RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/14/confronting-teacher-union-twaddle/

Randi Weingarten, the gaffe-prone president of the American Federation of Teachers has outdone herself, and that isn’t easy. In a series of seven open letters over the years, I have playfully chided the union boss about her trove of inane and bizarre musings. But now she has jumped the proverbial shark.

Immediately following the National Education Association’s annual meeting, the American Federation of Teachers held an online conference, which began July 6. As the keynote speaker, Weingarten kicked things off, and most of her 74-minute talk was typical rah-rah teacher union blather, including praise for Joe and Kamala, and the obligatory swipe at The Donald. But late in her talk, the bushwa really kicked in.

At the 60-minute mark, she described a “new culture campaign” that 

some lawmakers (and Fox News) are using to distort history, limit learning and stoke fears about our public schools. 

Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools. It’s a method of examination taught in law school and college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists—and, in particular, whether it has an effect on law and public policy.

I wonder how Weingarten can make such a bone-jarringly stupid statement when there is a boatload of evidence to the contrary. Just a few of the myriad examples from across the country:

In Buffalo, students are told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” which might kill them at any time.

The Arizona Department of Education has created an “equity” toolkit, which claims that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old, and that white children become full racists—“strongly biased in favor of whiteness”—by age five.
In Cupertino, CA third-graders are forced to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
The principal of a school in New York City sent white parents a “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.”
In Seattle, there was a training session for teachers in which schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.

The San Diego Unified School District orders their students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/neas-radical-agenda-public-education-richard-l-cravatts/

One positive aspect of the vigorous current debate over critical race theory (CRT) being taught in public schools is that parents and other interested parties have a new awareness of what is being taught in their children’s classrooms. The criticism has also resulted in educators closing ranks against a questioning of their perceived role in promoting a leftist, radical ideology that many think has no place in public school systems.

In a July 6th speech at an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) meeting, Randi Weingarten, the organization’s left-leaning president, defended the teaching about race and pushed back against critics who questioned the educational and moral validity of CRT being part of a school curriculum.

“Let’s be clear,” Weingarten proclaimed, mendaciously, however, “critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” And answering back defiantly to anyone who questioned how the current teaching about race may be divisive rather than educational, she further claimed that “. . . culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

Weingarten and other educators, including local boards across the country, have been walking back their previous vigorous defense of CRT, claiming instead, as she did, that teaching about race and white supremacy is merely “accurate history,” and not part of a campaign to indoctrinate students with an ideological mishmash of racial justice, activism, white police brutality, social and economic disparities between whites and so-called “people of color,’ and a culture of white supremacy in which the privilege of the majority disadvantages and oppresses black victims.

But Weingarten’s protestation aside, the National Education Association (NEA) — with some 1,680,000 members — and other educators groups are not only actively engaged in promoting CRT but are creating learning environments in which students are bombarded with an increasingly radical set of lesson plans, some taught in conjunction with Black Lives Matter at School Week and some part of regular instruction, that teach children a one-sided view of race, law enforcement, class, family structure, crime, and economics—topics that have not heretofore been a central, or even appropriate, part of K-12 education.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/07/14/research_used_to_justify_californias_racial_equity_math_doesnt_add_up_784966.html

Part 1 of a Series on ‘Social Justice’ Research (Part 2 here)

The push to create “equity” and more “social justice” in public schools in America’s largest state rests on this basic premise: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” declares the current draft of the California Math Framework, which also states that it rejects “the cult of genius.”

Are blacks and girls filtered out of high-end math? Or are students just different?
Katerina Holmes

Informed by that fundamental idea, the 800-page Framework calls for the elimination of accelerated classes and gifted programs for high-achieving students until at least the 11th grade.

It’s a major departure for the Framework, commissioned every seven years by the Department of Education to provide guidance to the state’s 10,315 public schools serving 6 million students. Some California teachers describe it as a misguided “one size fits all” approach to reversing long-standing discrimination against girls and students of color in math instruction.

But the Framework, which could be adopted next year, claims its recommendations are based on the latest, seemingly unimpeachable findings of advanced social science research. Phrases such as “researchers found,” “the research shows” and the “research is clear” are sprinkled through the Framework, which states unequivocally: “The research is clear that all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users.” If true, this evidence would provide a powerful rationale for adopting the Framework’s proposals, which, given California’s size and prestige, is commonly seen as a model for other states.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/the_end_of_critical_race_theory.html

Critical Race Theory is liable to end for reasons very similar to the reasons the Salem witch trials ended.

In January 1692, nine-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms.

A special court, the court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem to hear the cases; and based on spectral evidence the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women, and children were accused over the next several months. 

Opposition to the trials grew as the family and friends of more and more villagers were accused of witchcraft, including the wife of Governor William Phips.  Governor Phips saved his wife by dissolving the Court of Oyer and Terminer and moving all trials to a higher court. This superior court did not allow “spectral evidence” and, since most of the earlier accused witches had been executed due to this evidence, any remaining witches were all ruled innocent.

