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EDUCATION

New Year’s Jeers As 2025 kicks off, there is no end to the bad news in the public education sector. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/08/new-years-jeers/

Now that the holiday season hoopla is behind us, a look at the latest doings in education is in order. To begin with, the sex cultists are still alive and well. In fact, according to The Heritage Foundation, 16 states force transgender lessons on children.

Heritage’s “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy” report highlights the education standards and frameworks of states that encourage gender ideology, which is defined as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”

Not surprisingly, only one of the states—Wyoming—is of the red persuasion. In deep blue Oregon, the state’s health standards include “heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, asexual, two-spirit, and pansexual.” in their definitions of sexual and romantic orientations.

In a similar vein, New Jersey’s learning standards state, “Gender assigned at birth means the gender that someone was thought to be at birth, typically recorded on their (sic) original birth certificate. The gender someone was assigned at birth may or may not match their (sic) gender identity.”

Hence, with the onslaught of misinformation and proselytizing, it becomes understandable that 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be transgender or nonbinary, per a Pew Research poll, and this social contagion is being used as a political cudgel by many with a perverse agenda.

In reality, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender.

Also, Brown University physician and researcher Lisa Littman released a study in 2018 that showed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in young people may be driven by “social and peer contagion.” She stresses that nearly 70% of the teenagers were involved with a peer group in which at least one friend had identified as transgender.

Brazen Taxation While some taxation is necessary—maintaining a national defense force, for example—too much of it is thievery. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/31/brazen-taxation/

hen I think about government-run schools, I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

While taxes are not necessarily socialist, they can be overbearing, nowhere more so than in education. In fact, the government excels at spending other people’s money on schooling. The U.S. (i.e., taxpayers) spent $1.2 trillion on K-16 in 2022.

Of that astronomical amount, spending on higher education amounted to $226 billion, which often goes to schools that don’t need it. Researcher Jay Greene examined payments to Ivy League schools and found that the federal government provides enormous subsidies to these elite institutions, which are the wealthiest universities in the country. “The eight universities in the Ivy League receive $1.8 billion each year from taxpayers, despite the fact that these universities are sitting on $192 billion in endowment funds. If they need money for buildings and electricity, donors have already given them plenty. There is no need for taxpayers to give the richest universities $1.8 billion each year to cover the costs of buildings that their donors have already enabled them to maintain and update.”

There are about 4,000 for-profit colleges in the U.S., and they receive the great majority of federal tax dollars for higher education, with just 22 colleges in the country refusing any public funds.

But the swindle doesn’t stop there. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus runs the think tank’s Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker, which identifies all student loan revenue from the U.S. Treasury that has been “forgone or forgiven during the Trump and Biden presidencies.” The tracker’s total now sits at about $415 billion.

Civic Education Is Making a Much-Needed Comeback By Jack Miller & Michael Poliakoff

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/civic-education-is-making-a-much-needed-comeback/

Over 300 JMC-supported programs enrich the academic lives of students, providing guest speakers, fellowships, courses, and a chance to interact with dedicated faculty who are outside of the stale progressive academic mainstream.

The Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University is an example of this transformational work. Begun in 2007 with JMC’s assistance, it has grown to be a major force on campus. Co-directed by professors Elizabeth and Nathan Busch, it has a full-time faculty of six who mentor many undergraduate students. The center has brought to campus distinguished scholars and public officials, including the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, Jonathan Turley, John Yoo, and William J. Perry, for presentations to the university community.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) works alongside JMC to promote the formation of new independent institutes. ACTA has redoubled its efforts to ensure that all undergraduates pass a required course that covers core American founding principles.

For 30 years, ACTA has warned of the cost of higher education’s malfeasance. In 2000, its extensive survey of students at the 50 most elite colleges and universities revealed a shocking level of historical and civic ignorance. ACTA’s survey report, “Losing America’s Memory,” led to a joint, unanimous resolution passed by Congress that called for improving the civic knowledge of college students.

ACTA’s 2024 survey that polled 3,000 college students shows that we must redouble our efforts.

Our work so far has helped South Carolina adopt the REACH Act. Since 2021, all of the state’s public universities require a course in which students study the key documents and moments in our nation’s story.

University of Michigan’s Student Government Removes Two Anti-Israel Activists from Leadership

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-michigans-student-government-removes-two-anti-israel-activists-from-leadership/

The student government at the University of Michigan has removed its top two leaders, who vowed to block funding for campus groups unless the university agreed to divest from companies accused of profiting from the Israel–Hamas war.

The student assembly’s president and vice president, Alifa Chowdhury and Elias Atkinson, were officially ousted late on Monday after they were impeached last month, the New York Times reported. Each received a guilty count of dereliction of duty for either missing council meetings or failing to organize them.

Chowdhury and Atkinson were elected last spring after running under the Shut It Down party. Given its name, the candidates’ intentions were apparent.

The two student leaders withheld $1.3 million in annual funding designated for 400 campus groups until their demand for total divestment could be met. The university was unwilling to agree to this demand and instead opted to lend money to the groups itself.

