RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the president must lead from behind, could he at least get behind someone who wants to win the war against Islamic extremism?

It continues, dreadfully. Islamic State’s advancing war on civilization—despite the Obama administration’s protestations that it has been stanched—brazenly pushes the modern world toward despair.

Now Islamic State, or ISIS, announces it has taken 86 more Christians hostage, their likely fate a grisly martyrdom. On the same day, June 8, at the G-7 summit, President Obama admitted that he lacks a “complete strategy” to defeat the Islamic extremists now bedeviling Iraq, much of the rest of the Middle East, and beyond.

Princeton University is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Its alumni include two former U.S. presidents and three current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and the college’s rejection rate of undergraduate applicants is among the highest in the country. About 97% of its students graduate.
But the accreditor that Princeton needs on its side so students can continue getting access to federal loans and grants told college officials in 2009 to improve documentation of how much students were learning.

Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s president at the time, says she was told by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to emulate another college, which had filled an entire room with black, three-ring binders stuffed with documents. The reviewers said nothing about what was in those binders, stressing only the quantity of the data inside them, she recalls.

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive

Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

Those problems are blamed by critics for deepening the student-debt crisis as college costs soared during the past decade. Last year alone, the U.S. government sent $16 billion in aid to students at four-year colleges that graduated less than one-third of their students within six years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of the latest available federal data.

Nearly 350 out of more than 1,500 four-year colleges now accredited by one of six regional commissions have a lower graduation rate or higher student-loan default rate than the average among the colleges that were banished by the same accreditors since 2000, the Journal’s analysis shows.

For Tony Blair and European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), “tolerance” seems not to be freedom of expression, but an Orwellian standard of behavior to be rigidly enforced and regulated by government, in which group rights trump individual rights.

Under government-enforced “tolerance,” extremists would flourish, honest critics would be silenced, freedom of expression would be criminalized, and, in deference to “groups,” the individual would lose his right to be an individual.

In a recent case before London’s High Court, a judge ruled that an illegal immigrant who beat his own son should be forgiven because of the “cultural context.” In other words, the law should protect only white children; the ruling implicitly condones the beating of minority children — all in the name of diversity and tolerance.

What if a team of Chinese agents had broken into the Pentagon or — less box office but just as bad — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and carted out classified documents?

The next day, the newspapers and morning TV shows would show pictures of the broken locks and rummaged filing cabinets. And if we caught the Chinese spies in the act, perp-walking them for the world to see? Boy howdy.

My hunch is that the airwaves would be full of people talking about how “this was an act of war.” And I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed and we had sent our team to Beijing, the Chinese would definitely see it as an act of war.

The recent Chinese cyberattack that compromised the data of as many as 4.2 million public employees — one of the biggest thefts of federal data in U.S. history — has given new urgency to longstanding concerns over the cybersecurity of HealthCare.gov and several state exchanges. Public records obtained by National Review over the past two years, as well as reports from inspectors general and news outlets, detail myriad health-sector breaches that have already occurred.

Probing the security breach at the Office of Personnel Management, the House Oversight Committee concluded Tuesday that “state sponsored and non-state sponsored hackers are aggressive, motivated, persistent, and well-funded in their attempt to breach government and commercial systems.”

Growing revelations about the Obama administration’s tech-security shortcomings could have major implications for the millions of Americans who bought health coverage online, trusting the federal government to safeguard their personal data, including Social Security numbers and financial and health information.

I am a high school English teacher. I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I do. And not only do I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate, but also because there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.

I do not believe that I am “cheating” my students because we do not read Shakespeare. I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition. I do not believe that not viewing “Romeo and Juliet” or any other modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play will make my students less able to go out into the world and understand language or human behavior. Mostly, I do not believe I should do something in the classroom just because it has “always been done that way.”

I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question. I am sad that we don’t believe enough in ourselves as professionals to challenge the way that it has “always been done.” I am sad that we don’t reach beyond our own often narrow beliefs about how young people become literate to incorporate new research on how teenagers learn, and a belief that our students should be excited about what they read — and that may often mean that we need to find the time to let them choose their own literature.

A veteran teacher at Luther Burbank High School, the biggest high school in Sacramento, Calif., is proposing that high-school teachers stop teaching Shakespeare because he’s just some old white guy who died a long time ago so what could he know about anything.

In a piece published in the Washington Post, Dana Dusbiber explains that we should “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely” because she “[does] not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach [her] students about the human condition.”

“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” she writes.

Just because she’s an uninspiring figure doesn’t mean she can’t win.

That calculation clearly underlay Hillary Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech over the weekend. She hardly tried to inspire: Both the writing and the delivery were pedestrian, at best. What she did instead was outline liberal policies and celebrate the liberal coalition. The theory seems to be that those policies are sufficiently popular, and that coalition sufficiently large, that together they can bring her victory no matter how meager her political talent or how suspect her character.

The policies she listed are, in the main, destructive ones. There is little evidence that the federal government can improve children’s futures through universal preschool. A big increase in the minimum wage is likely to suppress job growth. Discrimination by employers is not the major cause of the pay gap between men and women, and thus policing that discrimination more will not do much to shrink the gap. Mandatory paid leave may worsen employment prospects for women. Further weakening immigration enforcement will inflame social tensions while cutting the wages of the working poor. Judging from the premium hikes insurers are requesting, maintaining Obamacare probably means watching its already unsatisfactory outcomes get worse.

Her campaign relaunch repudiates everything Bill Clinton did as president.

If anyone thought Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was going to mean a replay of the 1990s, we were wrong. Instead, the campaign she relaunched on Saturday is much more of a return to the 1930s. The woman who, as First Lady, reputedly communed with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt now seeks to transform herself into the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt.

Of course, at a time when Rachel Dolezal can “identify” as black, Hillary Clinton is perfectly free to see herself as the new FDR. But in doing so, she not only delivers an economic platform designed to please people who think President Obama is too right wing, she also repudiates just about everything that Bill Clinton did as president.