RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/28/the-fate-of-the-nation-rests-on-fixing-public-k-12/

The latest Nation’s Report Card is out and, once again, it shows the appalling state of government-run education in America.

There will be much hand wringing over the devastating impact of foolish COVID-19 policies on student learning. Don’t believe the B.S. It wasn’t COVID that caused these unprecedented declines, it was the public policy response to COVID that drove this destruction.

The cries that “we must do something!” will soon fill the airwaves—with “doing something” generally meaning writing bigger and bigger checks to the public K-12 educational leviathan. They will do this, despite the fact that no correlation between public K-12 spending and student achievement has ever been found.

But it’s clear to anyone who cares to look that public K-12 education has been doing a lousy job for decades. It’s not really a secret. Every single president since at least John Kennedy has had some plan to improve this country’s K-12 public education system. That’s over 60 years and the problem not only persists, it’s gotten worse.

We’ve had “blue ribbon” panels and loads of smart people telling us what must be done for over half a century.

In 1983, “A Nation at Risk” exposed the failures of the public education system. It was supposed to be a wake-up call:

Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament . . . Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.

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

Across the nation, war rages between parents who charge that schools are teaching their children race-based Marxist Critical Race Theory and school boards and educators who deny their accusations. 

Finally, we have definitive proof that students actually are being taught these dangerously divisive concepts.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York  City–based free-market think-tank, commissioned a study of a national sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-olds who were still in high school or had just graduated.  (Of these, 82.4% reported attending public schools.)

The participants were asked whether they had ever been taught in class, or heard from an adult at school, these following six concepts, of which four are central to Critical Race Theory.  The percentages are those who answered “yes.”

1. America is a systemically racist country.  (62%)

2. In America, white people have white privilege.  (69%)

3. In America, white people have biases that negatively affect non-white people.  (57%)

4. America is built on stolen land.  (67%)

5. America is a patriarchal society.  (53%)

6. Gender is an identity choice, regardless of the biological sex you were born into.  (51%)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/toxic_english_departments_and_the_students_who_now_avoid_them.html

The decline in the study of undergraduate English proves the proposition that the Left ruins everything it touches There has been a precipitous drop in the number of English majors across the country, and our “progressive” professors have only themselves to blame.

The National Center for Education Statistics publishes its annual Digest of what undergraduates study. In 1970 there were roughly 840,000 undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States. Of these approximately 64,000 were degrees in English Literature and Language. This made it the fourth most popular major across the country.

Since 1970 there has been a vast increase in the number of undergraduate degrees conferred: over two million in 2020. Yet, despite this huge influx of students, the number of degrees in English has dropped to just over 38,000 in 2020.

If confronted with this decline in student interest, the professors would no doubt point to economic and vocational concerns and to our crass American culture. The unstated premise for this rationale, which is ludicrous on its face, would be that there were no economic or vocational concerns then, and that American culture was somehow less crass in 1970. The professors would shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s not our fault.”

When we were undergraduates at Kenyon College, it had an English Department as formidable as any. The professors were serious about literature, its criticism, and the quality of our written expression. They weren’t interested in nurturing resentment, grinding axes, psychotherapy, or the creation of like-minded political cadres. The materials were chosen based on what Mathew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” We read the best and worked to understand the authors as they understood themselves. English was a very popular major.

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

The currently constituted Supreme Court has enough of a conservative majority that it does seem to be returning to an original list standard of review—that is, the justices are respecting what those who wrote the Constitution, and those who passed the amendments, meant when they acted. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,* for all her chatter, cannot change this. For this reason, it looks as if the court may finally hold that affirmative action in higher education is unconstitutional. However, because we know that ruling will not stop institutions from engaging in affirmative action, one legal thinker has come up with innovative ideas to put the brakes on discrimination in higher education.

At Minding The Campus, Louis K. Bonham, an intellectual property litigator, is optimistic that a return to originalism at the Court will reverse past decisions that paved the way for anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination at America’s colleges and universities, all in the name of “remediating” racism in America. However, he argues (correctly, I believe), that Supreme Court rulings will not stop the academics, who view affirmative action as a religion.