On October 8, the student government voted to reinstate the funding during a fraught meeting attended by anti-Israel protesters. Chowdhury and Atkinson reportedly encouraged protesters to shout at the assembly speaker, spit on an intern, and follow assembly members to their cars and insult them, according to the Michigan Review. They were accused of doing nothing to stop the unrest.

Jew-Hate Cancer in U.S. Schools It’s flourishing. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-schools-jews-lose/

When Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists attacked Israel through air, land, and sea, killing over 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, it was the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. There were also countless numbers of gang-rapes, and 251 Israelis were taken hostage. Sadly, the attack revealed an antisemitic cancer in many of the nation’s schools, which I wrote about at the time. And, sadly, it is still with us. To wit….

The Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley is being sued over rampant antisemitism their kids experienced in high school as administrators stood by and allowed it to fester. “When SUHSD parents and students raised concerns—through emails, petitions, and formal complaints—the District responded with bureaucratic obfuscation and outright denial, demonstrating a deliberate indifference to SUHSD’s Jewish students. Emails were ignored, and meetings were canceled without explanation,” the lawsuit says.

“The District’s administrators and trustees have consistently and deliberately refused to take concrete action to stem the scourge of antisemitism on their campuses, to the detriment of Jewish SUHSD students who, subjected to harassment and ridicule from both peers and teachers, have been forced to endure an increasingly hostile learning environment.”

In New York City, there are myriad examples. One concerns the mother of a Manhattan public school student who is outraged. “On Monday, Oct. 9, my child came to school and found their teacher chanting, ‘Palestine all the way!’ Israel is going to get what they (sic) deserve!’” In Harlem, a swastika was drawn on a wall immediately following Oct. 7, and another was carved into a desk at the beginning of this academic year. The principal sent out an email encouraging everyone to be tolerant of different points of view and said that the “person who drew the symbol probably didn’t know what it meant.”

Not surprisingly, the teachers’ unions are fully on board with unabashed Jew-hatred.

How to Get Wokeness Out of Schools By Jordan Adams

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-to-get-wokeness-out-of-schools/

When Glenn Youngkin cast his vision for education by saying, “We need to be teaching students how to think, not what to think,” he expressed a common conservative understanding. But this is not quite right. Although conservatives must ensure schools teach students how to think, and it’s quite impossible to teach students what to think or to conclude, they must use their authority unashamedly to establish whatstudents in America’s public schools think about. 

Curriculum — what students learn — lies at the heart of education. It’s why schools exist. But for many American schools today, curriculum is full of critical race theory, historical revisionism, and graphic, sexualized content.

The thirty-odd states with conservative governors, state superintendents, or state boards of education and the 9,000 school boards in Trump-voting districts across the country should be working immediately to fix that, providing an education that is woke-free, academically effective, and pro-America. 

Can conservatives actually change what students learn about in America’s schools? Yes, but it’s not easy. Conservatives must understand how Leftist ideology gets into schools in the first place before they can create the plan for getting it out.

How Woke Ideology Gets into Schools

Wai Wah Chin A Win for Merit in New York City’s Schools The Panel for Education Policy passes a contract preserving the specialized high schools’ admissions exam.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-win-for-merit-in-new-york-citys-schools

After 11 p.m. on December 18, the New York City Department of Education’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP) voted to approve the contract for administering the specialized high schools admissions test (SHSAT): the final tally was 14 for, two against, with four abstentions. By then, many SHSAT supporters, especially the children, who had arrived before the 6 p.m. meeting began, had left and missed the roll-call vote. All are grateful to PEP for retaining the test.

A public comment period preceded the vote. The real issues of debate concerned not the contract’s cost—$17 million over five years, a mere speck of the city Department of Education’s $200 billion five-year budget—but questions of race and merit.

Many of the SHSAT supporters in attendance were immigrants of Chinese origin. In thick accents, they told their stories of hard work, sacrifice, and achieving the American dream. There was also a Bangladeshi (a member of one of Stuyvesant High School’s fastest-growing groups) and several people with Russian accents. But tribalism was not the point—this was about merit. From these specialized schools have come 15 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, awarded for inventions and discoveries with broad applications that have benefited humanity.

The SHSAT’s supporters spoke for all future students of any hue. The opposition responded with thinly veiled racism against the Asians in attendance: they’re protecting a system that favors them, they only show up for their own causes. 

In fact, Asians are not looking for special favors or preferential treatment. In the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York’s lawsuit against changes to the specialized high schools’ admissions policy, the plaintiffs did not seek preferential treatment, such as racial set-asides or the implementation of Asian studies curricula. Instead, they sought a colorblind admissions process: equal rights for all.

