RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-student-writes-a-good-paper/

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM:A Student Writes a Good Paper Fearing the consequences, she hides. by Danusha V. Goska

Professor Josephine K knew what she was hired to teach. She was hired to teach Jonathan Kozol. Kozol is a recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and multiple fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Field, and Ford Foundations. Kozol’s website identifies him as “one of the nation’s most eloquent and outspoken advocates for equality and racial justice in our nation’s schools.” According to Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Thernstrom, Kozol is a “guru” in university education departments. A survey of departmental reading lists shows Kozol’s name on every one. Chances are that anyone studying to be a teacher in the United States will be required to read Kozol. Indeed, Amazon reviewers of Kozol’s books sometimes mention that his books were required reading for a university class.

Education students reading Kozol’s works learn that America is an “apartheid” country. They learn that “there are expensive children and there are cheap children.” They learn that children are cheap because of “governmentally administered diminishment in the value of children.” Poor children are “locked out of opportunity … for no reason but … the budgetary choices of the government.” Kozol’s readers learn that there are two flavors of human in the US: rich, greedy, racist white victimizers, and poor, disenfranchised, powerless black victims. Rich whites send their kids to early education programs beginning at age two or three. “Low income children” “are denied opportunities” and thus “come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities.” Poor children “spend years at home in front of a TV” or in “a slum apartment gazing down into the street.” These deprived childhoods are caused by “high officials of our government” who “rob” black children “of what they gave their own kids.”

Black students, on average consistently perform less well than whites, East-Asian Americans, and Hispanics, on average. Teachers, administrators, and politicians want to solve this achievement gap. A new proposed solution appeared: performance-based learning. Performance-based learning is defined as “emphasizing students being able to do, or perform, specific skills as a result of  instruction.” That is, students learn something, and then demonstrate their mastery through action. Kozol describes this method as having been devised by racist whites to “humiliate” black children who cannot possibly learn anything in America’s schools as they are currently constituted. “There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education.”

Prof. Josephine K’s students learned from Kozol’s National-Book-Award-winning publications that the achievement gap between blacks and other ethnic groups exists because of malicious whites working to hurt blacks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-schools-antiracist-curriculums-education-teachers-students-open-minded-free-speech-racial-equity-systemic-racism-11663254720?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I was educated in the school district ranked by Niche.com as America’s third-best. Immigrants from around the world come to Great Neck, N.Y., to raise their children. My best friend’s father was at the Tiananmen Square massacre. My classmates left behind their families in El Salvador. My mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and my grandfather escaped the Nazis.

Lately, though, the area’s diverse and liberal-minded residents may have reason to think their local school officials aren’t as open-minded as they thought. In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.” I was the student government’s treasurer, and I felt we didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds. So I refused to sign the check.

In response, the teachers who advise the student government berated, bullied and insulted me at our next meeting, which took place over Zoom for my parents to overhear. They began by announcing that my social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told me that the principal himself found my stance “appalling.” I had made them and the school “look bad,” they told me. One teacher said the situation gave her “hives.”

When I suggested that students might not need or want a lecture on systemic racism, my social-studies teacher asked whether I’d also oppose a Holocaust survivor’s presentation.

I objected to that comparison, but she cut me off: “If you’re not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend.”

https://www.city-journal.org/michigan-education-department-radical-gender-teacher-training

The Michigan Department of Education has adopted a radical gender theory program that promotes gender “fluidity” beginning in elementary school and encourages teachers to facilitate the sexual transition of minors without parental consent.

I have obtained videos and internal documentation from the state’s training program, which first took place in 2020 and was repackaged for public school employees for the 2021–2022 school year. The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory: the presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that “gender is binary” in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of “intersectionality,” a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to “dismantle systems of oppression,” which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education. (In a statement, the Michigan Department of Education defended the program as “respecting all children” and “meet[ing] the needs of their LGBTQ+ students.”)

The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary. In one presentation, trainer Amorie Robinson, who describes herself as a “Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered lesbian baby boomer” and uses the “African name” Kofi Adoma, says that “we’ve been conditioned and we’ve been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary.” But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including identities such as “gender non-binary,” “gender fluid,” “gender queer,” “gender non-conforming,” and “bi-gender.” Likewise, sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories. Students might identify as “asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and skoliosexual,” says Robinson. “I’ll leave that to you to go Google on those. Because we ain’t got time today!”

Next, Robinson and Kim Phillips-Knope, project lead of the LGBTQ+ Students Project, share a series of TikTok videos featuring adolescents exploring their sexual identity. “I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay,” says one. “Last night at about 2 a.m., I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender,’ which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the gray area between genders,” says another individual. “Hi, my name is Elise,” says another. “I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today. And I have never been happier with how my body looks since I was a kid.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-secret-curriculum/

School is starting, but don’t count on getting answers about what your child is being taught. School administrators commonly lie or give parents the runaround.

