RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/scoreless-admissions-set-minority-students-up-for-failure

Admissions officers around the country can hardly contain themselves. With their schools seeing record numbers of applications and acceptances for minority students, they are taking a victory lap in the media.

“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at the school, told the Wall Street Journal. At Dartmouth, 48 percent of accepted students identify as black, indigenous, or other people of color, and 17 percent are the first in their families to attend college.

At New York University, this year’s class is about 29 percent black or Hispanic, up from 27 percent last year; it also includes 20 percent first-generation students, up from 15 percent. MJ Knoll-Finn, NYU’s senior vice president for enrollment management, sees the situation as historic. She told the New York Times: “You could tell the story of America through the eyes of all these young people, and how they dealt with the times, Black Lives Matter, the wave of unemployment and the uncertainties of the political moment, wanting to make a difference.”

Applications at Harvard were up 43 percent over last year, and the percentage of black students admitted went from 14.3 percent to 18 percent. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, enthused: “We have the most diverse class in the history of Harvard this year, economically and ethnically. . . . This is an incoming group of students who’ve had experiences unlike any experiences first-year students have had in the history of Harvard or history of higher education.”

The celebrations may have come too early. Many of these admissions decisions, administrators say, happened because their schools went “test-optional.” Dropping the requirement that students submit SAT or ACT scores meant that admissions officers could rely only on grades, essays, and recommendations. Thus students with lower scores may have been more willing to apply to schools they otherwise would have considered a reach.

Despite the shift of public opinion against them, SAT scores remain fairly good predictors of not only how well students will perform in college but also the difficulty of the classes they’ll take. “Students with high test scores are more likely to take the challenging route through college,” University of Minnesota psychologists Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett maintain.

Too often, young people admitted to demanding colleges wind up switching to easier, less remunerative majors. According to researchers at the University of Texas–Austin, “More than a third of black (40%) and Latino (37%) [STEM] students switch majors before earning a degree, compared with 29% of white STEM students.” While the authors of that study suggest that the reasons for this discrepancy are social rather than academic, the truth, as Purdue University researcher Samuel Rohr discovered, is that “a higher aggregate score on the SAT helped predict the retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and business students.” He concluded: “For every point increase in SAT, there was 0.3% increase in retention.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/southlake-says-no-to-woke-education-11620426330?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The takeover of higher education by critical-race theory may be a fait accompli, but some parents won’t surrender K-12 education without a fight. That’s the message voters in the Dallas suburb of Southlake sent last weekend.

The May 1 special election became a referendum on efforts to impose critical-race theory on the curriculum and practices of Carroll Independent School District. The district’s diversity council developed the so-called “cultural competence action plan” after several students were caught on video uttering racial slurs.

The plan called for the district to hire an equity and inclusion director, encourage students to report each other for microaggressions, and revise the curriculum to make it more woke, among other changes.

Parents rejected this indoctrination effort, judging by the election results. School board candidates Cam Bryan and Hannah Smith vocally opposed the proposal and won 68% and 69% of the vote, respectively. Southlake Families, a political-action committee opposed to the plan, backed two city council candidates and a mayoral candidate. All three won with about 70% of the vote.

Reporting in the national media on the election has predictably portrayed the landslide election result as a victory for bigotry. “A school district tried to address racism, a group of parents fought back,” CNN proclaimed. A Dallas Morning News story featured a tweet claiming that Southlake had “doubled down on racism and White supremacy in their local election.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rhodes-scholarship-turns-against-its-legacy-of-excellence-11620412428?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Rhodes Scholarship stood for more than 120 years, through cataclysm and world war, as a symbol of individual excellence. But since 2019, under the shadow of a supposed reckoning with racism, the scholarships have been corrupted from within.

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the imperialist and financier who founded the scholarship, wanted Rhodes Scholars to be “the best men for the world’s fight.” The Rhodes Trust rewarded those who survived a withering competition with three years at Oxford University, all expenses paid. (Women were made eligible in 1977.)

Neither Rhodes nor many of those who over the decades benefited from his bequest would recognize the Rhodes Scholarship today. The scholarship, in the words of Edgar Williams, a former warden of Rhodes House, was “an investment in a chap.” A much-admired ideal was the German Rhodes Scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, who was hanged for his role in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

While at Oxford, I studied Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and the Russian language and traveled to the Soviet Union. Classmates studied Arabic and Chinese and became respected experts in their fields. The U.S. Rhodes Scholars in 2021, however, were praised not for worldliness but for their demographics. Twenty-one of the 32 winners are “students of colour” and one is “nonbinary,” according to the Rhodes Trust’s announcement. More important, diversity is often their preferred academic specialty, along with sexual harassment, racism and the status of prisoners. The winners are described as “passionate” or motivated by “fierce urgency.” The notion that Rhodes Scholars are defenders of universal values and destined to have careers that benefit their countries has been replaced by training them for conflicts with their fellow citizens.

