RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/14/its-time-to-acknowledge-americas-education-crisis/

Tina Blum Cohen is a Republican running for Congress in Texas District 7.

The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding college admissions has once again thrust America’s educational system into the spotlight. A major question that has come from this ruling is whether America’s children are being intellectually and academically prepared to even enter or succeed in these colleges and universities. The tragic answer is that America’s public education system is failing to equip our youth with the tools necessary to succeed in higher education and in their future professional lives. We are failing America’s most valuable asset—our children.

According to the Department of Education’s own report on the state of education in America, we are experiencing what is essentially an educational crisis. Scores in every subject and grade level have been declining over the years. While illogical and unscientific Covid policies certainly worsened the crisis to a point that lawmakers can no longer ignore the problem, the situation has actually been declining for years. Especially concerning are scores in reading and mathematics, with close to one third of students in elementary school behind in grade-level reading and only about a third of fourth graders able to perform grade-level math.

Earlier this year, the nation was shocked to hear that 55 Chicago schools reported zero proficiency in math or reading despite billions of dollars of federal funding for the schools. But this crisis is not unique to Chicago. In my own Houston community, the Texas Education Agency has had to intervene in the leadership of the state’s largest public school district after years of failing to adequately educate our community’s children.

Unfortunately for America’s youth and the future of our nation, public schools have put core educational instruction on the back burner, instead prioritizing culturally sensational philosophies. We now see schools artificially inflating grades in order to ‘pass’ students who do not have the educational tools necessary to succeed in higher grades. While this is done under the guise of “equity,” it is unfortunately setting kids up for future failure when they find themselves unprepared for the next steps in their education, and ultimately, for adulthood and success in society.

Likewise, we see schools ditching the concepts of expectations and consequences, both educational and behavioral, including things like homework deadlines. Besides the negative effect this has on mastering educational principles that will be used to learn more difficult concepts later, this lack of personal accountability and consequences has our youth growing accustomed to an unrealistically lenient reality which does not exist in our society. We do our children a disservice when we do not intellectually and emotionally prepare them to deal with reality, including things like personal consequences or meeting deadlines. Imagine their shock when their first employer sets a hard deadline for a project, and they have no experience with being required to meet a deadline. They will have been set up for anxiety and potential failure rather than confidence and success.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

An unsurprising consequence of the recent Supreme Court decision to expunge race-based affirmative action for college admission was the resolve to sue select colleges for an unfair bias toward legacy students, children of wealthy donors, and, as former Harvard President Larry Summers intoned, those colleges that have a preference “for those who excel in ‘aristocrat sports.’”[1] He added, admissions officers should “resist being impressed by those who have benefitted from high-priced coaching through the admissions process.”

While the suits may have some merit, admitting students on the basis of name and legacy peaked in the 1950s, though money still talks. From my perspective, selection should be based on merit, but universities need support from all stakeholders: alumni, donors, faculty, and students. Those needs are matched against the demands of government, which is a major source of funding. As an aside, it is a curious fact that economic underclasses are rarely considered. Writing in The New York Times last week, David Leonhardt wrote: “The skew is so extreme at some colleges that more undergraduates come from the top one percent of income distribution than the entire bottom 60 percent.” Nevertheless, in the quest for a perfect solution, universities must keep in mind the aphorism that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

Laws of economics play a role: What happens when supply fails to keep pace with demand? College, over the past sixty years, has been a growth industry. The number of high school graduates has roughly doubled during that time to 3.9 million, while the percentage of each graduating high school class going to college has increased from 7.7% to 37.5%. Despite that ten-fold increase in demand for a university education, select colleges have not increased student bodies commensurate with increased demand. For example, consider the Ivy League, where demand has been augmented by women who now comprise more than 50% of student bodies and by foreign students who today represent about 11% of their student bodies, yet their total student bodies have increased only about 50% from 1960.

The result is a squeeze on supply, especially at elite colleges.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-preferences-bred-50-years-of-mismatch-harvard-sat-scores-equality-7942bd8e?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for her colleagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in college admissions. She alleged in her dissenting opinion that the six-justice majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had subverted the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, not upheld it, by “further entrenching racial inequality in education.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion slammed shut the door of opportunity to underrepresented minorities, especially black students, who still fight against a society that is “inherently unequal,” she wrote.

Many in academia agreed with Justice Sotomayor. Incoming Harvard president Claudine Gay warned in a video statement that the decision “means the real possibility that opportunities will be foreclosed.” David A. Thomas, president of historically black Morehouse College, asserted that in the absence of racial preferences, black students will rightly conclude that they are “not wanted.” Students “of color” may not feel that they “matter,” according to Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

The charge that colorblind admissions will foreclose educational opportunities for blacks rests on a breathtakingly elitist view of education. And the idea that minority students should now conclude that they aren’t “wanted” on college campuses defies reality. Black students will attend college in the same numbers after affirmative action as they did before, if they so choose. Colleges will be as eager to have them. The only difference, assuming compliance with the ruling (a big if), is that such students will attend college on the same footing as most students from unpreferred racial groups: admitted to schools for which their academic skills qualify them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/in-blow-to-academic-freedom-court-rules-universities-can-punish-faculty-for-lack-of-collegiality/?utm_

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a public-university faculty member can be punished for the “lack of collegiality” he purportedly showed when he criticized a higher-ed-degree program for prioritizing social justice over scholarship.

To academic-freedom advocates, the decision is a blow, and there are fears the “collegiality” rationale could chill unpopular speech at universities throughout the country.

