RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/dealing_with_the_school_staff_shortage.html

K-12 public schools throughout the U.S. are facing staff shortages so severe that school days are being canceled. Seattle, Boulder, and Portland, Oregon are just a few examples of districts without adequate staff to maintain daily operations following Veteran’s Day. Claiming exhaustion, hundreds of teachers in these cities opted to take the day off in order to have a four-day weekend. Denver Public Schools’ situation is even more dire. The district moved to remote learning for three days in mid-November, canceled school on November 19 as a mental health day, and took a full week off for Thanksgiving.

The school staff shortages and well-being crisis of both teachers and students can be traced to the left-wing priorities and policies of the teacher unions and politicians who run these cities. Most egregious was the shuttering of schools closed for more than one calendar year, which kept teachers pinned behind screens and distanced from their students. It not only took the passion out of teaching for many teachers, but it also overwhelmed many educators whose limited technical skills were insufficient for the remote learning environment.

Fearmongering by teacher unions and Democrat political leaders also caused many employees distress regarding returning to school and triggered some to quit. Despite the harm they personally experienced and witnessed in their students, many teachers supported keeping schools closed due to an exaggerated fear of COVID and loyalty to their union and political leaders. Furthermore, despite seeing their students slip behind academically (especially those of minority ethnic groups and low-income families), they played puppet to political narratives that often clashed with the data and even common sense. The unwarranted duration of public-school closures during the 2020-2021 school year — which occurred even while private schools operated fully — was detrimental to students, despite the public rhetoric of Democrat leaders and teacher unions about how much they cared.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2021/12/07/an_education_in_the_american_idea_806633.html

The American Idea podcast looks “to restore an understanding of the history and principles that show us what it means to be an American,” says Ashbrook Center executive director Jeff Sikkenga.

Presented by Ashbrook, the podcast “explores America’s Founding principles and their effect on American history and government.” Sikkenga notes that it “elevates lively and thoughtful conversations with renowned academics and public figures based on questions rooted in the fundamental documents and debates of America.” It’s what he calls “the Ashbrook way of teaching and learning.”

This approach, he says, transcends “accidents of time, place, class, and gender to pursue the truth with others through conversation.” It is an old idea of education, stretching back at least as far as Socrates and summarized in the Jeffersonian principle that “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” It’s neither about simply amassing information nor being subjected to indoctrination – rather, it amounts to a joint effort by teachers and students to pursue truth.

Greg McBrayer, the podcast’s executive producer and associate professor of political science at Ashland University, cites evidence from “study after study” showing that students “lack a basic civic understanding.” Unfortunately, he says that “few universities are filling in the gaps.” He points to a recent ACTA study that found “only 18% of American universities require a foundational course in U.S. history or government.” The podcast aims to correct this flaw by bolstering American civic knowledge.

Hosted by Sikkenga, conversations are centered around key American documents and speeches including the Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

The America Idea podcast’s 16 episodes have featured Ashbrook’s own Christopher Burkett, John Moser, Jason Stevens, and McBrayer, and affiliated scholars including Lucas Morel, Joseph Fornieri, and Donald Drakeman. The most popular episodes feature journalist Mollie Hemingway, and, just recently, a special conversation with former Vice President Mike Pence.

Sikkenga calls hosting Vice President Pence a “great honor and a delightful surprise.” He notes that Pence was a “history major as an undergraduate and even wrote his senior paper on ‘The Religious Expression of Abraham Lincoln.’” Pence “knew a lot about American history and principles and clearly has thought about how to bring them to bear on contemporary political issues.”

The podcast’s producer and director – himself an Ashbrook alumnus – Tyler MacQueen reflects on the unique opportunity to speak to someone “who held the same office as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George H.W. Bush.” He reports that nearly half a million people – many of whom have not heard of Ashbrook previously – have listened to or watched the Pence conversation. (Episodes are available on Ashbrook’s YouTube channel.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/remote-learning-fails-the-test-nber-study-schools-11638463245?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Accumulating evidence shows the damage of school shutdowns. Now a working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research documents how much remote learning reduced student achievement, especially for low-income and minority children.