Ray Domanico What’s the Best Way Forward for Education Reform? Universal parental choice remains the surest route to strengthening curricular standards in schools.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ashley-rogers-berner-education-reform-government-funding-school-choice

Educational Pluralism and Democracy, by Ashley Rogers Berner (Harvard Education Press, 200 pp., $35)

Should all parents be free to choose the school they believe is best suited to their children—and should that choice be supported by public funds? Does the government, whether state or federal, have an obligation to see that all schools offer an academically strong curriculum, including core concepts necessary to the goal of preserving “the full history of the United States” in a way that honors “cultural minorities while simultaneously inculcating democratic values”?

Johns Hopkins professor Ashley Rogers Berner has been exploring these questions since the publication of her 2017 book, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School. In her latest book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy, she seeks to chart a way forward for the adoption of curricular reform alongside the growing state-level adoption of universal school choice. It’s a daunting task, as she concedes: “We seem currently betwixt and between, with red states expanding access, blue states removing it, and curriculum wars ongoing.”

Berner defines educational pluralism as “a way to structure education in which the government funds a wide variety of schools but holds all of them accountable for academic results.” Five of the eight states that recently adopted universal choice require participating schools to follow a state testing mandate, which seems to meet this definition.

Berner has a larger vision, though, one equally hard to argue against–and to realize. She wants to see all schools in a pluralistic system offer a curriculum rich in content and not limited to the Common Core’s “twenty-first century skills,” focused on reading, mathematics, and critical thinking. The skills emphasis constrained what schools taught, as states had to follow federally required testing programs in English and mathematics. What was tested became what was taught.

Court allows student’s suit to move forward at Carnegie Mellon Yael Canaan’s submission of a Jewish-related architecture project resulted in a professor saying that she should have explored “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

https://www.jns.org/court-allows-students-suit-to-move-forward-at-carnegie-mellon/?utm_campaign=

Pennsylvania Judge Scott Hardy released an opinion on Tuesday affirming that a discrimination lawsuit could proceed against Carnegie Mellon University, a private academic institution in Pittsburgh. Yael Canaan, a graduate of the school who is Jewish and has Israeli heritage, alleges numerous incidents of bigotry and a failure of administrators to properly respond to them.

The suit, filed by the Lawfare Project in 2023, describes an incident when Canaan presented her architecture project on May 5, 2022, to Mary-Lou Arscott, a professor and associate head for design fundamentals at the architecture school.

Canaan had created a model to depict a wire fence eruv—an enclosure used by Orthodox Jews to permit certain activities not usually allowed on Shabbat, such as wheeling a stroller or carrying an object.

Arscott reportedly replied that “the wall in the model looked like the wall Israelis use to barricade Palestinians out of Israel,” and that Canaan’s time would have been better spent on a project that focused on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

The suit describes the steps Canaan took to address the statement and the lack of assistance from the school’s administration to support her. One professor she reached out to for help, adjunct instructor Theodossis Issaias, allegedly lambasted her for “acting like a victim” and “calling all of us antisemites.” He allegedly said he was “not there to fight her battles for her” and that he “cannot be an advocate for the Jews.”

The suit states that Issaias showed hostility to Canaan in class, which other students noted, and gave her a low grade that prevented her from receiving an honors degree and put her scholarship at risk.

In Schools, Jews Lose Antisemitism, “the world’s oldest hatred,” still flourishes in U.S. schools. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/18/in-schools-jews-lose/

When Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists attacked Israel through air, land, and sea, killing more than 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, it was the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. There were also countless numbers of gang rapes, and 251 Israelis were taken hostage. Sadly, the attack revealed an antisemitic cancer in many of the nation’s schools, which I wrote about at the time. And, sadly, it is still with us. To wit…

The Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley is being sued over rampant antisemitism their kids experienced in high school as administrators stood by and allowed it to fester. “When SUHSD parents and students raised concerns—through emails, petitions, and formal complaints—the District responded with bureaucratic obfuscation and outright denial, demonstrating a deliberate indifference to SUHSD’s Jewish students. Emails were ignored, and meetings were canceled without explanation,” the lawsuit says.

“The District’s administrators and trustees have consistently and deliberately refused to take concrete action to stem the scourge of antisemitism on their campuses, to the detriment of Jewish SUHSD students who, subjected to harassment and ridicule from both peers and teachers, have been forced to endure an increasingly hostile learning environment.”

In New York City, there are myriad examples. One concerns the mother of a Manhattan public school student who is outraged. “On Monday, Oct. 9, my child came to school and found their teacher chanting, ‘Palestine all the way!’ Israel is going to get what they (sic) deserve!’” In Harlem, a swastika was drawn on a wall immediately following Oct. 7, and another was carved into a desk at the beginning of this academic year. The principal sent out an email encouraging everyone to be tolerant of different points of view and said that the “person who drew the symbol probably didn’t know what it meant.”

Not surprisingly, the teachers’ unions are fully on board with unabashed Jew-hatred. For example, in Oregon, the Portland Association of Teachers suggests that kindergarteners be gathered into a circle and taught the history of Palestine: “Seventy-five years ago, a lot of decision-makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with white skin. There’s a BIG word for when indigenous land gets taken away to make a country; that’s called settler colonialism.”