RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/even-homer-gets-mobbed-11609095872?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/28/the-real-reason-why-your-kids-cant-go-back-to-school-hint-its-not-covid-19/

Schools have been closed for the better part of a year now, for the putative reason that COVID-19 makes them unsafe. Only distance learning and Zoom and other online classes are safe enough for both teachers and kids, we’re told. Even though the science says otherwise, powerful teachers unions keep schools closed anyway. But why?

Let’s start with a blunt fact: The teachers unions — including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), along with a host of radicalized local unions — don’t have your kids’ best interests at heart, despite their well-funded, slick propaganda to the contrary.

They oppose reopening schools, despite overwhelming evidence they should be reopened immediately.

As a must-read piece in the American Institute for Economic Research recently noted:

Significant evidence shows that a truncated school year supplemented with online learning is vastly inferior to the education children get in-person. Virtual learning is particularly harmful to students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds who do not have sufficient resources to support their learning.

This is a looming disaster for all children, but especially for poor and minority kids.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that school closures could cost the 24.2 million affected U.S. students nearly 5.53 million total years of life, largely due to lower incomes, less educational achievement, and worse health outcomes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lone-star-speech-victory-11608852943?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Political speech is under attack these days from Beijing to Berkeley, so we’ll take victories where we can get them. One arrived Tuesday when the University of Texas at Austin agreed to disband its PC police and end policies that suppress speech on campus.

Credit the nonprofit Speech First, which sued on behalf of student members in 2018. The group claimed UT and its officials had “created an elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress, punish, and deter speech that other students deem ‘offensive,’ ‘biased,’ ‘uncivil,’ or ‘rude.’”

Students could anonymously report their professors and peers for “bias incidents” to the Campus Climate Response Team, which would investigate and threaten disciplinary referrals and “restorative justice” meetings with administrators. The university gave several examples of what constitutes an act of bias, including “faculty commentary in the classroom perceived as derogatory and insensitive,” and other behavior open to highly subjective judgments about what is offensive.

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2019. Citing that decision, university spokesman J.B. Bird said Wednesday that there was “no evidence students were disciplined, sanctioned or investigated for their speech” and that, “to the contrary,” there was “strong evidence of the university protecting the speech rights of conservative students and guests on campus.”

But Speech First appealed, and in October the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones blasted the bias-response team as “the clenched fist in the velvet glove of student speech regulation.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/12/anti-racist-grading-means-not-expecting-kids-know-daniel-greenfield/

Here’s a preview of “anti-racist grading”. What’s anti-racist grading? The math on that simple. Anything you attach “anti-racist” is nullified. Thus “anti-racist policing” means no policing. Anti-racist carpet cleaners make your carpets dirty instead.

And anti-racist teaching? Since none of you are the products of anti-racist education, I’m sure you can already figure that equation out. But here’s the work shown.

One thing we understand from Universal Design for Learning is that there are multiple ways a kid can express their knowing. And so if you know 2+2=4, one way you can express your knowing is by writing it. Another way you can express your knowing is by discussing it. A third way is by creating a model that shows it. A fourth way is by illustrating it and a fifth way is by performing a play. But in too many schools, only one way is considered legitimate. So if you write it, you get an A and that’s it. There might be 100 kids in the school who know 2+2=4, but if only two of those kids can write it, then only two of those kids will receive As. That is profoundly discriminatory.

Awesome. No wait, profoundly awesome. In an anti-racist way.

Kids will no longer need to learn that 2 + 2 = 4 because it’s assumed that they already know it. And they can express that knowingness by performing a play whose theme is that capitalism is evil because it insists that 2 + 2 = 4.

The main beneficiaries of this anti-racist education will be minority students who will be left even more unprepared for the real world, and even more dependent on the subsidies and privileges of the anti-racist system and its anti-racist non-plantation that is totally a plantation. 

Who knew how true Animal Farm would really be.

Two bad. Four also bad. All numbers are bad. Only anti-racist numbers are good. And there’s only one anti-racist number. Zero. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/23/losing-a-generation-across-the-country-a-frightening-number-of-students-are-receiving-failing-grades-n1227213

Across the United States, school districts are reporting an alarming number of students who are receiving at least one failing grade, which has educators and administrators asking: Are the students really failing — or are the schools failing the students?

The “Great Experiment” in “virtual” classrooms is turning out to be a catastrophic failure.

The question is what to do about it. Here, wokeness meets reality in an unambiguous way. If teachers were to give these failing grades, a disproportionate number would be in black and brown communities. But school officials are extremely reluctant to fail so many minority children lest it makes them feel bad.