Elizabeth Kiss, warden of Rhodes House, wrote that the Rhodes Trust today rejects Rhodes’s goal of educating young men for a civilizing mission as “wrong and obsolete.” Oxford itself, she writes, is a place where “racism in all its forms—structural, overt and implicit—remains rife.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/critical-race-theory-americas-classrooms-clare-lopez/

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in America’s schools, usually as part of a broader Ethnic Studies program. Already present in public, private, and charter school classrooms, CRT is a dangerous Marxist ideology that serves to indoctrinate students with racial identity, divisiveness, and animosity. The immediate objective of this deeply harmful curriculum is to incite hatred among our children based on intrinsic characteristics like skin color. The ultimate objective is revolution to destroy America’s Constitutional Republic by methodically shredding our First Things Principles: individual liberty, government by consent of the governed, but most especially equality of all in human dignity before the rule of law.

In the first Part of this series, we set out the fundamentals of CRT, its origins among Marxist intellectuals and basis in Bolshevik ideology. The reason that CRT has made such inroads into American academia is rooted in the 20th century realization that a revolution based on class divisions would not work very well in a society based on free market capitalism where opportunity and upward mobility are available to all who are willing to apply talent and hard work to achieve individual goals. Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions” therefore took the place of a quick, violent Lenin-style uprising and race the place of Marx’s class divisions. America’s schools, teacher’s unions, textbooks, and students became top priority in the campaign to extend Marxist infiltration throughout the rest of society.

Indeed, as Alex Newman has written, “Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.” The arrival of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist academics from Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany, in the U.S. in the early 20th century marked the first foothold for communist ideology in the U.S. education system. Welcomed into Columbia University in New York in the 1930s, Frankfurt School operatives set about promoting a suite of concepts explicitly designed to undermine traditional American principles. Founded in Hegelian and Marxist premises, Frankfurt School thinkers pioneered the ideology of Critical Theory. In simple terms, Critical Theory attacked basic societal norms by characterizing them as nothing more than means by which a dominant, minority, bourgeois class ruled over the masses comprising the rest of the population. People were divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed”. Material well-being was the myopic lens through which Marx and his devotes viewed society. For them, the solution to abolishing inequality in material well-being was revolution, the only legitimate means by which they see history progressing into the future.

The problem here in the U.S. was that, although the free-market capitalist system featured large differences in wealth between the most-successful and the least-successful, the opportunity to rise from humble beginnings up through economic classes was here for the taking by anyone. So, this is where Critical Race Theory comes in: a wedge issue other than class had to be found and exacerbated. Enter Ethnic Studies, in which CRT plays a central role, with narratives like ‘systemic racism’, ‘white privilege’ and everything else that so dominates the U.S. education system today as well as every other institution, from faith communities, to government, media, the military, and popular culture.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/04/the-immense-education-investment-fraud/

As reported by the estimable Just Facts, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. spent $1.02 trillion on education in 2019. This breaks down to $7,945 for every household in the country. It’s worth noting that these figures do not include land that is purchased for schools and other facilities, some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers, and unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (health insurance e.g.). Here in California, when all costs are considered, the state spends over $20,000 per pupil.

But for Joe Biden, a trillion isn’t nearly enough. In March the President, or whoever is handling him these days, rolled out a $1.9 trillion “federal relief package” which includes $126 billion for schools. What the teachers unions and its allies in the media call an “investment” is really nothing more than the ongoing pillaging of taxpaying Americans who are already facing debt of gargantuan proportions. 

Then last week, Biden piled on with the American Family Plan, a $1.8 trillion giveaway which includes $554 billion for education—payments in-full for community college and preschool, to address the (alleged) “growing teacher shortage,” and a host of other “investments”—a word that appears in some form 58 times in the plan’s fact sheet.

While educrats drool, many with a firm grip on reality are horrified at the government’s tax antics. As policy writer Brad Polumbo points out, tuition at the average community college for an in-district student is just $3,770. “But it’s even less than that for students who qualify for existing grants and financial aid, which cover nearly all the expenses.” Polumbo goes on to say that the majority of students of who attend community college end up dropping out, and research has shown that those students who actually pay for their own schooling tend to work harder and get better grades.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-death-spiral-of-academia/

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

It is important to note that Kaufmann concentrates primarily (but not exclusively) on the social sciences and humanities, in part because that’s where most previous research applies. Data for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) are not as common. There is no a priori reason to believe, however, that these fields are unaffected by systemic biases influencing entire institutions. Sure, one can make the argument that math is apolitical, but one can’t say the same for the many branches of science that now have considerable and controversial policy implications. Even a casual reading of the “educated” literature on environmental science and climatology reveals profound politicization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-7-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#7: University of Minnesota

In an effort to “deconstruct and decentralize whiteness,” the University of Minnesota’s Center for Practice Transformation and School of Social Work recently presented a “12-step program” to make white students aware of their innate “white supremacy.”  This allegedly “anti-racist” course is the ultimate apotheosis of racism, telling whites that as a sole result of their skin color they endorse and promote racist beliefs and policies. 