The researchers—from Brown University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and MIT—examine the relationship between in-person learning and third- through eighth-grade student scores in 12 states. They found that the share of students who scored “proficient” or above declined in spring 2021 compared to previous years by an average of 14.2 percentage points in math and 6.3 percentage points in language arts.

What’s more, “these declines were larger in districts with less in-person instruction,” the authors note. For example, they found that “offering full in-person instruction rather than fully hybrid or virtual instruction reduces test score losses in math by 10.1 percentage points (on the base of 14.2 percentage points).” In language arts, the losses for full in-person instruction were cut by 3.2 percentage points. In short, remote and hybrid instruction were linked to two to three times more learning loss.

Losses in language arts were “significantly larger in districts with larger populations of students who are Black, Hispanic or eligible for free and reduced price lunch,” the researchers note. This isn’t surprising since lower-income parents may not have had the time or financial means to provide additional academic support to children. But here’s the kicker: The study also found that districts with lower test scores and more black students also offered less in-person learning.

https://christopherrufo.com/?mc_cid=d89864f563&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

Parents in Virginia and across America are acutely aware of the cultural changes taking place in society, most notably occurring in public schools. We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, believe that state lawmakers should empower parents with insight and influence over their child’s education. 

We therefore call for state legislators to enact policies that families and students desperately need to reject the racial prejudice inherent in Critical Race Theory, maximize transparency around what is taught in K-12 classrooms, and secure education choice.

In other words, policymakers must listen to the voices of the parents who spoke in this past election.

Every generation is responsible for transmitting the lesson that America offers equality under the law and the opportunity for human flourishing to everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin.

Public schools are a crucial setting where children should be taught this lesson.

Schools occupy a unique place in their local communities as the institutions where policy and culture meet: Lawmakers provide taxpayer resources to teachers with the implicit understanding that they will impart lessons about reading, writing, and math, along with equality under the law, to their students. We trust the children learning these lessons to apply what they learn as they become the new parents, neighbors, employees, and lawmakers.

Around the country, however, many professional associations and some educators are betraying taxpayers and parents, not infrequently with the support of policymakers. They do so by supplementing lessons about math and reading and civic responsibilities with intolerant, racially discriminatory pedagogy. 

An avowedly Marxist worldview known as “critical theory” has spread within American culture. Over the past several decades, its racially biased application, Critical Race Theory, which “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” has taken root. The goal of CRT, according to the discipline’s own godfather, was that “scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance.” Critical Race Theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings, the professor credited by NPR with bringing CRT to education, has declared that it’s hard to find a social studies textbook that doesn’t include or promote these concepts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backing-charter-schools-covid-19-learning-loss-teachers-union-11638371324?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

American public education is broken. Since the pandemic began, students have experienced severe learning loss because schools remained closed in 2020—and even in 2021 when vaccinations were available to teachers and it was clear schools could reopen safely. Many schools also failed to administer remote learning adequately.

Before the pandemic, about two-thirds of U.S. students weren’t reading at grade level, and the trend has been getting worse. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, show that in 2019, eighth-grade math scores had already fallen significantly.

Teachers understand the severity of the problem, and many are doing heroic work, yet some of their union representatives are denying reality. “There is no such thing as learning loss,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of the Los Angeles teachers union, in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine this past summer. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.”

What nonsense. How about reading, writing and arithmetic, the critical skills we are funding schools to teach?

Instead of giving students the skills they need to succeed in college or in a trade, the public education system is handing them diplomas that say more about their attendance record than their academic achievement. This harms students, especially those from low-income families. When and if they graduate, they will try to find work in an economy that values knowledge and skills above all else, and their old schools will say to them: “Good luck!”

