RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/virginia-parents-have-had-enough-of-woke-lies-at-their-schools

Asra Q. Nomani is vice president of strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education and a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

A diverse movement of concerned parents has arisen to oppose critical race theory.

Falls Church, Va. — Since Wednesday, October 6, Fairfax County Public Schools staffer Rob Kerr has been teaching a weekly two-hour course to teachers here at Marshall High School called, “AC-1608: How to Be an Antiracist Educator.”

If you happen to be white, look out — through the lens of this teaching, you’re racist. Consider this module in Kerr’s course: “Exploring and Understanding Whiteness,” which includes listening to a podcast by Bettina Love. She is the founder of the radical Abolitionist Teaching Network, whose core philosophy is that America’s schools, and especially its white teachers, are “spirit murdering” black children.

The Fairfax County “Antiracist Educator” syllabus, revealed here for the first time, borrows key concepts from the dour, divisive doctrine known as critical race theory, which holds that all white people are intrinsic oppressors of all minorities and especially black people. Lessons include “the Creation of Racist Systems,” “the building blocks of racism in the United States,” not to mention the ills of “whiteness.”

Education officials and politicians deny critical race theory is taught in K–12 schools, in a pattern of deception that parents are facing nationwide. We’ve heard of white lies, where folks fudge the truth. These are “woke” lies. But we’re now standing up with moral courage as unapologetic parents in a mama bear — and papa bear — movement. And we’re not just standing up against critical race theory. There’s a whole list of dubious woke education polices we’re fighting. These include: the elimination of merit exams for entry into once-elite schools; the elimination even of advanced math; the curating of pornography by some school libraries; and the cover-up of sexual assaults in schools.

Indeed, we’re seeing a “revenge of the parents.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/31/ballooning-ivy-league-endowment-forecasted-to-top-1-trillion-by-2048/?sh=3d82b6263a37

Why are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton charging $80,000 or more for tuition, room, and board?

The Ivies added $44 billion to their endowments this year, and new estimates show their collective endowment could exceed $1 trillion by 2048.

Organized as charitable non-profits, the Ivy League is a cash generation machine. Their collective endowment now stands at approximately $188.2 billion, which is up from $144 billion in 2020.

Now, critics are questioning whether the Ivies have gamed the federal, state, and local tax systems to operate as educational charities. These schools pay little or no taxes on their investments, endowment gains, and property.

Here are the new endowments by school: Harvard ($53.2 billion), Yale ($42.3 billion), Columbia ($13.5 billion), Brown ($6.9 billion), Dartmouth ($8.5 billion), UPENN ($20.5 billion), and Cornell ($10 billion). (Princeton is the only school not yet reported; however, we forecast their endowment at $33.3 billion, up 25 percent from $26.6 billion in 2020.)

Harvard’s endowment now stands at over $10 million per undergraduate student. Yale is just shy of this number at $9 million. Brown, far behind its colleagues, boasts just over $1 million in endowment assets per undergrad student.

However, the Ivies billion-dollar optics problem is soon to become a trillion-dollar optics problem. The size of their endowments is set grow substantially over the next couple of decades.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com forecast that the collective endowment of the Ivy League could surpass $1 trillion by 2049. This buildup of wealth for supposedly charitable educational purposes will trigger a host of public policy, legislative, and legal arguments. For example, Harvard alone could have $300 billion, or nearly $60 million per undergraduate student in endowment assets, by 2049.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-white-people-didnt-invent-slavery-and-conquest

It’s unclear what, exactly, they’re teaching Africana studies professors these days, but it apparently isn’t world history.

Rutgers University Professor Brittney Cooper, whose area of expertise is in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, believes subjugation and military conquest didn’t exist in the world between “brown and black” people until white people arrived on the scene with their colonialism and white supremacy.

“I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate,” she said this week during an appearance at the Root Institute conference.

Cooper continued, launching into a wild, fact-free tirade about “white people,” saying, “It’s not that white people don’t know what they have done. They know. They fear that there is no other way to be human but the way in which they are human. So, you know, you talk to white people, and whenever you really want to have a reckoning about it, they say stuff like, you know, ‘It’s just human nature. If y’all had all of this power, you would have done the same thing, right?'”

“And it’s like, no, that’s what white humans did. White human beings thought, ‘there’s a world here and we own it.’ Prior to them, black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other, for centuries without total subjugation, domination, and colonialism,” Cooper added.

