RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/28/ii-tipp-poll-americans-want-merit-not-woke-politics-to-decide-college-admissions/

America’s colleges and universities increasingly use non-academic criteria, including gender, family income and race, to decide who gets admitted and who doesn’t. It’s a trend most Americans seem to deeply dislike, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Parents want their kids to face a merit-based admissions policy, over one that is for the lack of a better word, woke.

Indeed, if parents’ preferences mattered to institutions of higher education, schools would be making their admission decisions on such merit-based standards as academic achievements and aptitude, not woke criteria such as race and income or whether an applicant has famous parents.

I&I/TIPP asked American adults a simple question: “To what extent do you support or oppose colleges and universities using the following factors to make admission decisions?”

They then provided the following nine possible college admission criteria: “Race or ethnicity,” “Gender,” “Whether a parent went to the school,” “High school grades,” “Extracurricular activities,” “Athletic ability,” “Household income,” “The applicant is the child of a famous person,” “SAT/ACT scores.”

Possible answers included “Support strongly,” “Support somewhat,” “Oppose somewhat,” “Oppose strongly” and “Not sure.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/critical-thinking-must-replace-critical-race-michael-cutler/

It is becoming all-too apparent that proponents of Critical Race Theory seek the demise of our great Republic. They are using the age-old “divide and conquer” strategy to turn Americans against one another, seeking to instigate conflict and violence to undermine our peaceful society.

There are no winners with this strategy in place — only victims.

Racism is defined as:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized — the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.

Racism is racism, and no matter who bears the brunt of it, is wrong-headed and dangerous. It is inherently and supremely unfair and leads all people, of all races, down a dangerous path of resentment and hostility that likely will ultimately result in violence. Critical Race Theory, or CRT, actually promotes racism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-school-shutdowns-and-lost-literacy-covid-pandemic-amplify-education-reading-11645653340?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Governments made many mistakes in the pandemic, and shutting down schools was arguably the worst. We’re now discovering the damage as studies calculate the learning loss.

Amplify, the curriculum and assessment provider, examined its test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with the literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).”

Before the pandemic, 55% of kindergartners were on track in reading skills. That fell to 37% in 2020–2021 and 47% this school year. The year before the pandemic, only 29% of kindergartners were deemed “far behind” in early literacy skills. That rose to 47% and 37% the first and second year of the pandemic.

Amplify sees some progress this year in reading as the classrooms have reopened. But the troubles persist for this year’s second graders, whose schooling has been dominated by shutdowns and disruptions. Among this Covid cohort, Amplify finds that “the number of students at greatest risk of not learning to read is slightly higher than it was a year ago.” Some 35% of second graders are in literacy crisis this year, up from 26% before the shutdowns.

Like other recent studies, Amplify reports that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. During the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/frisco-frolics-larry-sand/

It started in January 2021, when the school board in San Francisco decided to rename 44 public schools, claiming their namesakes were “unworthy of the honor.” The names of such American icons as Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, et al. were to be placed on the chopping block.

February was no less contentious – and at the same time provided some comic relief – when the art department of the school district bizarrely announced that acronyms such as VAPA (visual and performing arts) are “a symptom of white supremacy.” The month also saw the school board decide that top-rated Lowell High School should no longer admit students based on their academic performance. Instead, the school was to use a lottery to admit them. This, of course, was very discriminatory toward Asian American students who made up 50.6 percent of its student body at the time. And if February wasn’t already absurd, the city government of San Francisco sued its own school board to reopen schools. After 327 days the city fathers and mothers decided that enough was enough. But in reality, kids, especially minorities, were not terribly well educated in Fog City before the shut down – just 19 percent of blacks passed a recent state test in reading – so perhaps the school board figured eliminating in-person learning couldn’t do that much more damage.

Then, in March, it was revealed that school board member Allison Collins had made some rather nasty comments on Twitter about Asian Americans in 2016, and left the posts intact five years hence. She accused them of many things, including the use of “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board was pretty much forced to do something, but they didn’t fire her or take away any of her six-figure salary; they merely removed her as vice president, and stripped her of committee assignments. March went out like a lion when Collins filed a lawsuit against the district and five fellow board members, asking for $87 million in damages for violating her free speech rights. Among other things, her lawsuit alleged that the demotion caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and – I am not making this up – “spiritual injury to her soul.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-related-mandatory-top-medical-schools-report

At least 23 of America’s 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education. 

“The racialization of medical school education is troubling. It’s one thing to recognize the health needs of different populations, it’s entirely different to inject racial politics into medical care. Demanding that medical school students become activists is dangerous,” William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. 

At least 23 of America’s 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training of coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org. (iStock)

Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and founder of the Legal Insurrection website, founded CriticalRace.org’s sprawling database that previously examined elite K-12 private schools and 500 of America’s top undergraduate programs. 

