students were evaluated every six weeks, placed into small groups at the same level of reading mastery, and taught exactly what they needed to progress to the next level. Success for All’s materials were so detailed and clear that even a relatively inexperienced teacher could use them.

Implementing Success for All didn’t require tons of money or brilliant teachers making heroic sacrifices. All it required was some modest additional funding so that students could learn in small groups for 100 minutes a day. Mr. Greenblatt, who picked up the tab, thought the school could make the money go further by asking other educators—such as the assistant principal or the art teacher—to pitch in.

Union work rules made that impossible at a district school. But it could be done at a charter school, so in 2006 Mr. Greenblatt and his business partner, John Petry, founded one and asked me to run it. Conveniently, I was available, as Randi Weingarten, then president of the United Federation of Teachers, had arranged for my early retirement from politics for holding hearings questioning the wisdom of the union contracts she’d negotiated.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/06/enduring-truths-and-neglected-lessons/

Much of the debate surrounding schools and education centres on falling standards, teacher quality, school funding and what constitutes the most worthwhile curriculum and effective pedagogy. While such matters are important, more significant is the question: what constitutes the purpose of education? Given the rise of AI and chatbots and the fear humans will soon be replaced by computers, the question is even more urgent.

Illustrated by the cultural Left’s long march and prevalence of woke ideology in the nation’s classrooms, one answer is to use education as an instrument to overthrow what is depicted as an inherently racist, sexist, heteronormative capitalist society and to bring about the socialist utopia.

Throughout their schooling, students are indoctrinated with the belief that gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless, that males are inherently violent and misogynist and that Western civilisation is oppressive and guilty of white supremacism. Add the fact the world is about to end because of the climate change, that the arrival of the First Fleet led to genocide and there is nothing beneficial or redeeming about Australia’s development as a nation, and it’s no wonder young people suffer such high rates of anxiety and depression.

When Julia Gillard was education minister, she described herself as the minister for productivity. The focus is a utilitarian one where the purpose of education is to strengthen the economy and to ensure the nation has a highly skilled, globally competitive workforce. Associated with using schools to increase productivity is ensuring students are prepared for the uncertain, ever-changing world of the 21st century.  Knowledge is secondary to teaching generic competencies and skills like creativity, working in teams, critical thinking and embracing diversity and difference.

Ensuring education, especially in primary schools, is child-centred represents yet another approach to defining the purpose of education.  Re-badged as “personalised learning” and “student agency”, the belief is that learning only comes alive when it embraces the world of the child.

While each of the above models are distinctive, what they hold in common is the failure to address the essential role education plays in enculturation.  If societies are to survive and prosper and if individuals are to find meaning and purpose, each succeeding generation needs to be initiated into the broader culture.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/naep-scores-13-year-olds-math-reading-nces-peggy-carr-education-schools-covid-bda47967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“National Assessment of Educational Progress scores decline” is a familiar story; the last installment was in May, with a report that 8th-grade U.S. history test scores hit an all-time low. The latest dispiriting data from the Nation’s Report Card is more evidence that learning loss from public-school closures won’t be easily recovered.

NAEP scores for 13-year-olds declined by nine points in math and four in reading between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported. The math decline is the largest ever for this NAEP assessment. For the lowest-performing students, math scores were the worst since the 1970s, and reading scores were lower than the first data collection in 1971.

“There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said.

In the rare silver-lining department, NCES reports that Catholic school scores “were not measurably different” between 2019-20 and 2022-23. The reasons for the difference can’t be proven, but Catholic schools reopened much faster while teachers unions kept public schools closed. The educational devastation of remote school is well documented, and it’s becoming clearer that this effect won’t dissipate merely because students are back in buildings.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-american-schools-indoctrinate-kids?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

If you read The Free Press, you know that over the last decade, an illiberal ideology that goes by various names—Critical Race Theory; Critical Social Justice—has transformed key institutions of American life. It is remaking the law, Hollywood, medicine, higher education, psychology, and more.

No area, however, is more important than our schools, which shape the minds of future citizens. And across the country, teachers are now engaged in the wholesale indoctrination of their pupils.

The Evanston–Skokie School District teaches K–3 students to “break the binary” of gender. Seattle Public Schools tell teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children, while a Cupertino, California elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Portland, K–5 students are taught to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and explore the “infinite gender spectrum.” And thousands of similar examples, perhaps in your own community.

Yet many refute the claim that this ideological transformation is happening at all. Which is why we thought it was crucial to ground the anecdotes that sometimes make headlines in representative, large-scale data. We wanted to understand the impact that this reprogramming is having on young people’s ideas about race, gender, identity and more.

A recent survey of 1,500 Americans aged 18–20 that I conducted with Zach Goldberg for the Manhattan Institute proves just how widespread and pernicious this issue has become. It has implications that should concern anyone who cares about open inquiry and free speech.

We asked a random national sample of 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had heard (from an adult in school) of pro–Critical Race Theory (CRT) concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” as well as radical gender concepts such as the idea that gender is separate from biological sex. An astounding 90 percent had been exposed to CRT and 74 percent to radical gender concepts at school. In 7 of 10 cases these beliefs were presented as fact, or as the only respectable view to hold. 

Why does this matter? Increasingly, evidence is pouring in that young people are intolerant of opposing views.

For instance, nearly 70 percent of undergraduates polled in a 2021 study said that if “a professor says something students find offensive,” they should be reported to the university. The massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020–2022 find that 65 to 85 percent of American undergraduates believe universities should not permit speakers on campus who argue that some transgender people have a mental disorder, BLM is a hate group, or abortion should be illegal. 

When compared to older age groups, young people are far more intolerant, even when taking their politics into consideration. As I show in this report, over two-thirds of 18- to 25-year-olds think Google was right to fire programmer James Damore in 2017 for raising evidence-based questions in an internal memo about the firm’s gender equity policy. This compares to just 36 percent of those over 50 who backed Damore’s termination. Among liberals, I found that 82 percent of 18–25-year-olds support his firing while a much lower 57 percent of liberals over 50 do. 

Not only are educated young people intolerant of opposing ideas, they are increasingly unwilling to date or befriend Republicans. According to original data that I analyzed from FIRE’s 2020 survey, just 7 percent of female and 19 percent of male college students who are not Republican would feel comfortable dating a Trump supporter. 

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-test-scores-falling-american-schools-history/?utm_source=Spectator%20World%20Signup&utm_

“Imagine if flight schools had the same success rates as America’s teachers. Would anyone get on an airplane again? Would we hear the FAA telling us to just trust America’s pilots? Of course not; we’d see a full ground-stop until we could verify that planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies anymore.”
Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two.

The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm.

In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide. More and more students were falling short of the basic standards set out on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The New York Times reported that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in US history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” And just 13 percent of eighth graders were considered “proficient,” compared to 18 percent nearly a decade ago.

The scores match record lows in science, math and reading. The Times explained that “in history, it’s possible that reduced reading comprehension played some role in student performance.” So perhaps students can’t express a basic grasp of history because they can’t read. Reassuring, isn’t it?

The Biden administration’s education secretary Miguel A. Cardona zeroed in on the real culprit for the failures: Republicans, of course. Cardona explained that “banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

Last I checked, Republicans aren’t running teachers’ unions, teacher-training programs, the Department of Education, textbook or testing companies. In May, Cardona tweeted: “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.”

Imagine if flight schools had the same success rates as America’s teachers. Would anyone get on an airplane again? Would we hear the FAA telling us to just trust America’s pilots? Of course not; we’d see a full ground-stop until we could verify that planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies anymore.