Other nations are rising to this challenge and racing ahead, but we are moving backward, creating an economic and national-security crisis that will worsen over time. Unless we have the courage to rebuild public education from the bottom up, we will continue to doom our most vulnerable to a life of poverty and, in too many cases, incarceration.

We know what works, because we can see it in real time. Success Academy’s network of 47 public charter schools is serving New York children whose families predominantly live below the poverty line. Their students are outperforming public-school students in Scarsdale, N.Y.—the wealthiest town on the East Coast and the second-wealthiest town in America—by significant margins. Yet a statewide cap on charter schools is blocking Success Academy from expanding.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/university-austin-meteor-higher-education/

Americans are beginning to seek alternatives to our established menu of colleges and universities. In fact, not just Americans. Students from other countries are also choosing alternatives to studying in the US. The combined effect has been a sharp drop in American college enrollment, which is down overall by about 8 percent over the last two years, and more than 14 percent at community colleges. International student enrollment is down a total of 15 percent, but that masks an even more serious problem: enrollment of new foreign students fell last year by 46 percent.

Some of this, of course, is due to Covid. And some of it is due to a demographic shift: fewer babies born 17 to 20 years ago means fewer young people to fill the seats in lecture halls. But other contributing factors are more mysterious. Why has there been a precipitous drop in the number of males who choose to go to college? (The male/female ratio among students is now 4:6.) Why have so many colleges declared themselves “systemically racist”? Why have colleges turned campus life into a pressure cooker of ideological conformity? Why do those who run colleges and universities think their path to success is to copy what all the other colleges and universities are doing?

The recent announcement of the formation of a new institution, the University of Austin (UATX), which intends to break with the herd mentality, was met with met with high praise in many quarters, and with extreme disdain by many supporters of the legacy institutions. Let’s stick with the disdain for the moment. Hank Reichman, professor emeritus of history at California State University and former American Association of University Professors (AAUP) vice-president, is about as close as one could get to the perfected voice of higher education’s leftist establishment. The day after UATX sent out its birth announcement, Reichman happily noted in a post titled “Welcome to Rogues’ Gallery University” that the announcement had “garnered widespread ridicule on academic social media.”

What was it that prompted the ridicule? Reichman focuses on the members of UATX’s board of advisors, and borrows the sneer of the progressive law professor Paul Campos who characterizes these advisors as “our most ludicrously self-regarding and mawkishly preening intellectuals.” The rest of Reichman’s essay is a long string of ad hominem attacks against individual UATX advisors.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/we-cannot-rest-mary-grabar/

Voters this election rejected the teaching of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, as proven by the results of Virginia’s gubernatorial race and, less publicized but as equally telling in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, where nineteen-year-old, Nicholas Seppy won a seat on the school board. Seppy said he thought that the history of slavery should be taught in the classroom, but it should be taught objectively.

I agree with him. That’s why I wrote Debunking The 1619 Project and before that Debunking Howard Zinn.

So hats off to Christopher Rufo who exposed these toxic materials and to Seppy and Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin who listened to parents who were rightfully outraged.

But we cannot rest. The radical “educrats” who believe they are the ones to remake your children never do.

Over the years I have seen how “educators” introduce a topic, put on a pretense of retreating, and then sneak back. This happened with the teaching of Ethnic Studies in California, which was withdrawn for about eighteen months after complaints about antisemitism. Then—surprise!—it was signed into law by the governor. Superficial changes had been made but the promotion of politicized ethnic identity—what the educrats wanted—will remain for all California high school graduates.

Similarly, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which claims to “establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade,” was rebranded under various names by states. But the damage remains as demonstrable knowledge of the subject matter was replaced by students’ ability to “collaborate” and accept “diversity.” As I pointed out back in 2012, Common Core broke down the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction. English teachers were tasked with having students read “cold” such historical materials as the Gettysburg Address.