RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/arizonas-campus-disaster-can-be-stopped/

The woke rebellion against America’s founding principles continues to advance on all fronts. Nowhere is this truer than at America’s universities, the source and stronghold of the cultural revolution. The pushback against the illiberalism of our universities — their betrayal of their own first principles — has so far been a paltry thing. Supposedly, this is because higher education is shielded by academic freedom in a way that K–12 education is not. But that is not the reason we have failed. The truth is, opponents of the woke revolution have barely begun to do what they can to restore liberal education to America’s academy.

The greatest abdication of all is our failure to reform universities by way of trustees (also called regents or governors). University boards of regents can do almost anything. Yet most often they do nothing but rubber-stamp the decisions of administrators. That has to change right now, and it needs to change first in Arizona.

Boards of regents at public universities are responsible to the people of their state. Regents are appointed by governors, and sometimes by legislatures, too. In a few states, regents are selected by popular vote. Yet almost never do we see the appointment of university trustees become an election issue. Well, trustee selection needs to be an election issue right now in Arizona. Here’s why.

Arizona’s public universities have turned themselves into leaders in the national movement to indoctrinate students in the tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). The showpiece of this campaign is Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) move to require four — count ’em, four — diversity courses for graduation, all of which must be grounded in “critical theory,” the neo-Marxist system that produced critical race theory, critical legal theory, and still more entries in the grand campaign to neo-Marxitize pretty much everything.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/new-jersey-parents-who-protest-leftist-agenda-robert-spencer/

Public schools even for the youngest children are becoming playgrounds for the woke, featuring drag queens, transgender closets, Critical Race Theory and more, but if you say a word about it, the National Education Association (NEA) will destroy you. That is the message of a new YouTube ad from the NEA’s New Jersey chapter. According to Fox News Thursday,  “the ad flips back and forth between colorful photos of teachers with students and black-and-white photos of parents, arguing that the latter are trying to fuse politics with education.” Which, of course, the hard-Left, thoroughly politicized NEA itself would never ever do.

The NEA ad declares: “When extremists start attacking our schools, that’s not who we are. People who only want to fight to score political points should take that somewhere else.” Attacking our schools? Are parental mobs storming schools, taking teachers hostage, and destroying every rainbow banner in sight? Are administrations walking to their cars every afternoon in fear that some parental sniper will make it the last walk they’ll ever take? Are angry parents entering classrooms during school hours and ripping the LGBT propaganda out of unwary students’ hands?

None of that is happening, of course, and nothing like it. What the NEA would have us believe is happening was made clear in September 2021, when the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to Old Joe Biden, claiming that “NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety…. As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings is being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult issue…. As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/has_wokism_scared_black_students_away_from_college.html

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Black student enrollment in American colleges and universities has declined dramatically in the past ten years, 24 percent in fact, from 2.5 million students in 2010 to 1.9 million in 2020.

Prior to that ten-year period, argues Chronicle reporter Oyin Adedoyin, “The story of Black college students in the USA was a narrative of success.” Judging only by numbers, Adedoyin is right. Black population on campus grew nine-fold from 1966 to 2010. The decline since 2010 puzzles administrators given the thousands of DEI officers they have hired and the myriad enticements they have offered to Black students.

Although Adedoyin offers no overarching reason for the enrollment drop, the reader willing to wade through her tortured logic and butchered prose may find an explanation that Adedoyin herself did not seem to notice.

The students and staff she interviews, like so many other campus activists in recent years, speak of college life as affectionately as Solzhenitsyn spoke of life in the gulags. This is not a good marketing strategy, “Every single day looks like a combat to be acknowledged,” Adedoyin writes, summing up what she hears. A former prof elaborates, “We’re put into these white areas, and we really feel marginalization and lack of help.”

Adds Skye Jackson, an activist at Brown University, “It simply is exhausting to stroll by way of the hallways and really feel like you’ll be able to’t (sic) be who you actually are because of structural racist programs put in place in opposition to college students of colour (sic).”

