RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/06/educational-freedom-is-on-the-move/

I wrote early last month that COVID-related lockdowns were leading many states to implement or advance already existing school choice measures. Just a few weeks later, it is happening at breakneck speed.

Legislators and parents have become fed up, and are doing what they can to regain control of the educational lives of children. They have watched as private schools flourish, while many of the government-run variety—typically at the behest of the teachers’ unions—have been shuttered. Also, because of forced online learning, parents have been given a Zoom-view as to just what teachers are—and are not—teaching.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states this year. Kentucky voted in a tax-credit-funded education savings account, its very first school choice legislation. As Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy, explains, “Students from families with incomes below 175 percent of the federal poverty line will have access to education savings accounts. The program is available to students living in counties with more than 90,000 residents, and will initially be capped at $25 million.”

In North Carolina, House Bill 32 is currently working its way through the legislative process. If passed, the “Equity in Opportunity Act” will increase funding for the existing voucher program and allow more students to apply for scholarships.

Perhaps the most interesting state to advance educational freedom is West Virginia, which on March 29 passed the most expansive school choice program in the country. Under the new law, all parents have unrestrained options. If parents choose a private school for their kids, they will receive 100 percent of their state education dollars—$4,600 annually—to help defray expenses. In addition to private school tuition, parents can use the funding to homeschool or for other education expenses.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/academic-freedom-alliance

Booker T. Washington would have liked the Academic Freedom Alliance, a newly announced group of college faculty dedicated to protecting freedom of expression on campus. The group, conceived at Princeton last summer, has quickly scaled up into a nationwide network. Although one of its main founders is Robert P. George, himself a conservative professor at Princeton, the alliance is determinedly nonpartisan and includes liberals and progressives as well as conservatives. The actions of the intolerant mob threaten everyone, regardless of political coloration. As a tribe, academics are not conspicuous for their courage. They tend to look the other way when colleagues are attacked for expressing opinions that do not pass muster with the wardens of wokeness. The afa hopes to change that, encouraging its members to act like elephants, not zebras: when hunted by lions, George noted in an interview, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” Elephants, he said, behave differently. They “circle around the vulnerable elephant” and protect it. Academics need to do likewise and offer support—legal as well as moral—when one of their numbers falls victim to the mob.

We welcome the Academic Freedom Alliance. Like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), it may well become a beacon of sanity in the stultifying and tenebrous atmosphere that prevails in American academia today. You can find out more about the alliance, and donate to support its activities, at its website, academicfreedom.org.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. After social distancing disrupted test taking in 2020, the future scope of the SAT and ACT is uncertain.

But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive. Privileged students are likely to gain the most. A new paper from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that “essay content”—that is, the quality of admissions essays—“is more strongly associated with household income than is SAT score.”

It’s true that high-income students, who are more likely to have highly educated parents, score better on the SAT, on average. But testing critics never explain what would be a fairer metric. That’s because the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/02/communist-and-black-nationalist-angela-davis-speaks-to-k-12-students-calls-on-them-to-dismantle-capitalism/

On Wednesday, former Communist Party activist and black nationalist Angela Davis spoke at a webinar for an elite California prep school, where she told the K-12 students watching online that it was incumbent upon them to “dismantle capitalism,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

The “diversity and inclusion”-themed webinar, titled the CommunityEd Series, was hosted by the Heads-Royce School, a prep school that costs just over $47,000 a year in tuition.

“Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to dismantle capitalism if we really want to move in a progressive direction,” Davis said to the impressionable students on the final day of the webinar. “If we want our children and children’s children and their children to begin to move along a trajectory that is described by freedom.”

Davis went on to bash the United States and voice her support for globalism, saying “I think that we have to struggle against this notion that this is the best country in the world, that we are always the ones to give leadership even when we’re talking about social justice struggles. We have to take internationalism into consideration.”

Davis’s appearance received backlash for her history of radicalism and violence. A former member of the Communist Party, she is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and also supported the Soviet Union’s suppression of Jewish dissidents. She received the USSR’s International Lenin Peace Prize in 1979, and in her acceptance speech praised Vladimir Lenin as “glorious” and “great.” She purchased several guns that were used in an armed attempt to break three murderers out of a California prison in 1970, serving 18 months in jail.

https://www.city-journal.org/christopher-rufo-on-woke-education

In an ongoing investigative series, City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo reports on the spread of critical race theory through American schools.