By a vote of 2-1 in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, the court ruled against professor Stephen Porter of NCSU, who had been removed from a degree program for complaints he made during a 2016 department meeting, in a spring 2018 email to colleagues, and in a personal blog post written that fall.

According to Porter, “the field of higher education study is abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’” He also called an academic conference in his field a “woke joke.”

Porter was accused of “bullying” his colleagues, and it was suggested he leave the degree program in question. The professor was soon forcibly removed. Porter also claimed his colleagues were making it impossible for him to recruit new doctoral advisees, jeopardizing his tenure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/appeals-court-rules-university-can-punish-professor-for-criticizing-diversity-hiring/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The academic left has no tolerance for faculty members who aren’t all in favor of the DEI agenda. It will look for any pretext to punish those who dare to disagree.

That was the case at North Carolina State where Professor David Porter complained about a departmental hire that he thought was ill-advised, done just to increase “diversity.” That bit of honesty caused the university to punish him. Porter sued, but the Fourth Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, held that the university was in the right.

Hans Bader examines the case in this Liberty Unyielding post. 

A slice:

Yet the Fourth Circuit ruled that the professor’s email about a diversity-oriented faculty search, which complained that a colleague ‘cut corners [in] vetting’ a black finalist ‘out of a desire to hire a Black scholar whose work focused on racial  issues,’ was not on a matter of public concern — and thus not protected by the First Amendment, because it (a) ‘was an unprofessional attack on one of [his] colleagues,’ and (b) was ‘sent only to other faculty members.’ This “unprofessionalism” claim is diametrically at odds with the Supreme Court’s Rankin decision saying that ‘the inappropriate…character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/majority-of-black-people-support-supreme-court-ban-on-affirmative-action/

While the bulk of the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court decision banning colleges from basing college admissions on race consists of the expected leftist hysteria and propaganda, a small number of inside baseball stories largely aimed at talking Dems down from the high ladder, tell the truth.

You would never know it from most of the media’s coverage but the vast majority of Americans oppose using race to decide who gets into college.

84% of white adults oppose colleges considering race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept

81% of Hispanics oppose it

76% of Asians oppose it

So do 71% of blacks

Asians are not even the top non-white group to oppose racial discrimination in college admissions, Hispanics are.

Black people, on whose behalf the whole affirmative action college debate has been waged, oppose it 71% to 28% and they’re the group most favorably inclined to it.

Awkward. Obviously.

Strikingly, black people don’t much like affirmative action and a majority backed the Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, more of them actually approved of the decision (more than 4 in 10) than disapproved (fewer than 4 in 10). And more Black Americans “strongly” approved (31 percent) than disapproved (26 percent).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/law-schools-hollow-commitment-to-viewpoint-diversity

Just hours after the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, the president of NYU, from whose law school I recently graduated, sent out an email to alumni, announcing on behalf of the institution that June 29—the date that race-based admissions schemes were found to violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection for all—was “a difficult day,” because “diversity is a core part of our identity.” Nonetheless, NYU would find a way to stand defiant: “we will not forsake our commitment to building and sustaining a scholarly community that is diverse and inclusive, a community to which you all rightly belong.”

Peer institutions sent similar messages to their alumni and posted on social media. Georgetown, though “deeply disappointed,” vowed that it would continue “ensuring that the full range of voices, histories and experiences are included in our academic community.” Yale “emphatically” affirmed that it remained “fully committed to creating an inclusive, diverse, and excellent educational environment” and “to ensuring that our university is home to a diverse range of ideas, expertise, and experiences.” The University of Southern California’s statement stood out for its flair. The Court’s decision was “very disappointing,” but USC would carry on providing an atmosphere “where differing backgrounds and points of view are embraced, where ideas collide, beliefs are challenged, and innovation thrives.”

Paragraph break, for flourish: “We will not go backward.”

Apparently our best and brightest missed the glaring contradiction at the heart of their messages. While lamenting a decision that they say strikes at their ability to foster, for instance, “a diverse range of ideas, expertise, and experiences,” they all take the same institutional position on a highly contested issue. Do USC students who agree with the Court’s decision—who would, if the student body reflected national opinion on the issue, constitute at least half the student population—feel that their university welcomes a point of view that their administration equates with backwardness? Does Yale advance its mission of hosting a “diverse range of ideas” by announcing that it considers a 6-3 majority’s decision beyond the pale?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/05/theres-nothing-racist-about-ending-affirmative-action/

Race-based affirmative action, in US colleges at least, is over.

At the end of last week, the Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be used as a weighting factor in the collegiate admissions process. This brings an end to the era when an Asian applicant would need a far higher score to get into Harvard than a black applicant.

The Supreme Court case centred on the affirmative-action policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC). But the court’s judgement will also affect the more than 40 per cent of US universities that currently take race into account in admissions. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that UNC’s and Harvard’s affirmative-action programmes ‘lack sufficiently focussed and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints’.

It was a blunt verdict, and one from which Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented in almost histrionic terms. According to Sotomayor, ‘The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education’. For Brown Jackson, this was a ‘tragedy’ that would ‘impede [the] achievement of our great nation’s full potential’. However, all data indicate that a substantial majority of Americans would agree with Roberts’ take. Critics of the ruling may try to denigrate it as furthering the cause of ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’. But that’s hard to maintain when the case against Harvard and UNC was brought by Students for Fair Admissions – a group composed entirely of East and South Asian plaintiffs.