Then there is the question of whether all this struggle and stress is worth the cost, however reduced that cost is for students of color. “Affordability is a good barrier for African People,” a Wright State alum gripes. “And, after all, we’re all the time the final employed, first fired nonetheless.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/freshman-orientations-push-dei-propaganda-over-free-speech-nationwide-survey-finds/

Free speech conversations ‘strikingly absent’ from most freshman orientations, and DEI topics covered 7.37 times more than free speech issues 

Almost all — 91 percent — of university freshman orientation programs across the country emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion topics, a recently released investigative report found.

By contrast, free speech and viewpoint diversity topics are only mentioned in about 30 percent of orientation programs, and are often “strikingly absent” from the conversation, the Speech First survey found.

Speech First, a 4-year-old nonprofit that advances free speech on college campuses through advocacy and litigation, obtained the results by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to over 50 public universities asking for freshman orientation materials.

The group found DEI topics are covered in “3.71 times more orientation slide material, 4.9 times more orientation handout material, and 7.37 times more orientation video material” than free speech topics.

Speech First Executive Director Cherise Trump told The College Fix that the process of developing the report, which took nearly a year to finish, was “wrought with delays, excuses, additional fees, and redactions.”

Many universities were reluctant to comply with the Freedom of Information Act requests. While 51 universities ultimately complied, 3 universities—Arizona State University, Colorado State University-Fort Collins, and University of California-Berkeley—did not respond.

Examples of orientation DEI issues highlighted by Speech First include a Northern Kentucky University orientation video that labels the phrases “Where are you from?” and “I don’t see race” as microaggressions and a James Madison University PowerPoint featuring 34 slides on diversity, power and oppression.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/enormous-amounts-money-continue-flow-bottomless-larry-sand/

Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America now spends even more on k-12 education, with an outlay of about $900 billion dollars a year, which includes an additional $122 billion from the Covid-related American Rescue Plan. While we have a military that is second to none, our education spending does not lead to a similar result. Our annual education outlay is second highest in the world, trailing only Norway. But in achievement, we are in the middle of the pack. For example, the 2018 rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has the U.S. 36th out of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, which is given to 15-year-olds.     

So where does all this money go?

Not much for the kids. In fact, Over 80% of it goes to salaries and benefits for teachers and other employees.

Maybe the money will help alleviate the teacher shortage?

Hardly. The teacher shortage writ large is non-existent. Using data from a National Education Association report, Mike Antonucci writes that  there were 48,985,186 students enrolled in the nation’s public school system in 2021, about 256,000 fewer than in 2012. But school districts hired an additional 276,000 instructional staff during the same period. He adds that student enrollment fell 2.4 percent in the U.S. from fall 2019 to fall 2020, falling in every state and the District of Columbia, yet 17 states added teachers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/parent-sues-school-over-transgender-brainwashing-matthew-vadum/

California parent Jessica Konen is suing her local school district for secretly indoctrinating her 6th grade daughter into the cult of transgenderism, convincing her to change her gender identity, all while urging her not to discuss the situation with her mother because she could not be “trusted.”

The behavior of these woke teachers matters not only because parents – as opposed to the government – are supposed to be in charge of raising their own children, but also because transgenderism is a treacherous ideology that threatens the very underpinnings of both our society and Western civilization as a whole.

It is not about homosexuality or bisexuality, which Americans have become increasingly tolerant of in recent years. Many Americans are even supportive of transgender people when they are consenting adults, but they do not support groomers’ efforts to force impressionable children to renounce their birth sex and pretend to be something they are not. The rise of groups such as Gays Against Groomers, whose members are aghast at reports of little kids being forced to attend drag queen performances, shows that plenty of gays recognize it is wrong to push transgender ideology onto children.

It is about totalitarian thought control. The advocates of transgenderism, backed by the Biden-Harris regime, would force Americans to recognize an individual’s professed gender identity even if it doesn’t match the person’s birth sex. Forcing people to say things they know aren’t true is the essence of totalitarianism.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/democrats-are-woke-but-parents-are-awake

Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel became the second woman ever elected as the leader of the Republican National Committee in 2017.