Senator Cotton’s Stand
The Arkansas lawmaker is introducing a bill to protect the military from critical race theory indoctrination. March 24, 2021
Subversive Education
North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.” March 17, 2021
Revenge of the Gods
California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice. March 10, 2021
Critical Race Fragility
The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate. March 2, 2021
Critical “Race” to the Bottom
10 Blocks podcast with Brian C. Anderson, February 26, 2021
Failure Factory
Buffalo’s school district tells students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”—while presiding over miserable student outcomes. February 23, 2021
Gone Crazy
A New York City public school principal calls on white parents to “subvert white authority.” February 18, 2021
Bad Education
In a Philadelphia elementary school, teachers are putting a premium on radicalism, not reading. February 11, 2021
Spoiled Rotten
Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.” January 28, 2021
“Antiracism” Comes to the Heartland
A Missouri middle school forces teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and watch a video of “George Floyd’s last words.” January 19, 2021
Woke Elementary
A Cupertino elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” January 13, 2021
Radicals in the Classroom
San Diego’s school district tells white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy.” January 5, 2021
Teaching Hate
The Seattle school district claims that the U.S. education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children. December 18, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-zionist-congress-is-born-blake-flayton-antisemitism

“Don’t go there.” It’s a phrase I’ve gotten used to hearing. Not from those who disagree with me on the internet or from my parents who want to make sure I’m safe at school, but from Jewish professionals charged with protecting students like me.

Since The New York Times published my story about being a Jewish college student and experiencing anti-Semitism in left-wing circles on campus, I’ve had the opportunity to write for a number of publications and speak in synagogues, high school classrooms, and Jewish community centers. Many of those who host these talks call me ahead of time and use that ubiquitous phrase: “Don’t go there.” They are warning me to avoid certain topics. They don’t want me to emphasize that anti-Semitism is one of the key features of today’s new leftism. Too often when I talk about anti-Semitism with Jewish liberals like myself, both on and off campus, they are terrified by this new and all-too-popular trend, but they are unwilling to speak freely about it. They are asking me not to tell the truth.

“Don’t go there” means stop bringing up the new form of social justice that flattens all individuals into steps on a privilege pyramid, a strict hierarchy of who is oppressed and who is oppressive, who has access to truth and justice, and who must be told to shut up. In this ideology, Jews, Jewish peoplehood, Jewish culture, and the Jewish state are placed at the tippity-top of the privilege pyramid. It’s therefore completely acceptable to demonize all of these things, for you are speaking truth to power, comrade! You are dismantling unjust systems. It is acceptable, and in fact encouraged, to insist that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian children, to insist that pro-Israel students are merely pawns of the “Zionist lobby,” a cabal that is flooding the corridors of academia with cash to silence professors. It’s fine to insist that Judaism is only a European religion, that Jews are not their own nation, not their own people, or are indigenous to Poland. These canards not only score you a place in any progressive circle, but maybe even a book deal too, not to mention a speaker’s slot on a Zoom panel for the Democratic Socialists of America. But take issue with any of them? You’re a white supremacist, babe. Go Sieg Heil somewhere else.

In this new world order, nobody is surprised when a majority of students at Tufts University vote to pass a referendum blaming racist police violence in the United States on the State of Israel. In this new world order, it’s not cause for alarm when an Israeli restaurant in Portland, Oregon, is forced to remove all mention of Israel from its menus and signs, but still gets vandalized with graffiti that reads “eat shit” and “falafel is from Palestine.”

In this new world order, no one blinks when the organizers of a rally against police brutality in New York City say it’s “open to all, minus cops and Zionists.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/02/the-latest-canceling-at-vanderbilt-shows-that-everyone-is-awful-and-we-are-all-doomed-n1436896

The latest episode of cancel culture at Vanderbilt University should terrify Americans. This is a harbinger of the damage the woke “social justice” mob can do when there are no adults in the room, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of not standing up to the ridiculous standards of modern outrage.

Last month, Vanderbilt University held its elections for the president and vice president of student government. The two leading campaigns pitted Jordan Gould and Amisha Mittal against Hannah Bruns and Kayla Prowell.

Shortly after the campaign began, rumors swirled that Gould, who is Jewish, attended a Sigma Chi fraternity event that broke the fraternity into North and South teams, with games and events loosely based on the Civil War. Cue the outrage.

The “North/South week” appears to have been a themed event in good fun. Early reports claimed Sigma Chi used a Confederate flag in the event and that some players chanted, “The South will rise again!” Some claimed the event was a longstanding tradition for the fraternity. Gould claimed that none of these claims were true, but that didn’t stop him from catering to the mob by calling the event “racist.”

“This week we draw the battle lines and celebrate the 79th annual Sigma Chi North/South Week. Our house is historically divided among Southerners and Northerners, so, we like to determine which half of the country reigns supreme,” read an October 2018 email obtained by Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, The Hustler. Monday was to feature a “Battle of Gettysburg Reenactment” in the fraternity’s basement.

Reports claim that this “reenactment” merely consisted of a game of beer pong, where spilled beer was referred to as “spilled blood.” The Civil War was a serious conflict centered on the expansion of race-based slavery into the territories, but college students are known for making fun games out of a broad assortment of topics. Only a bizarre woke form of Puritanism would demonize this event as racist.

College students — who are ostensibly adults — should be able to recognize that this “reenactment” was not the same thing as an endorsement of the South’s cause.