RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/high-school-test-scores-are-plummeting-and-not-just-because-of-the-pandemic/

The numbers are as shocking as they are undeniable: American high school students are more ignorant and ill-equipped than they have been in decades or more; in fact, it’s likely that their abilities are at their lowest level ever. The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that “average scores on the ACT [American College Testing] college admissions test dropped to their lowest in 30 years, revealing more evidence of the pandemic’s alarming impact on American education.” But it’s not just the pandemic. This is the result of the wokeification of the American public school system. Far too many teachers are spending their time filling their students’ heads with trans and Critical Race Theory nonsense instead of giving them an education. It’s dereliction of duty on a grand scale.

The Free Beacon added that “the average composite score for the class of 2022 was a 19.8 out of 36, according to a report released Wednesday, falling under 20 points for the first time since 1991. This year’s graduates endured the effects of the pandemic for three of their four high school years.”

The pandemic wasn’t even close to being the only thing they endured. In Georgia, PJM’s Chris Queen reported in August, “Gwinnett Schools are now adding gender propaganda to the mix with what one group calls ‘inappropriate gender lessons’ on school-issued Chromebooks that parents can’t access when logging into their children’s accounts on other devices.” In San Juan Hills High School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., teacher Danielle “Flint” Serio has an entire “queer library” in her classroom. And down the road at Madison High School in San Diego, a teacher has defined “fascist” with words including “Trump,” “white,” “Christian,” and “heterosexual.” The Republican Party, this sage wrote on his classroom whiteboard, “is a fascist organization that no longer fits the category of a conventional Democratic Party.” In a rural, conservative school district in Minnesota, the ninth-grade curriculum includes a book that features explicit rape scenes.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/tufts-university-criticized-after-launching-diversity-event-separating-white-attendees-from-bipoc-colleagues/

Tufts University is in a tough spot.

The Massachusetts university is being heavily criticized for the structure of its upcoming “Dialogue Series” that is reportedly set to commence on Oct. 17. Launched by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the event is supposedly aimed toward understanding a “cross-cultural dialogue.” Eyebrows were raised when the public learned that the sessions would be split based on the race of attendees.

The sessions are set to separate Black and ethnic minority staff from white colleagues and discussions are reportedly specifically structured for each group, according to Daily Mail. In one part of the series, labeled Radical Healing, Tufts faculty and staff who racially identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are encouraged to join.

Although white colleagues are not banned from attending, the free sessions are reportedly designed for BIPOC who’ve experienced being the “only or one of a few in predominately white spaces on campus.”

According to the university, Radical Healing attendees who meet the said criteria will assemble to discuss how marginalized and oppressed groups should live “free of discrimination, racism, and oppression.”

The other part of the series, called Unpacking Whiteness, is designed for Tufts colleagues who identify as white. They are invited to practice “anti-racism” and participate in discussions specifically for white people “holding spaces of privilege.”

According to Fox News, a description for the series states, “Anti-racism is an active and ongoing process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes in a way that redistributes power, policy, and structures to be more equitable while drawing attention to the lived experiences of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.”

Since launching, the university has received harsh criticisms toward the upcoming dialogue series.

Daily Mail provides that one response exclaimed that the university was setting their students back by years, while another called the separated sessions discrimination.

A response from a person who claimed to be a Tufts alumni said, “As a once proud alumnus of Tufts, I am speechless that they are promoting SEGREGATION and RACE SHAMING.”

“I am cancelling my annual donation and urging fellow alumni to DEFUND Tufts University until they restore racial compassion and respect.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-education-exodus-advances/

In August, it was reported that over the past two school years, children whose public schools were shuttered during the Covid panic were much less likely to return when they reopened. According to the American Enterprise Institute, k-12 enrollment in the 2020-2021 school year had declined by 2.7%, or about 1.2 million students nationwide.

Updated enrollment numbers and chronic absenteeism

But a new survey has revealed that between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9% drop in families saying their children were enrolled in a government-run school – a plunge of about 4 million students. At the same time, the number of children in charters, private schools, and homeschools shot up. While the dropout numbers aren’t actual data, there is no doubt that a massive education exodus is underway.

Another sign of turbulence is the number of children who are still enrolled in district schools but are “chronically absent,” meaning that they miss more than 10% of school days for any reason. Per the U.S. Department of Education, at least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during the first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data, collected for the 2020-21 school year, is a substantial increase from the approximately 8 million students chronically absent in the prior years. Excessive absences have serious consequences – kids’ learning suffers, and they are more likely to get suspended in middle school, and are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.

The future does not promise a reversal. In fact, chronic absence continued to surge during the 2021-2022 school year. Although no national data have been released yet, several diverse states – Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and California – claim that high absentee rates doubled in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Money flows in; no accountability required

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-the-supreme-court-finally-get-it-right-on-affirmative-action/

Hard on its landmark victories for judicial and Constitutional integrity last term, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this month on two cases challenging admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. If decided rightly, both cases should lead to the banning of unconstitutional, discriminatory racial preferences in university admissions.

After years of previous cases in which the Supreme Court tried various work-arounds to avoid stopping discrimination, maybe this year the Justices will get it right.

From its beginning in the 1978 decision Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the jurisprudence of subsequent cases have, as Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case put it, “refus[ed] to define rigorously the broad state interest” served by “diversity,” and thus demonstrate specifically the “educational benefits that flow from student body diversity,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy in Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) vaguely defined that “compelling state interest” allegedly justifying discrimination on the basis of race.

As we’ve seen for 44 years, this vacuum created by the lack of clarity about what “diversity” is exactly, and how it specifically enhances educational outcomes, has been filled by illiberal ideology and factional politics that serves partisan purposes rather than educational ones. The “diversity,” then, that courts, businesses, educational institutions, and government trade in is so broad and simplistic that it guarantees the concept will be used to pick political and racial winners and losers.