“The mantra of the so-called ‘antiracism’ movement has no place in medicine. Current racial discrimination in order to remedy past racial discrimination is wrong generally, but is downright dangerous in medicine,” Jacobson added. 

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. Of the top 25 colleges and universities, 23 had some sort of mandatory training and 21 have offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-judge-ho-georgetown-racism-ilya-shapiro-cancel-supreme-court-black-woman-justice-11645471956?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

From prepared remarks delivered Feb. 15 by Judge Jim Ho of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to the Federalist Society’s Georgetown Law School chapter:

Months ago, I was scheduled to talk with you all today about a subject that I’m very passionate about. . . . But I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead. . . . I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro, who was recently appointed to serve as executive director and senior lecturer at the Center for the Constitution here at Georgetown. As you all know, there is now a heated debate—first, over the content of a recent tweet that he made and then deleted, and second, over what, if anything, Georgetown should do in response to his tweet. . . .

Ilya has said that he should have chosen different words. That ought to be enough. . . . If you asked Ilya, I am sure he would say that he’s the one standing up for racial equality, and that his opponents are the ones who are supporting racial discrimination. You don’t have to agree with him—but it’s obvious that’s where he’s coming from. And yet I don’t hear Ilya trying to punish others for taking a different view on racial equality. . . .

About a year ago, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “The Importance of a Diverse Federal Judiciary.” I’m honored that the committee invited me, along with four other federal judges, to testify to express my own views on the topic, and I agreed to do so. Here’s what I said:

“Equality of opportunity is fundamental to who we are, and to who we aspire to be, as a nation. . . . But here’s the kicker: Once everyone has had full and fair opportunity to be considered, you pick on the merits. Both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act make clear that it is wrong to hire people based on race.

https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/the-gender-cult-marches-on?utm_source=url

A reader sent me a trove of materials for “Equity Month” courtesy of the Chicago Public School System, available here. It’s worse than you think.

Things to note:

Preschoolers (age 3-5) are to be taught what “Queer” means, what “Non-binary” means and told: “When someone is not a boy or a girl, maybe they feel both, they are non-binary or queer.”
Teachers of preschoolers are told to read from The Story of Harvey Milk, stopping at “Harvey was proud of the flag, and proud of himself.” Are you proud of yourself, little one?
Even Special Needs kids (including the non-verbal and those on the Autism Spectrum, who tend to fixate) are to be instructed to create BLM flags and indoctrinated in the alleged difference between sexuality and gender.
Every single part of the school day becomes a reason to teach children about being transgender, or America’s systemic racism. The lessons are inserted into every part of the day — even P.E., Visual Arts, Drama, Library Lessons and Music. The P.E. materials for grades 4-5 must be seen to be believed:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/14/why-the-well-educated-see-racism-everywhere/

We are repeatedly told that racism is all around us today. It is supposedly systemic, surreptitious and present everywhere, from the boardroom to the university. It can be glimpsed in everything from disparities in income to microaggressions.

But if you dig a little deeper, a different picture emerges. It seems that racism is often in the eye of the beholder. So while some ethnic-minority individuals do indeed perceive racial discrimination everywhere, others do not. Interestingly, a clear disparity emerges when you look at educational attainment.

In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 81 per cent of black American respondents with ‘at least some college experience’ said they experience racial discrimination ‘from time to time’, and 17 per cent said they experience racial discrimination ‘regularly’. In contrast, just 69 per cent of black American respondents educated up to high-school level reported experiencing racial discrimination ‘from time to time’, while fewer than one in 10 said that they regularly experience racial discrimination.

The relationship between attending university and heightened reporting of racial discrimination among ethnic minorities is clear in Britain, too. During my PhD research, based on survey data collected in the aftermath of the 2010 UK General Election, I found that more highly educated ethnic-minority Brits were far more likely to report racial discrimination than other sections of the ethnic-minority population.

https://www.city-journal.org/rocky-top-diversity-equity-inclusion-agenda

Since 2020’s summer of racial unrest, universities across the country have increasingly embraced radical “antiracist” agendas, commonly under the guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies or programs. Even public universities in deep-red states aren’t immune to the trend—as the case of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), discussed in a new report, demonstrates.

In May 2016, Tennessee’s legislature defunded UTK’s fledgling Office of Diversity and Equity for one year, diverting its monies toward minority scholarships. The office’s four employees either left the university or were assigned elsewhere. UTK thus had zero dollars and zero personnel dedicated to DEI during the 2016–2017 school year. While minority scholarships reflect the DEI cast of mind, they are probably a better use of such funds than hiring more DEI personnel.

Shortly after the legislature defunded the office, UTK released a strategic plan, Vol Vision 2020, that listed promoting “Diversity and Inclusion” as one of six priorities. Nevertheless, the school allocated no money to the achievement of that priority and proposed no metrics for its DEI policies. The Chancellor’s Council for Diversity and Inclusion also launched a “Campus Diversity Metrics Plan” but did so outside of the strategic plan process.