RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/teachers_unions_are_destroying_american_education.html

American public schools are witnessing a mass exodus of teachers.

The term “stampede” may be more appropriate. According to one poll conducted in 2022, some 55% of educators were ready to leave the profession, and this unease is often translated into action. In one Chicago school nearly every teacher bailed out. Many teachers are not even waiting for the end of the school year and are leaving in mid-term.

These departures overwhelming result from school violence, disorderly classrooms, insufficient administrative support, and trying to teach kids who just don’t care. According to one study during the 2020-21 school year, one-third of teachers reported at least one incident of harassment or threats of violence while 14% were actually physically attacked. The American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Violence against Educators and School Personnel reports that threats can even come from parents convinced that junior is “a good kid” despite carrying a knife to the classroom.

Cold statistics understate the fear of violence, especially in schools where poor, single-parent minority students predominate. Reports of physical confrontations quickly spread to others as does the unwillingness of school administrators to punish culprits.  Further add daily in-your-face hostility to learning such as talking during lectures, constant iPhone use, and obvious boredom that can kill a teacher’s commitment.

Under such circumstances, the usual workplace incentives are of little value to unhappy teachers. A 3% salary raise, or better medical plan, cannot compensate for daily living in fear for one’s safety. This is not the Great Depression where a secure teaching job was prized no matter what. Nor are today’s female teachers limited in their vocational options.   

The problems of unsafe and dangerous working conditions are the classic tribulations that precipitated America’s labor movement. After all, what could be more central to a union?  So, how are the two teacher unions responding? Answer: By making it worse.

https://www.city-journal.org/battle-over-hasidic-schools-is-a-broader-battle

For almost 130 years, New York State has required private and non-public schools to offer a curriculum “substantially equivalent” to those offered in local public schools. That requirement has been loosely enforced, and the state education department issued new regulations in September 2022 that promised a more aggressive approach. But last week, New York Supreme Court Judge Christina Ryba partially invalidated those regulations. The ruling overturned neither the state’s compulsory-education law nor the substantial-equivalency law upon which the September regulations had been based. Rather, it invalidated the enforcement mechanism included in those regulations, which, Ryba found, would shut down schools out of step with the substantial-equivalency requirement. The compulsory-education law applies to parents, not schools, Ryba argued; accordingly, enforcement actions would have to be brought against parents instead of the schools themselves.

The ruling comes at a time of fierce debate over substantial equivalency at religious schools serving Hasidic Jewish New Yorkers. One side of the debate has reduced these schools to a set of caricatures—arguing that the education provided in these schools is of low quality, that their graduates are consigned to lives of poverty, and that parents are coerced by religious leaders to enroll their children in these schools. Reality is more complicated.

While performing research for a Manhattan Institute issue brief on the subject, I visited a yeshiva (religious school) for Hasidic boys in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. It offers no instruction in secular subjects, but the boys I observed all seemed to be fluent English speakers. I was told that they came from homes where English was freely spoken and that some parents may choose to augment the yeshiva’s instruction with tutors in English and math. Judge Ryba’s decision anticipated that a family could ensure substantial equivalency through a combination of religious school attendance, tutoring, and homeschooling.

https://quillette.com/2023/03/26/dismantle-dei-ideology/

For now, the adults at the Stanford Law School appear to be in charge. In a March 22nd letter addressed to the “SLS Community,” Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martínez unequivocally repudiated the shoutdown of federal judge Kyle Duncan by Stanford law students earlier this month. The law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, who had lectured Duncan about his allegedly injurious presence on campus, has been placed on leave. That is the good news.

Martínez’s letter is one of the most thorough defenses of academic free speech to come from a college administrator in recent years. However, she has declined to discipline the students involved in the heckling. Distinguishing those students who had engaged in punishable conduct from those who had not would be too difficult, she claims. Moreover, the hecklers had not been warned that they risked sanctions. Punishing the hecklers would also leave unpunished those who did not literally disrupt the event but whose vulgar signs or insulting personal questions were outside the norms of civil discourse.

Instead of discipline, Martínez will require all law students to attend a half-day session on free speech later in the semester. (One can’t help but observe that Judge Duncan’s student hosts, who engaged in no speech disruption, do not seem to be in need of such training.) The reasons for Martínez’s amnesty are not persuasive. Nevertheless, that amnesty could serve as an acceptable compromise if other measures to prevent a reoccurrence were in place. They are not, and Martínez’s letter shows why they likely never will be.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/03/29/is_the_counter-university_movement_any_match_for_the_dei_juggernaut_889808.html

A group of intellectual mavericks made splashy headlines in 2021 when they announced plans to launch a new university in Texas called the University of Austin.   

Backed by a gallery of celebrity intellectuals – its trustees and directors include former Harvard president Larry Summers, Brown University economist Glenn Loury, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, civil rights leader and former congressman Andrew Young, and the journalists Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan – the startup would be dedicated to the classic ideals of open inquiry, Socratic debate, and the unfettered pursuit of truth.  

The University of Austin is just one of a number of recent academic experiments challenging what many conservatives and independents see as a stifling leftist monoculture on campus they deem illiberal, censorious, and anti-intellectual.   

These countercultural projects reflect a range of reformist strategies coming from inside and outside the academy. In addition to launching new schools, they are creating independent institutes as havens of free thought within existing institutions, and pushing universities to adopt statements that codify academic freedom.  