This is a lot to unpack.

For starters, to what oceans, exactly, is she referring? The Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or Southern? If she believes “black and brown” people regularly sailed across these oceans for “centuries” before white colonialism, interacting peacefully with each other, this would come as a shock to a great number of historians and archaeologists.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/578391-feehery-critical-thinking-theory

Education is the top issue in the Virginia governor’s race.

That’s usually not a good topic for Republicans, because the Democrats typically make it a referendum on spending more money.

But this year, this issue is not how much money is being spent on education; it’s how the money is being spent in the public schools.

Last year, parents got a better glimpse into how local schools spend taxpayer dollars. It wasn’t pretty.

If money wasn’t being wasted on critical race theory, it was being wasted on critical gender theory. Parents watched in horror as their kids were taught less about math, science and critical thinking skills and more about how they were either racist or victims, about how they may not be either boys or girls, and worse, about how evil and corrupt America truly is.

One thing has become readily apparent over the last year and a half in the United States.  Everybody needs more critical thinking skills and the courage to apply those skills to everyday life. We might as well start teaching them to the children.

You can’t believe everything you read in the paper these days. In fact, you really can’t believe anything you read in the paper. When our politicians say something, don’t take it face value.  They may not be willfully lying to you, but they are not telling you the whole truth. When health experts like Tony Fauci say something, get a second opinion. Fauci is not infallible. And for God’s sake, be careful with the internet. There is a lot of nonsense being spewed forth on social media.

The fight over our nation’s schools is long overdue.

Our education establishment has been failing our children and our nation for far too long.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/27/the-kids-most-definitely-are-not-all-right/

On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or “nation’s report card,” test scores in both reading and math declined for 13-year-old students, the first drop registered in 50 years. The test showed that the decline was concentrated among the lowest performing students. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, who has been working with these data for 28 years, was shocked to see the decline. “I had to ask the question again of my staff. Are you sure?’ I asked them to go back and check,” she said.

It’s important to note that this test was given in early 2020, right before the pandemic-related shutdowns in the spring. At that point, then Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos granted a blanket, one-year “accountability waiver.” But in February 2021, with the Biden Administration in place, new Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he’d “require states to administer the federally mandated tests in the spring, with an asterisk: They had the option of giving shorter, remote, or delayed versions.”

Bad idea. Per researcher Dan Goldhaber, “Using different versions of tests makes the results less comparable across different years and school districts.” And shorter tests produce less “actionable” information about individual student achievement in the short term. Nevertheless, the trend to disparage, eviscerate and ultimately do away with standardized tests is all the rage these days.

It’s also happening on the college level. Brandon McCoy, education policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, reports that the standardized test “has slowly lost its pride of place in college admissions over the past decade. By 2019, the number of schools going test-optional had risen to 1,050. The pandemic has catalyzed this trend, with at least 1,400 colleges in 2021 making the move to test-optional. College systems around the country are now permanently eliminating the requirement for the SAT and ACT; the University of California system is doing away with the tests altogether.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/uc-berkeley-study-explains-why-its-wrong-defend-robert-spencer/

In American colleges and universities today, marginalization is privilege and victimhood is power, so it should come as no surprise that a study conducted by – of course! – two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley has discovered that women are being oppressed not by the systemic and institutionalized misogyny of Islamic law (Sharia)—which devalues women’s testimonies and inheritance rights and sanctions the beating of women—but by “Islamophobia.”

According to the San Francisco Examiner, which reported this ludicrous nonsense with a straight face, Elsadig Elsheikh and Basima Sisemore of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (which must be a barrel of laughs to work in) conducted a national survey of “people living with Islamophobia, documenting their collective experiences and registering their voices.”

This makes it sound as if “Islamophobia” is some sort of disease; it’s actually a propaganda neologism that conflates two separate and distinct phenomena: vigilante attacks of innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism, which is always necessary. Those who use the term refer to both of those things under the rubric of “Islamophobia,” which has the effect of intimidating people into thinking that it is somehow wrong to speak about the root causes of jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women.

