RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.    

https://www.city-journal.org/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools

To what extent, if at all, are critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology being taught or promoted in America’s schools? With little data available, and no agreement about what constitutes the teaching of critical social justice (CSJ) ideas, the answer up to now has remained open to political interpretation.

Motivated by the work of Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo, many on the right allege that CRT-related concepts—such as systemic racism and white privilege—are infiltrating the curricula of public schools around the country. Educators following these curricula are said to be teaching students that racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are fundamentally the result of racism, and that white people are the privileged beneficiaries of a social system that oppresses blacks and other “people of color.” On gender, they are being taught that gender identity is a choice, regardless of biological sex. But are the cases Rufo and others point to representative of American public schools at large—or are they merely outliers amplified by right-wing media?

The response to these charges from many on the left has been to deny or downplay them. CRT, they contend, is a legal theory taught only in university law programs. Therefore, what conservatives are up in arms about is not the teaching of CRT, but the teaching of America’s uncomfortable racial history.

But strong connections exist between the cultural radicalism of CRT and the one-sided, decontextualized portrayal of American history and society that Democratic activists endorse. And these ideas have also influenced many Democratic voters. Indeed, according to a 2021 YouGov survey, large majorities of Democratic respondents support public schools’ teaching many of the morally and empirically contentious ideas to which opponents of CRT object. These include the notions that racism is systemic in America (85 percent support), that all disparities between blacks and whites are caused by discrimination (72 percent), that white people enjoy certain privileges based on their race (85 percent), and that they have a responsibility to address racial inequality (87 percent).

Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they are hardly “settled facts” on the same epistemic plane as heliocentrism, natural selection, or even climate change. To the contrary, they are a moral-ideological just-so theory of group differences, an all-encompassing worldview akin to a secular religion, whose claims can’t be measured, tested, or falsified. They treat an observed phenomenon (disparate group outcomes) as evidence of its cause (racism), while specifying causal mechanisms that are nebulous, if not magical. Their advocates have not refuted counterarguments; they’ve merely asserted empirically unverified statements about the nature of group differences.

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.