RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/witch-closet-larry-sand/

I was afraid of witches as a child. Indeed, I was convinced that there was an old crone hanging out in my bedroom closet just waiting to pounce. Not sure where or how it began, but it ended when I decided to take every bit of clothing and assorted junk out of my closet to convince myself that there was no witch stirring her cauldron there. Tragically, kids today have so much more than one imaginary hag scaring the living daylights out of them. In fact, there are enough witches these days to make a sizable coven.

Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gets to the meat of the matter in “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” He writes that “this pedagogy of the depressed—America the Problematic—is thought to be a virtue among professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication.” He goes on to point out that “contemporary education fetishizes the bad and the broken in American life.” Clearly this has become all the rage. At the heart of the problem is that it really isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. The doomsters see only problems to be solved. Teaching about the existing good – and even celebrating it – is nowhere to be found in the indoctrinator’s playbook.

A major source of fear in children is climate change, which used to be known as global warming, and before that, global cooling. According to a British poll, one in five children have nightmares about climate change. Another survey reveals that 59% of people aged 16-25 are very or extremely worried and 84% are at least moderately worried about atmospheric change. “More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change.” A full 75% said that they think “the future is frightening.” The reality is, yes, the climate is changing, but then again, it always has. And, while it is possible that we may need to do some very  minor adjusting, the academic alarmists and their hysterical media toadies are doing damage far greater than anything climate change will ever do.

The “America is racist” mantra has been exploited maximally by all the usual suspects. School children are placed in groups, labeled oppressors and victims, and taught that America’s system is rigged against persons of color. For example, an elementary school in Cupertino, California – a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million – recently forced a class of third-graders to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege.’” This type of scaremongering has worked, according to the “Coming Together: Family Reflections on Racism” study conducted by Sesame Workshop, which reports that 86% of children believe that people of different races are not treated fairly in this country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-new-politics-of-school-choice/#slide-1

It is surging in popularity as parents become more activist.

Jessica Bagos is the kind of mom who may be on the verge of transforming K–12 education. “I grew up in public schools, and I’ve always been a proponent of the public-school system,” she says. Then came the Covid-19 lockdowns. The public schools closed in Royal Oak, Mich., the Detroit suburb where she lives. When her twin sons were ready to enter kindergarten at the beginning of the last school year, the schools stayed closed. Her boys could connect with a teacher by video conference, but they couldn’t attend class in person. “You can’t put five-year-olds in front of monitors for hours and hours every day,” she says. Yet for months, her daily challenge was to stop them from wrestling with each other and instead keep them fixed to screens while she tried to hold down a full-time job from her home. “I used to cry in the mornings,” says Bagos. “Then I got mad.”

Last September, she and her husband sued Michigan’s government in federal court, joining several other parents who had suffered from their own frustrations. They seek to overturn an amendment to their state’s constitution that forbids them to pay for private education with money from a state-sponsored savings plan. For more than half a century, the amendment has blocked Michiganders from enjoying any form of school choice (apart from the kind paid for with personal funds) outside the public-school system. Meanwhile, other parent activists in Michigan have launched a petition drive that could create a $500 million program of educational savings accounts (ESAs), allowing families to pay for more kinds of education expenses for their kids, such as transportation costs, speech therapy, and tuition at Catholic schools and cosmetology colleges. Ben DeGrow, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the state’s free-market think tank, says that these combined efforts may lead to a watershed moment: “Everything about education in Michigan could change this year.”

It turns out that education already is changing in a lot of other states: Last year, 18 states enacted or expanded school-choice programs.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_progressives_reverse_midas_touch_in_education.html

Every 3 years, an international assessment of the academic performance of 15-year-old students in the academic fields of reading, science, and mathematics, known as the Program for International Student assessment (PISA) is administered.  79 countries around the world participate in the assessments, most of them developed, economically prosperous first world or developing second world nations. 

As of the latest PISA assessment in 2018, the United States churned out some alarming results.  Of the 79 countries, the average score (of reading, writing, and math) for the United States was 495, which put us at a ranking of 25th internationally.  For Mathematics, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (the organization that administers the assessments) data, the United States ranked 37th internationally, for science, we ranked 18th internationally, and for reading, we ranked 13th internationally.  Thus, for all 3 assessments, we didn’t even break the top 10 in terms of student achievement in 2018. 