The study is an exercise in exactly that kind of intimidation. Elsheikh and Sisemore discovered that “most Muslims in America believe women are more at risk of experiencing Islamophobia than any other group. That stands to reason as Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab (a headscarf covering hair and neck) or niqab (covering head and face but not the eyes), are seen more obviously as practitioners of the Islamic faith.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/totalitarian-tenderfoots-bruce-bawer/

You don’t hear a heck of a lot about Oberlin College, the liberal arts college in Ohio, but on Wednesday Hugh Fitzgerald wrote here about an esteemed member of its faculty, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who has enjoyed the unanimous support of Oberlin’s top administrators. Mahallati, reported Fitzgerald, served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s, where, among other things, he promoted “genocidal antisemitism,” denounced the Baha’i people (hundreds of whom “have been executed or murdered” in Iran), and helped cover up the mass execution of political prisoners. At Oberlin, he teaches Religion, Islamic Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.

This wasn’t Oberlin’s first time in the spotlight this month. A couple of weeks ago the college got a good deal of social-media attention after Peter Fray-Witzer, one of its 3,000-odd students, took to the Oberlin Review to pen an ardent j’accuse. You see, an e-mail had gone out from Josh Matos, “the area coordinator for Multicultural and Identity-Based Communities,” informing students that radiator installations were scheduled to take place in the “Women and Trans Collective,” a dorm in which Fray-Witzer resides. Being “very averse to people entering my personal space,” especially when those people are “strangers” and “cisgender men,” Fray-Witzer was rendered “angry, scared, and confused” by the news of this unwanted intrusion, which would damage the “feeling of safety and protection” ordinarily provided by the Collective. Why, asked Fray-Witzer, couldn’t the installation have been scheduled during the summer?

Three score and seven years ago, men Fray-Witzer’s age stormed the beaches of Normandy. Now this. American colleges once taught young people to deal with challenging ideas and experiences. Now the most expensive of them – Oberlin is America’s 11th costliest college, beating Yale at #18 and Stanford at #50 – are padded playpens where their pampered students, the presumed leaders of tomorrow (is Fray-Witzer, by any chance, the child of Harvard law professor Sharon Fray-Witzer?) expect to be protected from the slightest hint of distress. And when they graduate they become – well, they become those totalitarian tenderfoots who were protesting Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special outside of Netflix the other day.

No wonder Fray-Witzer’s tantrum went viral. “Ponder the rotted roots of an ideology,” commented Glenn Greenwald, “that convinces highly privileged and wealthy students at elite colleges that the guys who come to fix their radiators are their oppressors, and that the ones whose family is paying $80k/year are the oppressed.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/27/the_contretemps_at_yale_110658.html

Recent events at Yale Law School reveal that it’s all too easy for administrators to condemn a student for perceived racist statements, even in highly ambiguous circumstances – but much harder to undo the implications for admission to the bar. To put it plainly, a law school’s “discrimination and harassment coordinators” cannot denounce a student for racism and then withhold that information from its bar certifications. If the condemnation is warranted, it must be reported; if it is not warranted, it should be retracted. To do otherwise would violate the administrators’ own obligations under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

According to Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove, the YLS Office of Student Affairs “tries to help students talk to one another and resolve their disagreements within the community,” even about the most difficult issues. That’s a noble objective, but it doesn’t describe what recently happened when nine law students complained that a classmate had engaged in harassment and discrimination by circulating a “triggering” email. The offending message was in fact an invitation to a Constitution Day celebration jointly sponsored by the Native American Law Students Association and the Federalist Society, to be held at the jokingly described “world-renowned NALSA Trap House,” with a menu that included “Popeye’s chicken,” apple pie, cocktails, and soft drinks.

Trent Colbert, the second-year student who issued the invitation, was called in for a meeting with both Dean Cosgrove and YLS diversity director Yaseen Eldik, who patiently explained the racial overtones of the term “trap house,” as well as the troubling implications of “the fried chicken reference.” This came as news to Colbert, who thought that “trap house” was an innocent reference to a place where young people held parties, “like a frat house without the frat” (and Popeye’s was just a nearby fast food joint). He said he would stop using the term, but that was not good enough for the administrators, who urged him to issue a written apology for any “harm, trauma, or upset” his email had caused, along with a promise to “educate myself” to do better.

When Colbert balked, Eldik cautioned him about potential damage to his reputation, and ominously pointed out that “there’s a bar you have to take,” which of course would include a character and fitness assessment. That bit of not very friendly advice started Yale on a damaging course from which it will be difficult to withdraw.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-america-been-overtaken-by-creeping-credentialism-college-jobs-requirements-11635282885?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Editor’s note: In this Future View, students debate “credentialism,” the ever-expanding requirement of college degrees.  Very interesting responses….read them all…..rsk