RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-substantially-equivalent-provision

Last April, in a downtown Albany courthouse, three sets of lawyers for private kindergarten through grade 12 schools found themselves defending, before a state trial-court judge, private and religious schools’ right to operate. One might think that Americans’ right to educate their children in private schools was settled long ago—in 1925, when the Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, struck down an Oregon statute that required parents to enroll their children in public schools. But the lawyers in Albany, representing Jewish, Catholic, and nonsectarian independent schools, were challenging sweeping new Education Department edicts that would effectively force private schools to perform as de facto public schools. The Education Department is redefining an 1894 state law requiring that private schools offer “substantially equivalent” instruction to students as that provided in public schools—henceforth imposing on private schools the curriculum, scheduling, lesson plans, hiring standards, and reporting requirements that public schools must follow.

Even more alarmingly, the department’s new mandate would require local school district boards of education to oversee and inspect most private and parochial schools within their respective district boundaries, using undefined “objective criteria” to determine compliance with the redefined substantially equivalent standard. Lack of compliance could mean closure. Public school districts, then, would become the arbiters of whether their competitors—private and religious schools—can remain open, a blatant conflict of interest.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/school-integration-draws-scrutiny-from-left/

Long considered a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement, the integration of schools is coming under scrutiny in odd places.

EXCERPT:

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration. Voices ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill have proposed radical changes to the way we approach the integration of our educational institutions, long considered to be a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement.

Bill de Blasio is weighing a proposal to halt most admissions to the city’s various “gifted and talented” programs, from specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant to special educational opportunities in ordinary public schools. A disproportionate number of Asian and white students are enrolled in gifted programs — the two groups accounted for 75 percent of enrollees last year — which, some say, creates a regime of de facto segregation in public schools. Maintaining strict racial quotas in public education is of such importance to the de Blasio administration that the mayor is earnestly considering removing race-blind programs that, at their best, are avenues to upward mobility for some of the poorest students in the state.

This is in stark contrast to Jemele Hill, who — though focusing on collegiate rather than elementary or secondary education — encourages black student-athletes to voluntarily segregate themselves at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Her latest piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges,” decries “the flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges,” a process that she insists “has been devastating to HBCUs.”

Hill relates how, in some cases, “black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU campus,” and insists that, as currently constructed, “Black athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them.” What if a movement began to, in effect, embrace de facto re-segregation?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274835/immorality-free-and-public-education-jason-d-hill

As I travel across the United States to give talks and seminars on my books and political and moral philosophy, I am increasingly struck by the degree to which today’s college students believe that they are morally entitled to a free education. They think that this entitlement starts from the time they were born right up until the time that they graduate from college.

Since I never politicize my classroom and generally, as a rule, do not insert my political viewpoints into that space which I believe is a sacred domain where rigorous exploration and examination of great canonical figures from the Western philosophical tradition should take place, these campus visits give me ample opportunities to explore the philosophical and moral assumptions behind the idea that “free public education,” is the birthright and human right of all human beings. In a gentle but rigorous manner, I usually begin by asking students who press the issue privately with me on such visits, a few basis basic and fundamental questions. And they are:

Are the procreative choices that your parents made the moral and financial responsibility of other individuals? Or, do they not belong to your parents? When you become a legal adult at the age of eighteen are you not responsible for your own life and existence? Do we have a constitutional right to have children we cannot afford to maintain? Is it a form of child neglect to bring more children into the world than one can afford to support? When one has children, is it fair to expect one’s neighbors or compatriots to bear in the financial responsibility of raising them when they may have decided not to have any, or to have just one, or two, or just the exact number their budget can afford over the course of a lifetime?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/left-pushes-erase-high-achievers-university-halls-simply-theyre-white-male/

Perched in the old city of Akko, Israel, is an enormous citadel, one that has been built, leveled, and rebuilt again by various powers. When I visited the citadel, I recall mentally organizing the history, asking my friend to translate from Hebrew the timeline of the citadel’s ever-fraught ownership. From the Crusaders to the Ottomans to the British, the walls of Akko tell a story, one that locals are eager to both preserve and tell through intensive restoration projects.

I was reminded of this mantra­—walls tell stories—when I heard of a recent push within academia to remove pictures of scientists, Nobel Prize winners, deans, and various other accolade recipients from the walls of university halls under the auspices of their insufficient racial and sex differences. Most of the suspect portraits are of older white men.