At the same time, Republican legislatures and governors around the country are moving to shut down campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies at state universities. And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking the most aggressive tack, backing legislation that would defund DEI offices and eliminate courses based on Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and other social justice ideologies.   

This activity is generating buzz aplenty, but these projects face considerable obstacles – logistical, financial, and legal – that proponents acknowledge may be insurmountable on a meaningful scale, at least in the short term.   

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-law-schools-could-bring-down-america-ilya-shapiro-dei-bureaucracy-stanford-supreme-court-rule-of-law-34c402c2?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”

Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/03/27/florida-man-desantis-makes-universal-school-choice-a-reality-n1681850

The anti-progressive pathogen known as universal school choice spread to Florida today, as Gov. Ron DeSantis put his signature on the state’s House Bill 1.

DeSantis said at the signing that the new law represents “the largest expansion of education choice not just in the history of this state, but in the history of these United States.” Florida is generally ranked well in education, “despite” — please notice the scare quotes — spending less per pupil than almost any other state.

The new law ensures “eligibility of the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and Family Empowerment Scholarship to any resident of Florida” eligible for K-12 public education, according to Click Orlando.

“At the end of the day,” DeSantis also said, “we fundamentally believe that the money should follow the student and it should be directed based on what the parent thinks is the most appropriate education program for their child.”

Under the law, new Education Savings Accounts will give families up to $8,000 to spend on education outside the public school system. The amount is based on need, with families of four earning under $51,000 (or 186% of the poverty line) getting dibs on voucher dollars. The second tier of funds goes to families whose incomes do not exceed 400% of the poverty line.

DeSantis was on a roll against critics of universal school choice: “There were some that said, ‘Oh, you know, parents… don’t know what they’re doing. They shouldn’t be involved.’ You hear these crazy arguments, but I can tell you if you talk to most teachers, if a parent is engaged in the student’s education, the student is going to do much better.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-owns-the-university/

The most recent shout-down debacle at Stanford’s law school, one of many such recent sordid episodes, prompts the question: “Who owns our universities?” 

The law students who are in residence for three years apparently assume they embody the university. And so, they believe they represent and speak for a score of diverse Stanford interests when they shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan, as if he were an intruder into their own woke private domain. 

After all, Stanford, like most of the Ivy League universities, is a private institution. Are then its board of trustees, its faculty, its students, and its administration de facto overseers and owners? 

Not really. 

In the case of public institutions of higher learning, there is no controversy: The people own the university and, through their elected representatives, pay for and approve its entire budget. Again, through their selected regents and overseers, the taxpayers adjudicate the laws of these universities.  

But private universities, while different, are not really so different.  

Take again Stanford as a typical example. It receives about $1.5 billion per year in federal taxpayer grants alone to its various faculty, labs, research centers, and programs. 

Its annual budget exceeds $8 billion. If Stanford accepts such huge federal and state direct largess, do the taxpayers who provide it have some say about how and under what conditions their recipients use their money? 

Second, the university also has accumulated a $36 billion endowment. At normal annual investment returns, such an enormous fund may earn well over $2 billion a year.  That income is almost all tax-free, based on the principle that Stanford is a nonprofit, apolitical institution. 

But is it? 

One could imagine what would have happened had, say, a radical abortion proponent been shouted down at Stanford Law School. Further, conceive that conservative law students had called her scum and wished for her daughters to be raped. Envision obscene placards flashing in her face—before she was stopped speaking entirely by a conservative Stanford dean who hijacked her talk and informed the pro-abortion speaker that she more or less asked for such a mob reception. The perpetrators, we know, would have been expelled from the law school within 24 hours, and the dean fired in 12. And, alternately, had the architects of this real, vile demonstration faced an open hearing, where evidence of the event was presented, and had been found guilty of violating university policy and then had been expelled and ostracized from the law school, even after much chest-thumping and performance-art braggadocio, it is unlikely the debacle would be repeated. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/philosophy_professor_dont_go_to_college_become_an_electrician.html

I don’t think you should send your kids to any universities.  [I told] my daughter, “Don’t go to college.  Become an electrician.”  I never would have imagined 10 years ago that I would [say] that. … It’s better to stare at a wall … [or] do nothing than to learn things that are false.  — Peter Boghossian, former Philosophy Professor Portland State University, Feb. 28, 2023

It is astonishing when a liberal philosophy professor tells people, including his own daughter, not to go to university because they have become “indoctrination mills.”  Many other types of professors can make a living outside universities.  However, there is no real market for specialists in Kant’s transcendental deductions outside the university.  With slight exceptions, philosophers have little choice but to work in universities.  So, when Prof. Boghossian tells his own daughter not to go to university, he must believe that universities have become dangerously unhealthy.  Although Boghossian cites Harvard, Yale and Oberlin as “non-starters”, he says that all universities have been destroyed by “woke” nonsense and should be defunded.  University people, Boghossian says, “live in make-believe land.”

Boghossian was one of the professors who exposed the lack of academic standards in a set of “woke” journals in the 2017-2018 “Grievance Studies affair,” also referred to as the “Sokal Squared” scandal (referring to a similar case in 1996 perpetrated by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal). James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, using pseudonyms or borrowed identities, submitted absurd papers to journals in culture, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to test the integrity of their editorial peer review process.