That explains the fireworks over Jeremy Boland, a Greenwich, Connecticut, elementary school assistant principal, bragging about how the school pushes kids to think in a “progressive” way that he hopes will make them Democratic voters.

The school’s hiring process, he explains in a video, is geared to accomplish indoctrination. Prospective teachers who are Catholics or over 30 are disqualified. They’re too set in their ways, he says. Catholics are unlikely to “acknowledge a child’s gender preferences” or go against parents. He says, “You don’t hire them.”

When the video was released last week, Greenwich authorities immediately put their free-speaking assistant principal on leave. But Peter Sherr, who served on the Greenwich Board of Education for 12 years until last December, attests that Boland’s comments are very accurate. “I can say with a high degree of confidence that Mr. Boland is not alone,” he said.

The video, made by the undercover investigative nonprofit Project Veritas, is part of a “Secret Curriculum” series. Another video shows Jenn Norris, director of student activities at New York City’s Trinity School, swearing she’d never allow a Republican speaker at the school. “Not on my watch.”

Secrecy is a problem across the country. Officials discourage parents’ inquiries and throw up roadblocks to those who persist.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/10/yokel-wokeism/

On April 8, a Hillsdale College professor named David Azerrad gave a spirited lecture at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, advancing arguments conservatives have heard many times before. In his talk, Azerrad attacked practices such as affirmative action, disparate-impact law, and other privileges that have been accorded to non-white Americans as supposed recompense for past racist injustices.

Azerrad used some provocative rhetoric, including the phrase “black privilege” (a play on the ubiquitous “white privilege”), a reference to America’s “semi-official racial hierarchy,” and observed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ skin color was one reason she was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate. He ended with an exhortation that no American should find controversial: “We either develop the stomach for color-blindness, treating everybody equally under the law, not discriminating . . . or we decide to tear down our civilization in this mad quest to achieve equal racial outcomes.”

The talk was part of a conference at St. Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, a conservative institute for research and education that has hosted many contentious speakers and debates in decades past. It was slotted as the 2022 installment of CPET’s Culture and Policy series, titled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis.” The conference featured a number of high-profile speakers, including health-policy expert Scott Atlas and Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker, who attacked politicians’ use of the COVID-19 pandemic to unjustly seize and centralize power. As a Latrobe resident and adjunct professor at St. Vincent, I attended the conference and had lunch with Azerrad just before he spoke.

The aftermath of the talk was far more momentous than the talk itself, which generated a heated question-and-answer session but not the usual chants, disruptive behavior, or physical violence that are now commonplace on American campuses. Graduating senior Joseph LaForest informed me, “Many more St. Vincent students supported Dr. Azerrad’s talk than the media has reported. Groupthink is not something that characterizes me or my peers.” Azerrad confirmed this as well: he stayed at St. Vincent for a couple days after his talk and numerous students and faculty came up to greet and thank him.

The university administration, on the other hand, lost its mind.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/higher-ed-new-woke-loyalty-oaths-dei

In 2021, the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine—ranked fourth in the country for primary care—released a 24-page “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan,” listing dozens of “tactics” for advancing “diversity and racial equity” over the ensuing half-decade. One of those tactics reads: “Include a section in promotion packages where faculty members report on the ways they are contributing to improving DEI, anti-racism and social justice.” The plan promises to “reinforce the importance of these efforts by establishing clear consequences and influences on promotion packages.”

OHSU’s policy represents the latest stage in the institutional entrenchment of DEI programming. Universities have long required diversity statements for faculty hiring—short essays outlining one’s contributions to DEI and future plans for advancing DEI. Since it began almost a decade ago, the policy has been criticized as a thinly veiled ideological litmus test. Whether you see it as one largely depends on whether you think DEI is simply a set of corporate “best practices” like any other, or constitutes a rigid set of political and social views. In any event, the diversity statements and criteria have only expanded, and are now commonly required for promotion, tenure, and faculty evaluation.

A quick search for academic jobs inevitably yields dozens or hundreds of positions that require diversity statements. In November 2021, the American Enterprise Institute conducted a survey of faculty jobs and found that 19% required them, a number that is likely to grow. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, applicants seeking positions in chemical and biomolecular engineering must submit a one-page “Statement describing candidate’s approach to and experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.” At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, despite a new law that prohibits requiring job applicants “to endorse a specific ideology or political viewpoint,” applicants for a job in political science must submit a “statement concerning experience with and plans for contributing to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Meanwhile, every open faculty position listed by Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, including roles in econometrics, freshwater biology, and astronomy, requires some variation of a statement “articulating the applicant’s demonstrated commitments and capacities to contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion through research, teaching, mentoring, and/or outreach and engagement.”

https://spectatorworld.com/life/trinity-school-gets-anti-woke-comeuppance-veritas/?utm_source=Spectator+

The Trinity School in New York City was founded in 1709 by William Huddleston to instruct the children of poor parishioners of Trinity Church, located at the top of Wall Street. The school ceased its affiliation with the Episcopal Church 1968, though it still has an Episcopal priest, salaried by the Church, to conduct its weekly chapel services. Trinity is the fifth oldest school in the United States and the oldest in New York in terms of continuous operation.