In many instances, such as in the case of the Molecular & Integrative Physiology Department at the University of Michigan, the “dude wall” (as coined by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC) has simply been moved to a less-prominent location. But the relocation hasn’t always been received warmly. For example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, speakers presenting at Bornstein Auditorium now orate within the confines of bare walls, a situation in which former Dean of Harvard Medical School Dr. Jeffrey Flier has expressed public disappointment.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/01/from-icon-to-just-a-con/

Most of us who came of age in the 1970s revered the university—even as it was still reeling from 1960s protests and beginning a process that resulted in its present chaos and disrepute.

Americans of the G.I. Bill-era first enshrined the idea of upward mobility through the bachelor’s degree—the assumed gateway to career security—and the positive role of expanding colleges to grow the new suburban middle classes.

Despite student radicalism and demands for reform, professors had been trained in the postwar era by an older breed of prewar scholars and teachers. As stewards they passed on their sense of professionalism about training future scholars and teachers—and just broadly educated citizens. In classics, I remember courses from scholars like British subjects like H.D. Kitto and Michael Grant, who lectured on Sophoclean tragedies or the late Roman emperors as the common inheritance of undergraduates.

Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students, or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence in hopes of finding some common explanation of natural and human phenomena.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511

When Camille Paglia was an “obnoxious adolescent” of 15, she had what she describes as “this huge fight with a nun” in upstate New York. Ms. Paglia, 72, remembers the incident with a clarity that suggests a lifetime of unresolved umbrage.

“We were released from school for religious instruction on Thursday afternoons,” and teen Camille posed a question: “If God is infinitely forgiving, I asked the nun, is it possible that at some point in the future he’ll forgive Satan?” The nun—a doctrinaire Irish Catholic without any of the “pagan residue” of Ms. Paglia’s Italian culture—“turned beet red. She was so enraged that she condemned me in front of everybody for even asking that question.”

That was the day Ms. Paglia left the Catholic Church. It was not the last time she asked an awkward, even incendiary, question. Such provocations are the stock-in-trade of this most free-spirited of America’s public intellectuals.

Ms. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a tenured—and occasionally embattled—faculty member since 1984. This April, mutinous students demanded her firing over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That denunciation, with its indignant dogmatism, is particularly slapstick, since Ms. Paglia describes herself as “transgender.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274787/mandatory-teacher-training-denigrates-christianity-sara-dogan

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan revealed deeply concerning information on a mandatory two-day teacher training session on Islam conducted for public school teachers in the state which denigrated Christianity while presenting Islam in an exclusively positive light.

“We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers,” explained Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center. He noted that the school district had not sponsored teacher trainings on Christianity, Judaism, or other religions over the past five years, but solely on Islam.

The “cultural competency” expert hired by the Novi Community Schools District in Michigan is Huda Essa of Culture Links LLC, a hijab-wearing woman of Arab descent. After examining numerous documents relating to Essa’s presentation including audio transcripts from her talk, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) found that “information on Islam she provided to Novi teachers was riddled with falsehoods and errors of omission that were clearly meant to deceive.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/29/bill-de-blasio-merit-racist-wont-allow-nyc-public-schools/

Merit is now racist, as far as Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group is concerned. His new plans are just the next step in active discrimination against hardworking students, for the sake of equal outcomes.

Merit is now considered racist, as New York City Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio’s new education advisory committee suggests. A panel de Blasio appointed recently recommended ending selective merit-based programs in city public schools, even when no evidence supports the accusation of racial discrimination simply because people of some racial backgrounds fail to achieve as much as others do.

As Christine Rosen writes in Commentary, “The advisory panel describes merit-based testing and other screening procedures used in New York City’s public schools as ‘exclusionary admissions practices,’ not because they found any evidence of racial bias in the screening procedures but simply because the outcome of screening does not perfectly reflect the demographic make-up of the city.” The recommendation is therefore to “stop using academic criteria to screen applicants for admission to public middle schools, and to phase out elementary gifted-and-talented programs that now require a test.”

This is just the next step in active discrimination against hardworking students, for the sake of equal outcome. De Blasio and his schools’ chancellor, Richard Carranza, previously pushed to cut Asian enrollments. An absolute mindless discrimination is going on against selective “specialized high schools,” which are dominated by working-class Asian American students. The city’s Independent Budget Office conducted a study, finding that de Blasio’s plan would increase black and Hispanic enrollment from 10 percent to about 50 percent at these schools, while cutting Asian and white enrollment in half.

This Isn’t Limited to Crazy Blue NYC