RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/east-side-community-school-tells-parents-to-become-white-traitors

New York’s East Side Community School recently sent a letter encouraging white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.”

The message, sent by principal Mark Federman, showed a graphic outlining eight stages of white identity development—from the lowest form, “white supremacist,” to the intermediate forms of “white confessional” and “white traitor,” to the highest form, “white abolitionist.” The goal of this process, according to the graphic’s creator, Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse, is to challenge the “regime of whiteness” and eventually to “subvert white authority” and “not [allow] whiteness to reassert itself.”

In the letter to parents, Federman went on a tirade against white conservatives, arguing that “racism and hate is often the underlying cause fueling their beliefs.” He denounced former president Donald Trump as a “lying, racist, sexist, classist, hateful, science-denying bully” and described the Trump supporters who attended the president’s January 6 rally as “a crowd of white supremacists.” Federman’s latest outburst came as no surprise, said one parent of children who no longer attend the school. The parent, who requested anonymity, said that Federman had pushed a divisive “progressive line” to students and families.

The language in Federman’s letter carries disturbing historical echoes. The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis used the term “race traitor” to describe whites who crossed the color line to work, marry, or associate with nonwhites. The letter’s use of “white abolition” is also troubling. Federman and Hesse claim to want to abolish “whiteness” as a cultural and social construct, but they also use the term to describe an immutable racial essence. As University of New Mexico professor Geoffrey Miller has observed: “Applied to any other group, this would sound like a monstrous euphemism for mass extermination and cultural annihilation.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-needs-criticism-not-cheerleading-11613772365?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

When Prof. John Staddon read the “Statement to the Community Regarding Anti-Racism” sent out by Duke University’s president this summer, he was alarmed. The president, Vincent Price, promised to require “anti-racism and anti-bias training for every member of our faculty, student body, and staff.” To Mr. Staddon, that sounded more like indoctrination than academic inquiry. He responded in an open letter.

Mr. Price declared: “I cannot as a white person begin to fully understand the daily fear and pain and oppression that is endemic to the Black experience.” Mr. Staddon’s rejoinder: “Your reassurance is fine as an expression of empathy. I daresay you feel better, and possibly your African American audience does as well. But feelings differ: Unless the discussion can be moved from feelings to facts, no harmony is possible. Empathy, guilt, and good intentions are a dodgy basis for sweeping resolutions.”

Mr. Price affirmed that the “hard work before us” requires the community to “take transformative action now toward eliminating the systems of racism and inequality. . . . That starts with a personal transformation and . . . must end in institutional transformation.” Mr. Staddon countered that “this phraseology will strike many as more like psychotherapy or a call to religious conversion than a policy prescription. What are these ‘systems of racism and inequality?’ How have they affected Duke and how is Duke involved in them? Or are they societal concerns and thus the responsibility not of a university but of government, the church, and civil society?”

This isn’t the first time Mr. Staddon, 83, a tall, English-born American, has challenged the dogma of his peers. A professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology, he is something of a modern Cassandra, warning for more than three decades of the corruption of academia by political activists. As America becomes woke, his scholarly critiques read like prophecy.

But Staddon is a scientist, not a political firebrand. He doesn’t trade barbs over opinions but challenges his colleagues to answer the question that has long been the foundation of Western thought and science: How do you know what you know?

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/whistleblower-at-smith-college-resigns?token=

We all know that something morally grotesque is swallowing liberal America. Almost no one wants to risk talking about it out loud.

Every day I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past.

I get calls from parents telling me about the damaging things being taught in schools: so-called antiracist programs that urge children to obsess on the color of their skin.

I get calls from people working in corporate America forced to go to trainings in which they learn that they carry collective, race-based guilt — or benefit from collective, race-based virtue.

I get calls from young people just launching their careers telling me that they feel they have no choice but to profess fealty to this ideology in order to keep their jobs.

Almost no one who calls me is willing to go public. And I understand why. To go public with what’s happening is to risk their jobs and their reputations.

But the hour is very late. It calls for courage. And courage has come in the form of a woman named Jodi Shaw.

Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school.

She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.

In October 2020, after Shaw felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial discrimination at the school.

“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,” she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/18/elite-private-schools-go-woke/

Some parents are paying $50,000 a year for their kids to be indoctrinated.

Colleges have been fertile fields of woke craziness for years now. Just a few recent examples: Middlebury College Professor Jonathan Miller-Lane claims that “To preserve American democracy, Whiteness must be demilitarized so that bodies designated as ‘White’ might become human.” A Washington and Lee University law professor insists that votes of black Americans should be counted twice as a form of “voter reparations.” Not to be outdone, students, alumni, and faculty at Assumption University, a Catholic school in Massachusetts, have attacked the school’s promotion of Catholic teaching on marriage and abortion.

