RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/digital-technology-to-reverse-pandemic-learning-losses-by-henrietta-h-fore-and-david-malpass-2021-12

When schools around the world moved online due to COVID-19, children in developing countries suffered the most. Even though digital learning does not produce the same outcomes as in-person education, technology used effectively can close educational gaps and prevent learning loss.

WASHINGTON, DC – As the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, classrooms remain fully or partially closed for as many as 647 million schoolchildren around the world. Even where schools have reopened, many students continue to lag behind.

It is now abundantly and painfully clear that children have learned less during the pandemic. According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures could drive up “learning poverty” – the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read a basic text – to around 70% in low- and middle-income countries. This learning loss could cost an entire generation of schoolchildren $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. As the Omicron variant takes hold, more governments may be tempted to close schools. Without the online infrastructure in place to support learning, doing so would extend the educational losses and deny children the many other benefits of daily school attendance, like the possibility to connect with classmates and develop social skills for personal growth. Interactions with teachers and peers are essential to develop the abilities necessary to work collaboratively. Being part of a class promotes a sense of belonging and helps build self-esteem and empathy. Throughout the pandemic, marginalized children have struggled the most. When classrooms around the world reopened this fall, it became clear that these children had fallen even further behind their peers. Before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But school closures placed an estimated ten million more girls at risk of early marriage, which practically guarantees the end of their schooling. Unless this regression is reversed, learning poverty and the associated human capital loss will hold economies and societies back for decades. Children must be given a chance to recover the education they have lost. They need access to well-designed reading materials, digital learning opportunities, and transformed education systems that help prepare them for future challenges. Well-qualified teachers and effective use of technology are fundamental to this process. Many countries have deployed massive stimulus packages in response to the health crisis. But, as of June 2021, less than 3% of these funds was devoted to the education and training sector. And most of these resources were spent in advanced economies.

http://christopherrufo.com

Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”

DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.

The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”

As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students  to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/14/the-logic-of-californias-leftists-will-keep-us-all-children-forever/

Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, and San Diego Unified school districts have found a novel way to improve academic results—they’re getting rid of D and F grades. One imagines this will improve results immediately. On paper.

Reporting from San Francisco, KRON 4 News, writing in semi-literate English, informs us, “If a student fails a test or doesn’t complete their homework, they’ll be able to retake the test and get more time to turn in assignments.” 

The assistant principal at Fremont High School in Oakland, speaking in semi-literate English, told KRON, “Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.” 

I don’t think anyone will dispute that schools are not paying much attention to what kids are learning. But banning Ds and Fs won’t help students as much as it will help teachers and principals in these districts look less awful by comparison, or else make comparisons with schools that retain a full grading system impossible. The real goal is to rescue teachers’ unions and professional administrators from what they’re doing to the kids. 

To take a random example from the English readers on my desk, a seventh grader of a century ago, learning, no doubt, in a one-room schoolhouse with just enough funding for these text books, would have read Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Poe, Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Kipling, Thoreau, Whitman, Washington, Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius, to cite just a small subsection of the included authors. Selections range from stories and poems to nature study, science, and history. These authors have long since gone the way of the D and F grades: Better to eliminate challenging material than create the impression students are failing. Which really means—better to eliminate material than create the impression that teachers are failing to teach their students.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/1619-project-story-weeks-mary-grabar/

“It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s guide for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. “The first step in mitigating harm to children as you teach the hard and triggering history of the enslavement is confronting yourself.” This sentence is bolded.

This guide for those teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is linked at the page of the publisher, the multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House, but is produced by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a criminal, conservative-smearing non-profit. It was the SPLC’s “survey” claiming that students were not being taught about slavery that was used as a pretext to justify The 1619 Project, published as an issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019. A guide for high school teachers is also provided for the 600-page hardcover edition, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

New York Times “race” reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the much-criticized 1619 Project, co-author of the children’s book, and co-editor and contributor to the hardcover edition, accuses those introducing or passing laws forbidding classroom use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory of “censorship.”

At the same time, she has been publicizing a collaborative effort by her publisher, bookstores, and the nonprofit diversebooks.org (which receives donations from Penguin Random House!) to encourage fans to buy and donate her books to “low income classrooms, libraries, and educational organizations.” The non-profit Pulitzer Center, which produced the original curricular materials for over 4,500 schools, has sponsored events for librarians and after-school initiatives, including the “1619 Freedom School.”

Hannah-Jones insisted that the first stop on her nationwide book tour be at West High School in Waterloo, Iowa, where the celebrity author appeared “in conversation” with Mr. Dial, the high school teacher who radicalized her thirty years ago by introducing her to the writings of Lerone Bennett, a 1960s Ebony Magazine polemicist and coiner of the term Black Power. She tweeted on November 22, “Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature might not respect me or my work as they sought first to ban the 1619 Project explicitly and then passed one of these anti-history laws, but my community always supports and I can’t wait to see you all.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-schools-without-de-blasio-education-gap-chancellor-banks-charter-mayor-adams-11639518269?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

New York’s departing mayor, Bill de Blasio, has spent eight years at loggerheads with law enforcement and school reformers. When he wasn’t siding with Black Lives Matter demonstrators at antipolice protests, the mayor was busy thwarting the expansion of high-performing charter schools, attacking gifted-and-talented middle-school programs and denouncing public high schools that admit students based on a standardized test score.