The tide is turning against Critical Race Theory as those who endorse it become its victims.  Most teachers and staff of New York schools went along with the CRT craze because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if they spoke out against it.  In fact, even George Davison, the headmaster of New York’s Grace Church school that teaches CRT did not dare admit that he had said in a private conversation with Paul Rossi, a teacher at his school, that “we’re demonizing kids, we’re demonizing white people for being born.”  Instead, Davison accused Rossi of misquoting him.  Rossi released an audio recording proving his account was accurate after which Mr. Davison, perhaps with some persuasion from his school, decided to retire.

https://www.city-journal.org/evanston-critical-race-theory-lawsuit-and-the-non-enforcement-of-civil-rights

Last week, a teacher in Evanston, Illinois, filed a landmark civil rights lawsuit against her school district. Her complaint: the district segregated staff by race for professional development, subjected students to race-shaming “privilege walks,” instructed teachers to take race into account in student discipline, and taught students that treating people equally “helps racism.”

Such practices are, unfortunately, no longer shocking. But even if the public has become inured to such stories of state-sponsored racism, policymakers have yet to grapple fully with the significance of why this lawsuit had to be filed: the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has given up on traditional civil rights enforcement.

The facts of the case are not much in dispute. They were investigated by OCR, which, in January, under the Trump administration, found that “the District engaged in intentional race discrimination by coordinating and conducting racially exclusive affinity groups,” that “the District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes,” that “the District’s Policy to apparently impose racial discrimination in discipline has no part in federally funded education programs or activities,” and that the district’s “privilege” activities “may have created a racially hostile environment.”

But following President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, OCR took the perhaps historically unprecedented step of suspending its own decision. It’s hard to imagine that the Biden administration would have walked back the office’s decision if nonwhite students were being victimized. And it’s equally hard to evade the conclusion that the administration has all but formally decided that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act do not apply to white students or teachers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/ban-critical-race-theory-from-k-12-classrooms-a-response-to-the-new-york-times/

There can be no credible objection to prohibiting the racially based shaming of children.

O ne of the interesting lexical shifts that took place during the Enlightenment had to do with the way in which we speak about civil magistrates. As the manifold forms of classical liberalism espoused by Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau began to supplant throne-and-altar autocracies across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, political figures ceased to be called “rulers” and began to be called “leaders.”

This change was not a coincidence. Rule, as Harvey Mansfield helpfully pointed out during a recorded conversation with Bill Kristol a few years ago, is the means by which a society is given its particular character by its political institutions. Rulers indoctrinate, enforce, and set the boundaries for acceptable beliefs and behavior in a given polity. It’s always the attempt of the ruler to take his or her country or people in a given direction, and, for that reason, rule is always partisan.

The early classically liberal theorists believed that rule was not a necessary or inevitable feature of human relations. They believed that a primal state of natural freedom and equality among all people could be imagined which preceded the division of people into rulers and ruled, and they thought it possible to construct a political system that would safeguard this primordial condition by allowing each individual to exercise an attenuated form of the natural liberty which he had enjoyed in this “state of nature.”

For these liberals, then, the starting point for thinking about human action was apolitical. Furthermore, they argued that politics should only be introduced voluntarily and always with an eye towards protecting the pre-political freedoms of men and women. This view was in contrast to the older, ancient notion of Aristotle’s that “man is by nature a political animal.” From this Aristotelian perspective, human freedom and equality are thought to be political achievements rather than natural facts. No “state of nature” that pre-exists politics is admitted into this scheme of thought. Politics is inevitable, and so, as a result, is the fact of rule.

All of this might seem needlessly abstract and far removed from the debates roiling the United States today over the bans placed by several states on the teaching of critical race theory in K–12 classrooms, but an understanding of how the ancient and liberal understandings of rule differ is actually indispensable to understanding this conflict.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a guest essay jointly authored by Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams which argued against anti-critical-race-theory laws. The reasoning of the essay is fatally flawed. To understand why, it’s enough to understand the classically liberal conceptual framework within which its argument is made.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/keeping-up-with-nikole/

No sooner does the Nikole Hannah-Jones story turn in one direction than it veers in another. My wife has a name for roads in rural Vermont that behave like this. She calls them ziggles, a portmanteau of zigzags and wiggles. You can drive them safely, but it pays not to pick up too much speed between veering one direction and another.

It seems like only yesterday that the esteemed board of trustees at the University of North Carolina voted nine to four to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ now infamous “1619 Project,” in order to quiet the controversy over the board’s previous decision to award the acclaimed journalist an academic appointment at the Hussman School of Journalism but not to award her tenure. 