It’s no secret that the wacky world of woke has also made deep inroads into our nation’s K-12 public schools. But what about private K-12 schools? Like Covid-19, the woke pandemic does not stop at the schoolhouse door—not even at the gates of the chichi private ones. For example, Brentwood School is a top-rated private institution located in a tony part of West Los Angeles. Parents of the 1,000 K-12 students who attend the school fork over—depending on grade level—about $37,725 a year. The school boasts that all its students who graduate go on to attend a four-year college.

You might think that parents paying large sums of money to educate their kids would expect them to get something of a nonpoliticized education. But no. Brentwood School has gotten into bed with the diversicrats and the segregationists. The school’s “Community-Building Sessions” are right out of the Jim Crow South.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/malignant-tradition-uc-irvines-hate-israel-richard-l-cravatts/

If any area of the United States can be identified as the epicenter of anti-Israelism on campus, California, the nation’s most populous state, can certainly be said to have earned that dubious distinction. In fact, observers of out of control anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic activity on campuses consider California’s universities to be the veritable ground zero of such vitriol, with particularly troubling and persistent problems of radical student groups, venom-spewing guest speakers, annual hate-fests targeting Israel and Jewish students, and a pervasive mood on campus in which Jewish students and other pro-Israel faculty and students experienced visceral and real “harassment, intimidation and discrimination,” as a Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights described the situation on one campus, the University of California at Irvine.

In fact, UC-Irvine has for two decades been the epicenter of anti-Israel activism in California—and as a result, in the entire country—and this month, the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) continued that noxious tradition by successfully pushing a BDS resolution through the student government, a bill entitled “UC Divestment from Apartheid 2021,” which, in addition to once again leveling the mendacious charge of apartheid against Israel, suggested that “Israel has terrorized, displaced, and killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from its founding,” and that “Israel continues to follow the methods of terror from its founding until the present day.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/oregon-promotes-dismantling-racism-math-sara-dogan/

In a February 2021 bulletin sent out by the Oregon Department of Education, just below a feature on Black History Month, is a notice announcing a “micro-course” for educators titled “A Pathway to Math Equity.” The course promises to provide educators with “key tools for engagement [and] strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students” and knowledge on how to “dismantle racism in mathematics instruction.”

One might well ask, how can math—which more than any other subject deals in the realm of pure logic—possibly be racist? The “toolkit” provided as a resource for the first course session is happy to answer this question.

“We see white supremacy culture show up in the mathematics classroom even as we carry out our professional responsibilities” explains the guide. Educators must therefore take on the responsibility for “visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

These “toxic characteristics” include basic academic principles such as:

The focus is on getting the “right” answer.
Teachers are teachers and students are learners.
Independent practice is valued over teamwork or collaboration.
Students are required to “show their work.”
Grading practices are focused on lack of knowledge.
“Real-world math” is valued over math in the real world.
Students are tracked (into courses/pathways and within the classroom).
Participation structures reinforce dominant ways of being.

https://www.city-journal.org/reining-in-the-chicago-teachers-union

On Super Bowl Sunday, the Chicago Teachers Union announced its intention to return to the classroom. Finally, Chicago’s 347,476 public school students can receive the same in-person instruction that many private and parochial students have already been receiving throughout the pandemic. Why does this seem like such a big achievement?

Other “essential” workers such as grocery clerks, doctors and nurses, and package-delivery workers haven’t enjoyed the same luxury of working remotely—and they’ve kept doing their jobs without the generous pay and benefits earned by Chicago’s public-school teachers.

In 2020, Chicago had 20,927 full-time teachers at a total payroll cost of $2.3 billion, according to a response to a Freedom of Information Act request by our organization, OpenTheBooks.com. Our auditors found that the average Chicago teacher earned $108,730 last year—$81,422 in salary and another $27,307 in benefits. Further, teachers are allowed to accumulate up to 244 sick days for use or pension credit. (A full school year runs only 175 days.)

It’s not just unionized teachers who enjoy excellent pay, perks, and pension benefits. The most highly compensated Chicago Public Schools (CPU) employee was the CEO, Janice K. Jackson, who made $322,839—a $260,000 salary and an additional $62,839 in benefits. Jackson’s salary alone was $61,000 higher than that of the U.S. Secretary of Education, a cabinet-level position. And Chicago’s 522 school principals averaged $194,000 in pay and benefits last year, with the most highly compensated earning up to $219,000. Another 304 acting, interim, assistant, and resident principals averaged $171,315 in pay and perks.