This was all done in the name of racial equity, but New Yorkers apparently have tired of wokeness-driven governance. Last month, voters opted to replace Mr. de Blasio with a former police officer, Eric Adams, who in turn has tapped education innovator David Banks to be the city’s next schools chancellor. Mr. Banks is a former teacher and principal who founded the six-school Eagle Academy network, which serves low-income black and Hispanic boys in New York City and Newark, N.J. Eagle Academy is a network of public schools that, like charter schools, operates mostly outside the strictures of the traditional public-school system, which Mr. Banks believes has long ill-served minority communities.

Unlike Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Banks has not called for dumbing down the admissions standards of the city’s elite public high schools to produce more racial balance. He wants to expand gifted-and-talented programs rather than phase them out. He is refreshingly outspoken about the city’s bloated and unaccountable school bureaucracy, which operates as though public education were, first and foremost, a jobs program for adults. That 65% of black and Hispanic students in New York never reach proficiency on standardized tests is “a betrayal” of those kids, he said last week, joking that “if everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results.” Or maybe he wasn’t joking.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s 800-pound public-education gorilla, did not endorse Mr. Adams in the Democratic primary. Michael Mulgrew, the UFT’s president, was conspicuously absent from the news conference announcing Mr. Banks’s appointment. That chilly reception from the teachers union is one reason education reformers tell me they are cautiously optimistic about the Adams administration. One early test of the new mayor’s resolve will be how hard he fights to lift the cap on charter schools in the city, where no new ones can open even though more than 163,000 children are on waiting lists, according to the school-choice advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.

A related test will be whether Mr. Adams can find locations for any new charter schools that get approved. In New York, where space is at a premium, charter schools often seek to co-locate in buildings where traditional public schools are operating below capacity. Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a champion of charters and accelerated their expansion though this co-location process. One of the ways that Mr. de Blasio kept charter growth in check was by denying operators space in underused public-school buildings. A 2018 report by the Manhattan Institute noted that “in the last five years of the Bloomberg administration, 150 co-locations were approved, an average of 30 per year. In the first five years of the de Blasio administration, 59 co-locations were approved, an average of 12 per year.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-dissident-voice-at-cornell/?itm_source=parsely-api

The administration at Cornell University has gone absolutely mad with its “antiracism” crusade. Critical race theory education becomes mandatory, and it even appears to think it can compel people to accept the curriculum.

Law professor Bill Jacobson is speaking out against this astounding perversion of academic values. He explains what has been going on at Cornell in this Legal Insurrection article:

Here is a slice from his statement in opposition to the administration’s reeducation mandates:

Proposal F starts with the compulsion that “Faculty must understand structural racism and the forces of systemic bias and privilege” (emphasis added). Later, Proposal F “requires” that faculty accept that “structural racism, colonialism, and injustice, and their current manifestations have a historical and relational basis.” That CRT worldview, which in its current incarnation is often misleadingly referred to as “antiracism,” is off the table for debate under this proposal. Rather, CRT becomes the official ideology of the University. The rest of the proposal dictates how that mandate will be implemented, including dictating “a framework for interacting with other faculty, with students, with members of the staff, and the broader community” with the faculty “educational requirement . . . to support the faculty in this effort.” Why such compulsion? This campus already is awash in CRT-driven programs, courses, events, workshops, and faculty and student activism, and the separately proposed Center will further the breadth of CRT-based education.

If I were a Cornell grad, I’d let the school know that I would never donate another dollar to them and would try to convince as many Cornellians that the place is no longer worth supporting.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/will-2022-be-the-greatest-year-for-education-reform-in-a-generation/

The resistance to critical race theory, building on traditional priorities like school choice, is driving a revitalized conservative education movement.

T he conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, has shaped the way that conservative policy-makers think about education: Workforce preparation, test scores, and other utilitarian concerns are often prioritized over character formation and civic virtue, while the question of what we are teaching our children has taken a backseat to the content-neutral language of school choice and decentralization. This framework, Yuval Levin writes, has “made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, at times blinding some of those involved in education debates to the deepest human questions at stake — social, moral, cultural, and political questions that cannot be separated from how we think about teaching and learning.”

All of that is beginning to change. A backlash to critical race theory (CRT) at the grassroots level, with help from activists like Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, has forced the radicalization of the American public-school curriculum to the forefront of the national political conversation. The debates over CRT have also opened up broader questions of what (and how) we teach American students about their country, initiating a serious conservative counteroffensive against the Left’s monopolistic control of American politics and history curricula, with states like Florida and Texas pairing anti-CRT laws with new programs aimed at renewing civic literacy in public education. What began with local, parent-led organizing has grown into a national movement with enormous political momentum.

The anti-CRT backlash “crystallized this feeling that we have an agenda that we can cohere around,” Rufo told National Review. “All of the various threads on conservative education reform can now unite around the framework of critical race theory to make real change and actually get bills passed through state legislatures.” To date, eleven states have enacted bans or restrictions on CRT, and Rufo thinks “we’re going to get another five to ten states passing them in the coming year.”