Claiming racial discrimination, Hannah-Jones participated in a high-profile campaign demanding that the UNC board change its mind. And lo! It did. On June 30, the board conscientiously reviewed the case and decided, in the words of chairman R. Gene Davis, “to set the record straight.”

That’s an odd way for the road engineers to describe their plotting of a new ziggle. But let Chairman Davis explain: 

Let me be perfectly clear. Our motto is Lux et Libertas, light and liberty. We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement, all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.

Academic freedom has been robustly vindicated at UNC by capitulating to a woke mob that threatened the trustees and the university if it didn’t get its way. That’s how things are set straight in Chapel Hill these days. The trustees apparently have been studying Vermont road maps.

Of course, that was last week’s news. This week’s news was Hannah-Jones’ decision, announced on CBS News’ “This Morning” on July 6, that she was declining the UNC offer of a tenured appointment in order to accept the position of the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/moral-narcissism-national-education-association-richard-l-cravatts/

On May 19th, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” committing its members to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign, stating “that UESF endorses the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement.

Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

The engagement of public school teachers in activism against the Jewish state continued unabated in June when the 3-million member National Education Association proposed two anti-Israel resolutions, New Business Item 29, which committed the NEA to “publicize its support for the Palestinian struggle for justice and call on the United States government to stop arming and supporting Israel,” and NBI 51, which would create a campaign to “use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history, culture, and struggles of Palestinians.”

The rectitude of the NEA educators pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

So, apparently, vilifying Israel and focusing singularly and obsessively on the Jewish state make the NEA’s moral narcissists feel that they are standing up for something important and making a moral cause for a people they see as victimized and oppressed, even when so many much more pressing and tragic social upheavals are taking place around the world. But it is Israel that the NEA puts in its crosshairs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/important-reading-on-the-critical-race-theory-in-schools-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Conservatives are on the march in the political offensive against the teaching of Critical Race Theory and related racialist concepts in K-12 public schools, a battle that has moved into state legislatures. I have written about some of the philosophical problems with the “anti-anti-CRT” movement. But it is also the case that the anti-CRT initiatives must navigate a series of political and legal obstacles, and prudent consideration of those is a worthwhile task for those of us who believe in that cause.

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has some thoughts worth reading in a blog post co-authored with three other FIRE staffers. FIRE is, as I have detailed, an essential defender of free speech rights in higher education, without which conservative college and graduate students would be in a much worse situation. As you might expect, Lukianoff is somewhat skeptical of using state laws to limit the teaching of ideas in any school, particularly universities, but he takes a thoughtful approach to the important distinctions: between public and private schools, between universities and K-12 schools, between academic freedom and the power of government to intimidate and indoctrinate students. On the legal and political status of public K-12 education:

The modern view of education as a pipeline designed to carry children from preschool to graduate school tends to obscure the fact that K-12 education had a very different evolution from the university system. Compulsory public education was a project advanced by politicians and enacted by legislatures for a political purpose [as far back as 1794]…[W]hat will become the curriculum in most public K-12 schools is democratically decided by a combination of state legislatures, local school boards, and individual schools. As such, they represent the will of the people, as expressed in local and state elections. The individual schools cannot exceed the scope granted them by their school boards, which themselves derive power and authority from the state…Because K-12 attendance is compelled by the state and, at public schools, funded predominantly by local taxes, it is understandable that the substance of that teaching is subject to democratic oversight, through state legislatures and elected (or appointed by those who were elected) school boards. Legislators are expected to exercise oversight when citizens with children in the schools voice legitimate concerns about curricular matters.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/its-critical-race-theory-that-is-un-american-not-laws-banning-it/

Without breaking a sweat, the New York Times has gone from insisting critical race theory doesn’t exist to arguing state legislatures must let public schools inflict it on kids. Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams claim in the Times that “Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Un-American.”

This is exactly backwards. It’s teaching critical race theory that is un-American. The reframed Marxist ideology aims to destroy core American cultural and legal norms, including those these authors claim as the basis of their support for forcing taxpayers to subsidize its racism.

Just to name a few, critical theorists oppose free speech, the consent of the governed, freedom of association, and equal justice under the law. This is not about banning them from speaking, but in using representative government to deny them the privilege of taxpayer sinecures to help them foment America’s subversion and collapse.

CRT teaches not only that people are defined by their skin color but also that paler skin is inherently evil. So this theory is used to justify the insistence that the United States is inherently evil, which is also patently anti-American.

The concepts of “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “anti-racism,” and “equity [as opposed to equality]” all stem from critical theory. Since this ideology is obviously false and toxic, state legislatures have moved to protect children from being taught it as gospel in the public education systems they directly oversee.

Racists Can Still Speak Freely, Just Not on My Dime

Despite the obvious anti-American racial toxicity of this worldview, here’s the core of the four men’s NYT argument against banning its promulgation in public schools:

They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.