But failing any kid when the fault is not entirely their own seems unfair. Would they have failed if they had been allowed to attend in-person classroom instruction? The answer to that is almost certainly no.

Yahoo News:

In the first quarter of 2020, one school district in Charles County, Maryland, saw a 72.7% increase in failing grades for students enrolled in high school, WTOP reported. Forty-two percent of students in Houston received at least one failing grade in this school year’s first grading period, The Associated Press reported. This past year, secondary schools in Salt Lake City saw a 600% increase in the number of failing students, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

“Obviously we’re concerned,” James Tobler, the president of the Salt Lake City teachers’ union, told Insider, adding that teachers are trying to do their best “under the circumstances we are dealt with.”

Those “circumstances” have been almost entirely created by teachers’ unions and the politicians who coddle them. They are circumstances that teachers dealt with themselves. They can’t push the blame onto anyone else.

Some educators and administrators think they should just cancel grades for this year or even eliminate the entire idea of letter grades. At one time, getting good grades was necessary to get into a good college. But colleges today don’t really care how you performed in class previously. If you’re the right color, you’re virtually in.

Still, grades are a yardstick that parents (remember them?) can use to judge their child’s progress — or lack of it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/systemic_chaos_in_liberal_education_land.html

It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry at the education chaos in Liberal Land. There’s Dalton, the swank private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose staff has just issued a 24-point anti-racist manifesto demanding, amongst other things, twelve diversity officers, thusly

Expand the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to include at least 12 full-time positions: one Director, one Office Assistant, three full-time staff members per division, and one full-time staff member for PE/Athletics.

Back when I went to a swank private school in England in the 1960s, I’d say the total administrative staff, from headmaster and bursar down to office staff, was no more than five.

Then there’s the school district in swank Brookline, Massachusetts, a town full to the brim with highly-credentialed, well-paid experts and NPR honchos like Meghna Chakrabarti who all seem to have the credentials to boss around the school district and its teachers’ union. Because credentials.

(I wonder if Chakrabarti is a relative of Sandy O’s former eminence-grise, Saikat Chakrabarti? Maybe not: Chakraborty means “ruler of the country,” peasants.)

I have an idea. Maybe this system of politics-and-protest is a good way to cause chaos in our children’s education.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_birth_of_cancel_culture_and_the_death_of_education_.html

If today’s poisonous cancel culture is ever to be remedied, the cause must be understood.

When deliberating the origin, most just point to America’s universities and say, “they did it.”  And, clearly, that’s where the programming occurs, but it doesn’t explain why.  

Selwyn Duke recently noted that vanguard leftists have “indoctrinated the young in schools to transform them into foot soldiers in the leftist campaign of civilizational rape.”  Those foot soldiers are today’s cancel culture warriors.

But why did old-time educators morph into purveyors of cancel culture hate?  How did it happen?

The Vietnam War did it.  Or, more precisely, the campus antiwar activities did. 

Most are familiar with the undergraduate student deferments used to dodge the draft in the 1960s.  Less well known were the ones for graduate school, in place until 1968.  Those led to a 3-fold increase in Ph.D. degrees — men only — in the ‘60s compared to the previous decade.  The increases prior to that were a couple percent per decade.

And where are most Ph.D. awardees employed?  At universities.

Since their motivation was to avoid government service, it’s not surprising they would espouse principles not supportive of America.  Their negative views undoubtedly spilled over into their teaching, thereby providing foundational cancel culture training — Woke Philosophy 101; Introductory Victimology 202; Mobology 303: Advanced Bullying — identified as such or not.    

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/suppressing-free-speech-name-inclusion-and-racial-richard-l-cravatts/

The ubiquity of race obsession on campuses in the age of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd showed itself at Princeton University, too, so much so that in September its President, Christopher L. Eisgruber, published a self-flagellating open letter in which he bemoaned the fact that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.” At least one federal agency took Eisgruber at his word and Princeton subsequently received a letter from the Department of Education (DOE) questioning if the university was, in light of this self-professed racism, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Based on its admitted racism,” the letter read, the DOE “is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances . . . may have been false,” that “Princeton perhaps knew, or should have known, these assurances were false at the time they were made,” and “Princeton’s many nondiscrimination and equal opportunity claims to students, parents, and consumers in the market for education certificates may have been false, misleading, and actionable substantial misrepresentations . . . .” 

That investigation by the DOE may be of concern for Princeton officials, but the frenzy over racism from inside the campus community is proving to be a thornier problem as the campus has reacted vocally to some recent instances of alleged racism by faculty and students—even questioning whether academic freedom should be restricted to make sure no one’s feelings are hurt by racist expression.