I myself was enrolled at Trinity in all twelve grades. I received a top-flight education at Trinity in the 1950s and ’60s from a superb faculty most of whom I recall with respect and in many cases real affection, as I do the school itself. Yet I have also disapproved of every change it has made since my departure decades ago, beginning with the trustees’ decision to take the place co-ed in 1971. The very strict and rigorous curriculum — five, six, and seven hours of homework nightly — gave me more than enough to occupy my mind without having the female element to contend with.

Several days ago, a man with whom I entered the first grade forwarded me a letter addressed to the “Dear Members of the Trinity School Community.” The letter below the salutation began, “Regrettably…” I have learned from long experience that the word is one that heads of institutions such as John Allman’s have frequent occasion to employ. And indeed, on this particular one, Mr. Allman had a very great deal to regret.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/bidens_new_title_ix_proposals_will_codify_the_gender_derangement_of_the_left.html

If there is anything that has advanced American society, you can be sure that ‘woke’ leftists will destroy it. So it is with Title IX – a one-sentence statute of the Education Amendments of 1972 that ended sex-based discrimination in educational institutions, opened the doors for women aspiring to become doctors, engineers, or experts in any field of choice, brought parity to college sports, and launched the battle against sexual harassment. In this fiftieth year of that landmark law, the Biden administration wants to rewrite it to suit the radical leftist ideology of gender identity and fluidity.

This is dangerous because it codifies the spreading gender derangement of the left. Worse, it will immerse young minds in learning environments that condition them to believe, without critical thinking, that the biological idea of sex is false. It will unleash other complications as well.

Already, Americans are suffering the tyranny of ‘woke’ ideology. We have reached the abyss in which some people can’t (or won’t) define what a man or a woman is. Girls are forced to share private spaces with biological males. Teachers are cancelled or fired for using the wrong pronouns. Schools are hiding their curricula from the public and parents, who they think might object. Sadly, the insanity extends to parents losing custody of their children for opposing capriciously imposed (and dangerous) gender transitions. The codification of ‘woke’ gender will only cause the unending stream of such cases to proliferate.

Even scientists are succumbing to such ideology. Recently, the Scientific American mocked binary sex roles in Western science, taking us into the theater of the absurd. The once respected magazine quoted medical anthropologist (gasp!) Katrina Karkazis saying, “Our bodies are far more variable than our categories. Part of what has happened is people become slotted into this binary framework.” Can she possibly mean that a scientifically and religiously accepted fact – that there are two sexes, male and female – is categorically wrong?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trillion-dollar-bailout-idiot-machine-daniel-greenfield/

Government institutions are in the business of making things worse in order to collect more money to make them better. We declared war on poverty and impoverished ourselves. After promising to fix homelessness, the streets are covered in needles and human waste.

Nowhere is this truer than in education.

Education results are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on them. New York has the highest per pupil spending at $25,645 and the second lowest literacy rate in the country. Utah has the lowest per pupil spending in the nation and a 90% literacy rate.

Good thing the education market is set to hit almost $2 trillion by 2025. At 10% of GDP, we will spend far more than China (4% of GDP) with much worse outcomes to show for it. But Educrats will claim that if we only spent 25% of our GDP, Johnny would finally be able to read. All that’s  holding him back is that Chicago public school teachers with an MA only make $89,083.

The American Federation of Teachers put out a study claiming that funding levels should cause New York school districts to “perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and reading exams.” They did not. And no matter how much money is wasted, they never will. You can’t buy literacy with subsidies for a broken education system. At any level.

Ever since Bill Clinton told working class people that manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back, so they all better go to college and learn to write lesbian feminist poetry, the number of college enrollees and graduates has shot up. So have their illiteracy rates.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2022/08/30/diversity-over-careers-at-duke-n1625216

The Career Center at Duke University was slated to get some new digs. This is a good thing since its function is to help shepherd students into actual careers, which is ostensibly why people go to college in the first place. The career center’s page states:

“The Career Center, working in partnership with faculty and colleagues, provides career advising to all Duke undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni. Recognizing the unique talents and needs of each individual, the Career Center encourages students to make the most of their Duke experience by accessing relevant campus resources, developing career interests and values, and establishing and maintaining important human relationships with their peers as well as Duke faculty, staff, and alumni. The Career Center works to build and maintain relationships with alumni and employers who can provide internships and learning opportunities, entry-level positions, and opportunities for experienced professionals.”

Presumably, accessing the Career Center can help you get a job so you can make money, eat, rent an apartment, buy a home, contribute to society, and allegedly pay your student loans. Okay, go ahead and laugh.

According to the Duke Chronicle, the Career Center was supposed to take over the space on the first floor of the Bryan Center that had been previously occupied by the Office of Student Affairs. That did not sit well with the student body, which claimed the space had been promised to student groups that had been demanding a place to gather for decades.