RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/31/the-looming-nightmare/

According to the Burbio school tracker, 53 percent of schools nationwide are now fully open for business. With the new Centers for Disease Control guidelines having determined that three-feet is a safe distance for students, one would think the other 47 percent would embrace the chance to follow suit.

But teachers’ union leaders, including Randi “Follow the Science” Weingarten, are having none of that. The leader of the American Federation of Teachers is “not convinced” by the new guidance. There is also no buy-in from the National Education Association, which hemmed and hawed in a press release about reserving judgment until they could review “the new studies that were presented.”

Neither union nor any shutdown hawk bothers to explain why schools in densely populated areas of Florida and Catholic schools across the country are fully open and not spreading COVID-19. In fact, the CDC has concluded that other adults, not children, are the primary source of exposure to the virus.

With some schools closed now for over a year—many of them in California—the devastation to children is immeasurable. Of course, some union leaders and their acolytes refuse to acknowledge this tragedy. Chief union toady Diane Ravitch, who is wrong about, well, everything, recently implored her readers in a vapid blog post not to believe the “learning loss hoax.”

Back in the real world where facts matter, an analysis of 70 million 10-year-olds worldwide shows that “11.5 million of them could be unable to read as a direct result of the impact on education of the Covid pandemic.” Additionally, a recent poll of American parents reveals that more than 40 percent say their kids have fallen behind in school during the lockdowns, and, even worse, they “lack interest in classes.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/woke-colleges-john-stossel/

Did you take the SATs to try to get into college? Your kids may not have to.

More than 1,300 schools have become “test optional,” meaning students need not submit SAT scores. Some, like the entire University of California system, now won’t even look at scores.

There are seemingly legitimate reasons to oppose the tests. Richer kids often get tutoring that gives them an advantage.

Critics claim the tests are culturally biased and say that’s why Blacks and Latinos don’t score as well. But that doesn’t explain why Asians do so well. In fact, Asians get the best SAT scores.

I assume it’s more about culture and parenting. Kids raised in front of the TV do poorly. Those encouraged to read do better. Kids who spend time talking to adults do better.

Bob Schaeffer, executive director at FairTest, an advocacy group that helped persuade colleges to dump tests, says testing companies just want to make money.

“These are businesses selling products,” Schaeffer says in my new video. “The College Board is a billion-dollar a year business.”

I ask him what’s wrong with the tests themselves. He replies, “The SAT and ACT are inferior predictors of college performance.”

https://jamieglazov.com/2021/03/30/clare-lopez-video-the-marxist-agenda-infiltrating-our-schools/

This new webinar features Clare Lopez, is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC, with a mission to alert and educate Americans on a range of national security threats, international as well as from the Islamic Movement/Muslim Brotherhood and collaborators among the ranks of Marxists/communists in this country.

Clare discusses The Marxist Agenda Infiltrating Our Schools, revealing how parents across America, some for the first time, are realizing what their children have been learning in school — and they’re horrified.

Don’t miss it!

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/31/the-book-of-nameless-women-at-yale/

March was supposed to be Women’s History Month, but at Yale University this month they were busy erasing it.

Last fall, the university sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first women undergraduates as well as 150 years of women attending the university’s graduate and professional schools. Many distinguished alumnae attended and members of the first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far, so good.

Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous for personal reasons. But when the books were published, the Yale Alumni Association had deleted the names of all the women – without asking the authors’ permission or even warning them of what had been done to their work.

After centuries of women being suppressed, diminished, pushed into the background, or having their work appropriated by others, this unexpected anonymization produced the reaction you might expect. The complaints raised in a first letter of protest were dismissed by the administration, and when the campus newspaper took up the story in February, the people responsible responded placidly, assuring readers that only a few people were upset – saying, in effect, let’s move on, there’s nothing to protest here.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/30/virginia_universities_unholy_alliance_with_china.html

The Chinese Communist Party is using Virginia universities to spread its malign influence, and it is both wrong and unconstitutional. 

It is well understood the CCP is America’s greatest long-term threat, so we must defend against China’s broad-scale aggression against America. The challenge ahead is for every American – and every state government – to play a role in fighting back, especially in Virginia. 

For several decades, China has waged a non-violent war against the United States. The tactics don’t reflect war as it is understood traditionally, but the CCP is committed to infiltrating the West by any means necessary. The most infamous aspect of this effort is China’s centrally planned and executed stealing of massive amounts of American intellectual property. Even FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly noted China’s theft has been “on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” 

They have also established major influence in corporations, Hollywood, and sports leagues — all of which have capitulated to China’s communist regime. 

Disney faced backlash for filming a movie in the Xinjiang region, where China has enslaved an entire ethnic group. When one NBA team owner had the temerity to publicly support the peaceful protesters in Hong Kong, the league was confronted by its largest revenue source: China. Pathetically, the NBA folded to the tyrants rather than standing for freedom. Instead of expressing support for those seeking freedom in Hong Kong, the NBA caved to the communist regime.  

