RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/02/science-or-science-fiction/

When pressed about the reason for closing schools as a way to limit the spread of Covid-19, the comment you mostly hear from the teachers unions and other shutdown hawks is, “Follow the science!” Typical is American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten who declared in an online interview in August, “Decisions on school re-openings should be left to scientists and experts, not ideologues.” But clearly Weingarten and other power brokers are the ideologues who are making these decisions, often as a ploy to advance their agenda, much of which concerns massive amounts of money being poured into education.

According to the most recent Covid Tracking Project data, 43.5 percent of students in the U.S. were attending virtual-only schools. Big city districts with powerful teachers unions have been especially hard hit. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago are offering online-only instruction at this time and for the foreseeable future.

The schools in the unionized Fresno Unified School District in central California are only open for homeless and special needs kids. The Fresno Teachers Association has said the district should remain in distance learning at least through the end of the year, and prepare for a “safe, healthy and limited physical return” in the future. But right next door in Clovis, which has never had a teachers union, parents have a choice. They are free to send their kids back to school, or can have them learn at home via Zoom.

Taking Weingarten’s advice, let’s look at what actual scientists are saying.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield asserts that “school is one of the safest places” for children. Also, drawing on an assessment of data from 31 countries, UNICEF  maintains that “there is strong evidence that, with basic safety measures in place, the net benefits of keeping schools open outweigh the costs of closing them.” Moreover, the findings of a major British study reveal that it was a mistake to close schools. “The results demonstrate no evidence of serious harms from COVID-19 to adults in close contact with children, compared to those living in households without children. This has implications for determining the benefit-harm balance of children attending school in the COVID-19 pandemic.” In October’s Great Barrington Declaration, world renowned scientists noted that keeping children out of school is a “grave injustice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/questioning-diversity-delusion-race-obsessed-richard-l-cravatts/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

In 1978, the significant Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education  Although the Court found that the medical school at the University of California at Davis had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan Bakke admission, Justice Lewis Powell made his now-famous observation that, notwithstanding the inherent defect of such a quota system, universities could likely enhance the quality of their enrollments by striving to create a “diverse student body” engaging in “a robust exchange of ideas,” and that there was “a compelling state interest” in trying to achieve such a goal and in promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups on campus.

Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, however, the campaign to increase diversity has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the university diversocrats and their bloated fiefdoms with which they promote this theology of victimization, racial justice, and inclusion.

Coupled with the exclusion of all but liberal thought is the darker side of diversity: as victim groups become aware of their supposed classification as ‘authentic’ victims, they are prone to contradict the stated goal of diversity by limiting real dialogue and interchange between opposing points of view. Thus, while diversity proponents adamantly defend free speech in order to promulgate their own world views, they frequently move to stifle the alternate opinions of those with different opinions—through calls for censorship, threats of censure, and arcane speech codes—and exempt themselves from having to live by the suppressive rules they create for others.

http://American High Schools Go Woke Consultants cash in on radical changes to curricula nationwide

In July, the leadership of Los Angeles’s elite Harvard-Westlake School issued a 20-page confessional about the school’s role in perpetuating “racism and injustice” and promised changes. The school, which sends dozens of kids to the Ivy League every year, will now teach 11th-grade U.S. history from a “critical race theory perspective.” And diversity consultancies, which routinely charge six figures for their services, will facilitate the school’s transformation at every step.

On the East Coast, the wealthy Fairfax County public school district shelled out $20,000 for an hourlong speech from critical-race commentator Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. At one school in the district, faculty went further, disseminating “anti-racist” reading lists to parents and organizing students into “equity” committees.

Dozens of schools across the country, both public and private, have taken similar steps. The perceived need to announce sweeping changes in leadership and curricula has been a boon to the growing diversity-consulting industry, which is designed to profit from racial discontent.

A list of “anti-racism” resources, compiled just days after the death of George Floyd and featuring such writers as Kendi, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and the authors of the New York Times‘s controversial 1619 project, was shared widely by colleges and high schools across the country.

At Fairfax’s Justice High School, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show one of the school’s “equity leads” shared the list in an impassioned email to her colleagues. It was subsequently posted to the school’s website with the principal’s approval and shared in multiple community-wide emails. A representative of principal Maria Eck told the Free Beacon the list “represented the diversity of our families and students” and was posted “during a time of broad discussion of these issues in our community and in our society.”

Meanwhile, the tony Connecticut boarding school Loomis-Chaffee has introduced mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training for students and now requires faculty members to read Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and DiAngelo’s White Fragility for “professional development.” San Diego’s public schools have overhauled grading for fear of racist impact, and New York City wants to follow. The KIPP Schools, long a model for charter school excellence, have dumped their “Work hard. Be nice” slogan, claiming that “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/29/why-our-universities-have-failed/

Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with competency in oral and written communications, basic computation, and reasoning? How in the 21st century did race and ethnicity come to define who we are rather than become incidental to our individual personas? In answering all these questions, we always seem to return to higher education—the font of much of our contemporary malaise.

The Perfect Storm

A perfect storm of events—many of them reforms with unintended consequences—have conspired to end disinterested education as we once knew it.

The passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18—in response to widespread resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War—turned rhetorical campus activism into real progressive block voting. The campuses were no longer just free-speech zones, but woke reservoirs of millions of young voters, a new political and mostly subsidized constituency with clout, to which universities catered.

Globalization enriched the coasts. Seven-billion-person markets were translated into multibillion-dollar endowments of a magnitude never imagined. The Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, the UC system, and dozens of other research universities between Boston and Miami, and San Diego and Seattle, partnered with corporations and solicited foreign government money. They opened up overseas satellites, welcomed in hundreds of thousands of foreign students, and began adjusting their curricula to reflect transnational issues.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/11/28/california-isis-jihadi-stabs-four-in-university-classroom-university-blames-toxic-masculinity-n1179840

The FBI last Wednesday released new details about the case of Faisal Mohammad, who in November 2015, while he was a freshman at the University of California, Merced, entered a classroom and stabbed four people. It was already known back at the time of the attack that young Mohammad was a jihadi: The College Fix reported that he “was found to have an image of the ISIS flag, a handwritten manifesto with instructions on how to behead someone, and reminders to pray to Allah.” The new information that has just been released about the case only confirms this, and shows up the abject idiocy of the university’s utterly predictable reaction to the attack.

Mohammad, according to the Associated Press, “planned to praise Allah while slitting the throats of classmates and use a gun taken from an ambushed officer to kill more.” Then he planned to call 911 to report the killings, “read the Quran until he heard sirens, and then ‘take calm shot after shot’ with the gun” when the police arrived. He mapped out a detailed for his jihad; it “included putting on a balaclava at 7:45 a.m. and saying ‘in the name of Allah’ before stepping into his classroom and ordering students to use zip-ties he provided to bind their hands. Mohammad also planned to make a fake 911 distress call to report a suicidal guy [sic; this is how they write at AP these days] and wait for police outside the classroom before ambushing from behind ‘and slit calmly yet forcefully one of the officers with guns.’” Presumably in the officer’s throat, in accordance with the Qur’an’s directive, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4).

All this stands in stark contrast to how the attack was initially reported, and even more to the reaction to it at the University of California, Merced. Mohammad’s attack, as The College Fix noted back in November 2015, was widely characterized as “revenge for being kicked out of a study group.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/11/taxpayer-funded-islamic-terrorists-sent-millions-daniel-greenfield/

Open question: Is there any enemy nation or power, from Communist China to Qatar, that isn’t buying up academia? 

It’s one thing when wealthy enemy nations like China and Qatar do it, but the whole thing reaches a new level of obscene absurdity when it’s a terrorist entity that we fund with our tax dollars that’s doing it.

It’s not often that I’m surprised, but Mitchell Bard’s research in The Spectator turned up something I didn’t even imagine existed.

A new study that I compiled for the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise found that U.S. institutions received more than $10 billion in foreign gifts from Arab sources from 1981 to October 2020. While it is not surprising the wealthy Gulf countries were responsible for the lion’s share, it was startling to see the non-existent “State of Palestine” made nine gifts worth $4.5 million in the last four years. While the amount may sound relatively trivial, the impact can be exponential.

The PLO and its defenders keep claiming that they’re struggling with a state of miserable poverty. Meanwhile they’re funding chairs at American universities.

The “State of Palestine” also made gifts in 2017, 2018, and 2019 to Harvard of $275,000, $775,000, and $525,000, respectively. The university did not report the purpose and Harvard would not provide an explanation when asked. Because it fell below the $250,000 threshold required for reporting foreign gifts to the DoE, Harvard did not have to disclose a 2011 gift of $150,000 from the Palestinian Monetary Authority to establish an annual graduate public service fellowship to support a student from the “occupied Palestinian territories” for three years. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-assault-on-selective-high-schools-11606349353?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has fired the latest salvo in America’s assault on meritocracy: a 61-page opinion holding that the suburban Loudoun County school system discriminated against black and Hispanic youngsters because its selective-admission high school, the Academies of Loudon, hadn’t admitted enough of them. Never mind that—as Mr. Herring acknowledged—the school’s test-based admissions process is open to all and fairly managed. Because its results have a “disparate impact,” the school system must scrap it.

Nationwide, selective-admission public schools, also known as “exam schools,” are under attack because the demographics of their student populations don’t match those of their communities. Much like elite universities, critics allege, these schools have been admitting far too many whites and Asians and not nearly enough blacks and Latinos.

The ruckus began in New York, where admission to nine of the city’s hundreds of high schools is governed by the eighth-grader’ scores on a specialized admission test. Topping the list are Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and there’s no denying that they’re full of Asian and white kids, many from low-income and middle-class families. This has raised hackles for decades, but Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor have recently pushed to make the admissions process more “equitable.” They want to reserve places for black and Latino children, abolish the entry exam, and instead admit top students from every middle school in the city.

But is every middle school churning out eighth-graders with the requisite skills and knowledge to succeed at Bronx Science? Are all children who make good grades eager, motivated learners ready to make the most of what these high-powered schools have to offer?