We are better than this, we have been better than this, and, if we reclaim the public education system from the Marxists, cretins and left-wing airheads running it currently, we will be better than this.  Now, many may wonder: what are the root causes of these dismal results? 

The answer is: there are several causal factors. The fact that American children do not go to school year-round and have a 3-month gap in their education during the summer does not help, and neither does the fact that most inner-city schools have dismal performances, which negatively impacts the overall scoring in the United States. 

However, the American educational system has suffered devastating blows to in the past few years through the depredations of the left.  Left wing Marxists have systematically destroyed the public education system in America within half a decade.  It was a Blitzkrieg unparalleled since World War II and Americans are still reeling from its effects. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/antiwhite_racism_at_nyu_.html

In the United States, “if you’re white, leave; it’s really that simple,” announced Regan de Loggans, an activist with New York City’s Indigenous Kinship Collective, a “community of Indigenous womxn, femmes, and gender non conforming folx” who “denounce colonial power structures of leadership and blood quantum.”

Her belligerence captured the intersectional radicalism of the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change’s 2022 colloquium on “Resisting Settler Colonialism,” a February 9 NYU Law School webinar at which she and allied activists and academics spoke.

Moderating the webinar, Georgia State University Law School professor Natsu Taylor Saito introduced the self-identified “two-spirit” de Loggans, whose preferred pronouns are “they/themme.” Saito described de Loggans as an “indigequeer agitator” involved in “decolonizing, indigenizing, and queering institutions and territorial practices.” De Loggans later declared that she is also an “anti-Zionist Jew” who “advocate[s] extremely for the liberation of Palestine.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/university-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-staff-frontpagemagcom/

A recent Heritage Foundation study found strong anti-Israel bias in the social media posts of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) officials at colleges and universities throughout the United States. These officials criticize Israel far more frequently and far more severely than they do China. Their posts about Israel exceed those mentioning China by a factor of three, and almost all of their statements about Israel express condemnation, whereas nearly two-thirds of their comments on China convey praise.

These disturbing findings should surprise no one. U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of hostility toward the state of Israel as well as toward the idea of American exceptionalism, and in the radical religion of the campus, far-left professors are the priests and DEI officers are the choir.

This religion has its orthodoxies: America is systemically racist and defined by perpetual struggle of oppressed against oppressors; “white privilege”—for which Jews should be regarded as an exemplar—is a chief source of oppression, and status-based intersectional categories of victimhood confer both justness and entitlement. Under this neo-Marxist paradigm, there is no hint of irony when officials putatively devoted to fostering “diversity” and “inclusion” instead promote hostility toward Israel or regard as obnoxious the idea that the allegedly privileged Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/federal-judge-james-ho-surprises-georgetown-law-with-speech-defending-ilya-shapiro/

Guest speaker scraps original remarks in favor of unequivocal statement on freedom of speech and declares, ‘I stand with Ilya.’

F ederal judge James C. Ho delivered a robust defense of Ilya Shapiro on Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown Law, which recently suspended the respected legal scholar over a poorly worded tweet.

“I stand with Ilya,” Ho declared.

The subject of his address was a surprise to the audience. The judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had been slated to give a lecture titled “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” in an event organized by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. At the outset, according to prepared remarks exclusively obtained by National Review, Ho said he “was scheduled to talk” about originalism, “but I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead.”

Ho continued, “I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/creating-a-george-floyd-scholarship-sends-black-kids-the-exact-wrong-message/

Kendall Qualls is a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota.

The constant push to virtue signal to the idol of social justice is causing some of our historically trusted institutions of academia, health care, and journalism to lose the public’s trust and is further splintering our nation. Minnesota seems to be in the epicenter of it all.

The Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota recently endowed a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr. It’s the wrong decision and undermines the work of the civil rights movement and what we communicate to black American children across the country.

What happened to George Floyd was a travesty. But it is important we remain disciplined in acknowledging that tragedy. When honoring someone’s life in a scholarship at an institution of higher education, we should honor the sacrifice, achievement, and virtues of a person’s life.

With approximately 50 percent of black students graduating from Minneapolis public schools near the bottom of the country in achievement and approximately 80 percent of black children born in fatherless homes in the twin cities, the University of Minnesota should be lifting up models of character and achievement that convey hope and opportunity, not death and despair.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.