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/27/part-2-whatever-hap

In Lee Child’s thriller Personal, his audacious hero Jack Reacher lays down the four attributes of good spycraft: hard work, attention to detail, lateral thinking (“outside the box,” as the phrase has it) and unconventional or creative adaptations to circumstance. These are precisely the traits that characterize the mindset and practice of the good writer in any field or genre. Apart from the pragmatic aspects of, let us say, writecraft, one may add, as Ernest Hemingway did in A Moveable Feast, a moral component as well. “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway said. “Write the truest sentence that you know.” The rest follows.

Honesty of purpose in Hemingway’s terms and fidelity to craft in the Lee Child/Jack Reacher sense entail both the writer’s fealty to himself or herself and commitment to the reader. These are the qualities that are demonstrably missing, for instance, in propaganda, in hortatory manuals of self-improvement, in government reports, in social media’s verbal expulsions, in academic jargonfests, and in almost all contemporary journalism.

I have begun to notice that many Internet writers and even notable scholars whom I’ve long respected have begun writing ever shorter paragraphs, culminating in the forlorn, one sentence taglet, a sort of stichometry catering to the growing problem of attention deficiency. Moreover, these sentences are often pimpled with typos, attesting to an author’s lack of diligence—I recall one well-known writer who wrote “the Pubic wars” for “the Punic wars,” without noticing. Another common solecism is the jagged or wrenching transition from one sentence to another, obscuring the thought. Of course, everyone is prone to such errors, and this writer is not exempt—to err is human—but the question here is one of frequency, of an all too casual unawareness or lack of care. The best one can say of such writing is that it may be serviceable, but it does not stride on the page with athletic confidence. It exhibits neither grace nor muscle. 

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/03/29/a_third_way_on_the_place_of_critical_race_theory_in_the_classroom_110556.html

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) from being taught in Florida’s public schools. He stated that “Florida’s civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like Critical Race Theory and other unsubstantiated theories…we will invest in actual, solid, true curriculum, and we will be a leader in the development and implementation of a world-class civics curriculum.”

CRT, a school of thought that focuses on the effects of race on one’s social standing, is a distinct lens that sees racial disparities embedded in power structures and perpetuated by the people who benefit from them. Drawing on postmodern ideas that humans perceive reality through an array of power structures, animating how we think about race and other social issues, it upholds systemic deconstruction as the only way to progress. To start, marginalized people have special insight into their own plight and should define race and racism for the rest of society. Emotion and lived experience matter as much, or more than, rational discourse.

That said, both the common use of CRT, which is to teach it as established dogma, and the governor’s exclusion of it, strike us as highly illiberal. Perhaps we can draw on Martin Luther King’s wisdom: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” Like DeSantis, we decry the dogmatic application of CRT as the only way forward, but unlike the Florida Governor, we also see value in CRT as one way to explore social power dynamics. And so we encourage a third way: a pluralistic civics education that teaches Critical Race Theory alongside numerous other approaches to social science and social justice.

DeSantis’s move comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s ban of CRT in September 2020 in Federal agencies. The Biden Administration rescinded the Executive Order in the President’s first week in office. Still, it remains a hot topic, with many Republicans favoring the ban and many Democrats supporting CRT education. Numerous states, especially those with Republican-dominated legislators and governors, are trying to ban CRT altogether.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/03/24/the_war_on_merit_110552.html

New York City’s gifted and talented students are in the crosshairs of woke activists who seek to impose “racial justice” in the city’s school system, not by improving education but by destroying opportunities for the city’s most advanced learners. And we can’t let them win.

A consortium of activists, including celebrity lawyer Ben Crump, has filed an 81-page lawsuit against the State of New York, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, and other state and city education officials, demanding the elimination of merit-based admissions to the city’s Gifted and Talented programs. The lawsuit argues the city’s gifted program and its specialized schools, including Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, perpetuate an illegal “racial hierarchy,” “racism,” and “segregation” because black and Hispanic students qualify for them at a lower rate than white and Asian students.

The proposed remedy – eliminating gifted and talent programs and schools and punishing smart kids – will not fix the systemic academic problems in New York City elementary and middle schools that are the root cause for this “racial hierarchy.” Instead, it will promote another discrimination: against advanced learners. The legal activists demand discrimination against students whose academic performance ranks in the top 1.5 percent of their peers, and they disparage these students as having “in-the-know” parents. It is common sense that we will accomplish nothing as a society and surely do much harm if we embrace a conception of “fairness” that involves attacking and delegitimizing excellence as a form of “racism.”

That’s why a new organization, Parents Defending Education, filed a motion today to intervene on behalf of New York City parents whose children attend gifted and talented schools.

Attacks on gifted education programs have been a front in the national culture war that has heated up over the past year. “Social justice” advocates promote a concept of “equity” that any deviation in racial outcomes – such as gifted enrollments – can only be explained by racism. From New York to Seattle, these activists are working to dilute the most advanced and rigorous coursework with concepts from the ideology of critical race theory, including curriculum infused with discussions on “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “structural inequity,” and “white supremacy.”