Let’s start with the idea of “diversity” that supposedly justifies violating the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Actual diversity is light-years more complex than the old “scientific” racist categories of “black,” “white,” “Asian,” and later “Hispanic,” based on skin color, hair texture, or other superficial characteristics. Relying on these physical criteria ignores the real diversity that appears at the level of ethnicity: socio-economic class, language, dialects, customs, mores, folkways, regional differences, faith, and political preferences. Indeed, so bizarre has this crude “diversity” become that a poor white kid from a region historically impoverished who supposedly enjoys “white privilege” doesn’t add as much “diversity” to the student body as an affluent black student does.

Race-based preferences, then, ignore all those more interesting and meaningful markers of diverse identities––except the last one, politics. Particularly in education, “protected” categories like “race” and “gender” take precedence, and traffic in a “diversity” that camouflages a rigid intellectual and ideological orthodoxy. We used to called it “multiculturalism,” but now it sports the Orwellian moniker “woke.” The grand narrative of the “woke” is the melodrama of permanent white racial oppression of selected victims “of color.” “Diversity” now has been joined to “equity” and “inclusion” in order to define an ideology that is homogeneous, unequal, and excluding––the opposite of real diversity.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2022/10/09/maine-university-students-demand-prof-be-fired-for-contradicting-their-fantasy-that-there-are-multiple-genders-n1635693

“A time is coming,” said St. Anthony the Great way back in the fourth century, “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” And here we are. Fox News reported Friday that “students at the University of Southern Maine (USM) are demanding that their professor be replaced for saying that only two sexes exist.”

The students, drunk on the Left’s fantasies and propaganda about there being a multiplicity of genders, actually got up and walked out of professor Christy Hammer’s graduate education class en masse, because she dared to state the simple and obvious truth that cuts against the way they wish the world to be: There are only two biological sexes, male and female.

In response, instead of telling the students that they should stop denying the obvious and try to reconcile themselves to reality, university officials acceded to their demand to hold what the Bangor Daily News called a “facilitated restorative justice meeting.” Adamantine in their delusions, the students demanded that Hammer be fired. USM professors who believe that water is wet and that human beings cannot get along without breathing air are trembling; they could be next.

Oddly enough, in today’s carnival academic environment, USM declined to bring the hammer down on Hammer. However, it did bow to the slavering crazies enough to make an “alternative, identical class” available to the students who remain defiant in their insanity. USM spokesperson Gina Marie Guadagnino explained, “We have developed an alternative plan for this class and will be opening a new section of this course for those students who would like to move.” Sane students, however, will still be able to take Hammer’s class: “The original section taught by professor Hammer will continue for any student who wishes to remain in that class.” It will be interesting to see how many students choose each option.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-cold-war-program-gets-hijacked-national-resource-center-security-1950s-critical-race-theory-environmental-justice-k-12-language-11665320013?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A Cold War-era federal program has wandered far from its national-security mission and into the woke follies that permeate much of American education. For decades, U.S. colleges and universities have received taxpayer dollars through the Education Department’s National Resource Centers, a program intended to bolster U.S. national security at the height of tension with the Soviet Union. But more recently National Resource Centers are promoting unserious academic research or causes irrelevant to national security.

NRC-funded efforts included a training institute last year at the University of Texas, Austin, where teachers of pre-kindergartners through fifth graders were schooled in “(Un)learning patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” In May, Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies sponsored a webinar about using picture books to initiate “conversations centered on advocacy for LGBT Latina/o(x) youth.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia hosted a graduate student who uses critical race theory in her research on Russia and Ukraine.

Many scholars have questioned CRT’s academic rigor, distortions of history, and promotion of racial grievances. In fellowships at Syracuse University and Cornell University, education-school faculty incorporate subjects such as environmental justice into teacher-training programs. New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies held a 10-month program in which teachers use something called “contemporary critical educational theory” to create “culturally relevant” classroom lessons. The propaganda from such NRC-sponsored initiatives becomes more potent when the efforts include outreach for K-12 teachers, who will pass along what they learn to students.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/thirteenjudges_say_no_to_yale_law_grads.html

Toxic school, toxic graduates.

Instead of learning how to behave professionally as lawyers at Yale law school, the storied and prestigious school, possibly the most prestigious in the country, has become a haven for wokester intolerance of the most infantile sort. Speakers are shouted down instead of debated through the ace legal reasoning they’re supposed to teach over there,dissidents are “canceled” and the radical student body in this atmosphere is making a noisy spectacle of itself.

It’s gotten so bad that judges are saying to themselves they want no part of this — and the rot is so deep the entire school is considered hopelessly tainted. Not surprisingly, Yale is now increasingly seeing its grads treated like pariahs by real-world judges. The tally of judges who have stated they will no longer hire Yale graduates as clerks is now 13.

According to legal blog Behind The Black (hat tip: Instapundit):

Following the public announcement by Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that he would no longer hire Yale graduates as law clerks because of that school’s enthusiasm for blacklisting and censorship, it appears that a dozen other judges have joined his boycott as well.

“Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale,” said a prominent circuit court judge, whose clerks have gone on to nab Supreme Court clerkships. “I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.”

With one exception, the judges made clear this is a policy they are imposing on future—not current—Yale Law School students.

Ho’s public speech was even more harsh.

“Yale presents itself as the best, most elite institution of legal education. Yet it’s the worst when it comes to legal cancellation.” The school “sets the tone for other law schools, and for the legal profession at large. I certainly reserve the right to add other schools in the future. But my sincere hope is that I won’t have to. …”