The course is presented in the form of an online “webinar” titled “Recovery from White Conditioning.” The official program description explains that “The Model of Recovery from White Conditioning, a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is rooted in love and accountability. It involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community…” The AA community has notably rejected this usurpation of their 12-step format for an “anti-racist” crusade.

The webinar is led by therapist and clinical supervisor Cristina Combs, a white woman who states that the program “is designed for white people to challenge and support each other to accept our responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, as it lives in us and around us.”

This is the very definition of racism—telling a group of white people that solely because of the color of their skin, white supremacy “lives in us.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-north-carolina-disgraces-itself-with-latest-faculty-hire/

To land a professorship in American colleges and universities, you have to either have a superb record of academic achievement or espouse radical leftist ideas. The former still prevails in hard sciences (although standards there are beginning to erode), but in many other academic fields, “wokeness” is now the main consideration.

Consider, for example, the decision by the journalism school at the University of North Carolina to offer a professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones. She was the driving force behind the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a piece of propaganda that scholars all across the political spectrum have blasted. Nevertheless, Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it. Now UNC wants her.

In today’s Martin Center article, Jay Schalin examines the hiring of Hannah-Jones and finds it very lamentable.

What’s wrong with the 1619 Project? A lot. Schalin writes, “For instance, she claimed that ‘one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery’ as British anti-slavery sentiment grew. There is almost no hint of that in factual history.” When called out on this false claim, Hannah-Jones has resorted to evasions and personal attacks. What a model for aspiring journalists.

https://mailchi.mp/harvard/into-practice-monikjimenez-1412968?e=b8a501ae37

Dr. Monik Jimenez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, uses different pedagogical approaches to elevate diverse voices and styles of learning. In her Mass Incarceration & Health in the U.S. course, she balances speaking time between a traditional scholar and an impacted community member, and emphasizes to the latter (and to students) that they are an expert. Dr. Jimenez also provides a variety of ways for students to participate and ask questions that include different cultural and neurodivergent learning styles. “It’s important to think about decolonizing the classroom in a layered way,” she reflects. “What are the multiple ways in which systems of power and white supremacy have impacted what we consider to be an ‘optimal’ student through the metrics we’ve been taught?”
 

The benefits: “Creating a space that demonstrates everyone’s voice is valued allows students to engage with one another in ways that are far more authentic and that last.” Students open themselves to learning, engaging more deeply with the material, and practice challenging stigmas in a carefully cultivated space. Emphasizing that voices outside the traditional scholar have deep value, permits students to feel comfortable thinking of themselves as experts. Dr. Jimenez notes that her students are often more interested in what impacted community members have to say.
 

“We’re challenging who you can be in this space and that your presence – your whole presence, everything that brought you to this point – is valued, not just where you went to school, but all your lived experience and distance travelled.”

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/05/03/why-school-vouchers-matter-and-how-to-get-them-right/

After a year of missed schooling and inadequate online learning, after months of teachers unions delaying the return to classrooms, it is time to reconsider school vouchers. Many “red” states are already doing so. Indiana is the most recent, and Florida, with one of the largest programs in the country, is about to undertake a major expansion. As these programs are implemented, we should learn which policies work best and build on those lessons.

The pro-voucher debate so far has focused on two features shared by all voucher programs. They offer more choices to parents and kids. And the schools supported by them appear to perform a bit better, on average, than existing public schools (after taking into account differences in student populations).

We need to refocus the debate on two other points that are crucial to designing effective programs. One is whether the payments are actually large enough to benefit poor families. Vouchers are useless to the poor unless they cover nearly all the costs of tuition, books and transportation. (The federal government already covers food costs.) The other issue is whether the programs foster genuine market competition, forcing schools to do their best for students or pay a high price for failure.

Well-designed voucher programs should accomplish the following:

Encourage new schools to enter the market,
Drive out schools that don’t meet students’ and parents’ needs, and
Shift public resources swiftly and decisively toward the best schools and away from the worst, as determined by the parents themselves.

These goals can be achieved only if resources follow the students, not the schools, teachers or administrators. They happen only if voucher programs are large enough and if bad public schools aren’t kept on life support. Right now, we don’t have that kind of vigorous competition, and it shows. Our children suffer for it.