As a mother of two, I’m well acquainted with the tradition of back-to-school shopping. But this time, preparations look different for many families. From invasive COVID-19 vaccine requirements and woke curricular materials to surging costs for school supplies, back-to-school season has parents peeved — and for good reason.

From the beginning, President Joe Biden and Democrats have put special interest groups over students. The Biden administration slow-walked school reopenings and prioritized teachers unions’ demands over parents’ needs, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky meeting with families just once while granting “instant access” to union bosses. In fact, Walensky even admitted that she changed the CDC’s school reopening guidance to give teachers unions “what they need.” Emails show she went so far as to recommend that schools keep their doors shut — just because the unions said so.

Children paid the price. Studies show students who learned remotely for the majority of the 2020-2021 school year “on average … lost the equivalent of about 50% of a typical school year’s math learning during that time.” The fallout was especially dramatic for low-income, black, and Latino students, leading to “the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

Now, Democrats in Washington, D.C., have handed families in public, charter, and private schools an ultimatum: Get the COVID-19 vaccine or be expelled. This mandate disproportionately affects minority families. Roughly 40% of black school-age children in Washington, D.C., are unvaccinated, which means they could be banned from returning to school in person. The learning losses they will suffer as a result will have long-term consequences.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-gender-radicalism-conquered-sacramento-schools

Sacramento City Unified School District instructs teachers to “normalize gender exploration” and promotes such identities as “genderqueer,” “polysexual,” and “two-spirit.”

Sacramento City Unified School District has adopted a queer theory–based pedagogy that encourages teachers to “normalize gender exploration,” confront their “cisgender privilege,” and maintain strict secrecy when facilitating a child’s gender or sexual transition.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents from Sacramento City Unified that traces the evolution of the district’s sexual politics. The process began a decade ago, when the district invited Elizabeth Meyer, a professor of Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies at California Polytechnic State University, to conduct presentations on how the district could adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy. The “foundational concepts” of this approach, according to Meyer’s presentation, follow the standard left-wing narrative. Western society has created a “Heterosexual Matrix,” composed of “Hegemonic Masculinity,” “Emphasized Femininity,” “Heteronormativity,” and “Heterosexism,” that underpins an oppressive system of “patriarchy,” “homophobia,” and “transphobia.” To liberate schools from this system, administrators and districts must adopt “queer pedagogy” and “anti-oppressive pedagogy,” which will disrupt the “commonsense view of the world” and replace it with queer alternatives, emphasizing “gender non-conformity” and “gender and sexual diversity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/putting-parents-back-charge

Arizona governor Doug Ducey is brimming with optimism. The businessman-turned-politician has spent the past eight years campaigning for universal school choice—and he has finally achieved it. Today, the governor is hosting the signing ceremony for H.B. 2853, which will provide every family in Arizona with an “empowerment scholarship account” (ESA) and an annual $7,000 per child to take to any educational institution of their choice, including private schools, religious schools, and homeschool programs.

I first met the governor last year at a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where, in between firing rifle and pistol rounds at the shooting range, he spoke with me at length about the Founding Fathers, his own Jesuit education, the threat of critical race theory, and his vision for school reform. The governor had tried to pass universal school choice last summer but came up short by one vote in the legislature. This year, after rallying parents and negotiating with legislators, he has his redemption. Universal school choice has long been the Holy Grail for conservative education reformers. Governor Ducey has achieved it.

I spoke with the governor as he prepared to lead the signing ceremony for this historic victory. The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_battle_for_our_children_and_their_minds.html

In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding.  Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board’s woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who “sometimes wears a skirt.”

The sexual assault was later confirmed and the assailant arrested.  He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center.  But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn’t let Smith speak.  Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”  For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a “SWAT team.”

Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district.  The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board’s cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda.  Smith’s story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.

The global leftist agenda for the control of young minds runs deeper than patriotic Americans might suspect.  After a virtual takeover of the humanities departments of our universities, the leftists have been targeting schools by implementing gender-fluid bathrooms and woke curricula without consulting parents.  And then that last formidable frontier — the American family, which they hope to destroy by wresting away control of children from parents.  Should that happen, American values and American society as we know it will self-destruct.