Moreover, suing the institutions won’t help because damages never fall on the people who have made the bad decisions. Bonham, therefore, suggests that, if the Court does end the racist abomination of affirmative action, red states should enact laws very explicitly attacking not just the institutions but also the institutional actors.

The starting point would be laws explicitly making any preferences in academics (both paying jobs and student admissions), whether based on race or victimhood, illegal. Second, Bonham suggests an automatic and severe economic penalty for an institution found to have violated the state law: Students would be entitled to recover 50% of tuition and fees during the period in which the institution was violating the law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-racial-preferences-harvard-university-of-north-carolina-college-admissions-11666905779?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A great triumph of 20th-century American government was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It broke the back of Jim Crow and reasserted the principle that no one should be discriminated against for his race. The Supreme Court has a chance to reaffirm that vital American principle on Monday when it hears challenges to the admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina(Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina).

The case is an important moment for American law but even more for the country’s social and political future. America is becoming increasingly diverse. Yet rather than assimilate this melting pot with race-neutral principles, many in our political class want to divide America into racial categories, allocating jobs, benefits and even elections based on race.

The Biden Administration is trying to embed this practice across the federal government and impose it on the private economy. This is a destructive trend that will inevitably lead to more racial balkanization and enmity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-professors-white-students-are-not-inherently-racist/

One of the Left’s favorite tactics is to define or redefine a word to suit their purposes, then act as though that’s the only possible definition and the rest of us must simply go along.

Take “racism,” for example, or better yet “racist,” an epithet leftists love to hurl at anyone who disagrees with them or even at people they simply don’t like.

Indeed, Campus Reform and other conservative outlets have been reporting for years on university professors and administrators who insist that “all white people are racist.” The latest example comes to us from Dominican University in Illinois, which this fall will host a “White Accountability Group.”

There, white students will “explore how to recognize…white privilege [and] identify and interrupt internalized dominance”—because, you know, they’re all a bunch of racists.

But it’s true that all white people are racists ONLY if we accept the Left’s perverse definition. Otherwise, it’s pure nonsense.

Before we examine what leftists mean by “racism” and why they’re wrong, I’d like to look briefly at a few words they often use more or less interchangeably with “racism” but which don’t actually mean the same thing.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/blue-vs-red-2022-test-scores-show-devastating-toll-of-school-shutdowns

Academic proficiency plummeted in 2022 to among the lowest on record following the coronavirus school shutdowns, and children in Democrat-run states where teachers union demands led to extended school shutdowns bore the brunt, data released Monday from a national test known as the “nation’s report card” showed.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered to fourth and eighth graders every few years, allowing for a comparison of reading and math proficiency by state between 2019 — just before the pandemic — and 2022. The decline in math scores was the sharpest ever since the test began in 1990, and the average math scores were the lowest since 2005. The average eighth grade reading score was the lowest since 1998.

“Today’s NAEP results are the proverbial final nail in the coffin,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who won election in 2021 in a blue-leaning state largely because of fury over Democrats’ education policies, said Monday. “If this doesn’t wake you up, then you’re clearly trying to cover up your own bad decisions. In the business world, if this was your report card, there would be an immediate change in management. You would be fired. And I think that’s what voters did.”

He said leaders kept “schools shut for an unnecessary amount of time, forcing students to learn through a screen and telling them that’s a meaningful education,” and that coronavirus decisions followed decades of similarly bad education decisions.

The map at the top of this article shows how badly the number of fourth-graders who scored at least “basic” in reading fell compared to before the pandemic in each state. Basic is the lowest of the three tiers — basic, proficient, and advanced — and those who do not have even basic reading skills by fourth grade are at risk of serious problems when it comes to employment and higher education later in life.

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/nas-president-peter-wood-addresses-the-pending-racial-preferences-cases

The following are remarks that NAS president Peter Wood presented at a meeting of “Oasis,” an informal group of academics and intellectuals that periodically gathers at the faculty club at New York University.  Dr. Wood was invited to comment on the pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.  The National Association of Scholars filed an amicus brief in the case on the side of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., which represents Asian students who argue that Harvard has unlawfully discriminated against them on the basis of race.  

Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College is scheduled for argument before the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of this month, on Monday the 31st, Halloween. It is a matter of pure coincidence that this month has also brought the release of Halloween Ends, the thirteenth movie in the world’s most commercially successful horror franchise. For those whose filmic education stopped with Ingmar Bergman or Jean-Luc Godard, Halloween tells the tale of the rambunctious Michael Meyers, who likes to murder babysitters on October 31, generally in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Babysitter Laurie Strode, played by the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, has a knack for escaping Mr. Meyers’ knife. One or the other or both of them die at the end of the movies, only to spring back to screen life in the next sequel.

I bring this up, of course, because the parallel is uncanny. Here is a story about a terrifying and seemingly unstoppable force that destroys the lives of young people with impunity. It is met with heroic resistance and is seemingly doomed to be defeated once and for all, only to rise again. It is no small matter that Mr. Meyers owes his longevity to state officials who, over and over again, fail to do their duty. He escapes from an insane asylum, the morgue, incineration, and numerous other seemingly terminal destinations. Racial preferences in college admissions owe their longevity to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, but of course not just her.

I am among those that hope and expect that racial preferences in higher education will end, if not on Halloween proper, at some point in our lifetimes. If next June the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions, of course, that decision will not mean an end to racial preferences anytime soon. But it will be a significant step in the right direction, and it will help those of us who seek to bring more and more pressure on colleges and universities to finish for once and all the Meyers-esque career of racial preferences.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/24/report-covid-19-led-to-major-setback-in-students-grades-test-scores-across-the-country/

The latest national report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as “the nation’s report card,” reveals the full devastating extent of COVID-19 lockdowns on the nation’s education system, with students across the country seeing a significant drop in grades and test scores.

According to the Associated Press, math scores saw the largest decrease in recent history, with four out of ten eighth-graders failing to grasp basic math concepts. In addition, average reading scores dropped to their lowest levels since 1992. No state saw an improvement in academic performance.

This is NAEP’s first national report since 2019, with no report given in 2020 or 2021 due to the severe restrictions on education as a result of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Thus, as the first comprehensive national report on educational standards since the pandemic began, this year’s national report card paints a dire picture for the state of education as it struggles to recover, even a year after the pandemic more or less ended.

“It is a serious wakeup call for us all,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement. In math, we experienced an 8-point decline — historic for this assessment.”

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, describing the results of the study as “not acceptable,” used the findings as proof that the federal government needs to continue giving billions in aid to local schools to recover.

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

By chance, I was looking for the Cowboys pre-game show and ended up at “Face the Nation.”  What I saw was rather interesting and a good sign about the upcoming midterms.  This is from Fox News:    

A “Face the Nation” focus group featuring a Republican, Democrat and an independent unanimously agreed that “woke culture” has become a prime concern for parents raising children in America.

In a segment called “Eye on America: Election Influencers,” CBS host Margaret Brennan asked a group of parents to get candid about the issues they’ll prioritize when voting and their struggles raising kids in a post-pandemic era.

John, a Texas Republican, cited the “woke” overhaul of U.S. education as a key issue for parents.   

“The whole woke culture affecting our children, all these elementary, middle schools having woke culture pushed on them from the LGBTQ+ community for sexual identify and gender. We should be pushing the actual school studies. Math, social studies, science,” he said. “Not gender studies.”

Lashawn, an Illinois Democrat and mother of eight, largely agreed.  “I can agree with some of his points,” she said. “I will say sex education, I feel like some things are brought to the children’s attention they wouldn’t even think about.”

“Children are really influenced,” she continued. “You can teach them one thing at home, but when they go to school, they’re just as much influenced by their teachers and their surroundings.”

Lashawn said parents should have more of a say over what children are taught.

Stephanie, an independent from Arkansas, also agreed, spotlighting the struggles children are facing as they get back in their classrooms after extended school closures.