RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/28/americas-dead-ed/

On May 15, the Manhattan Institute published a brief on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Also known as the Nation’s Report Card, it is the gold standard assessment for measuring American students’ proficiency in various subjects. As a former middle school testing coordinator, I helped administer the exam once and saw the test delivered with the utmost professionalism. Students are randomly selected without cherry-picking, and the test is handled with great attention to detail.

Unfortunately, the 2024 scores reveal that American schoolchildren are on a downward slope. Only about a third of 4th- and 8th-grade students are proficient in reading or mathematics. A few of the key findings from the Manhattan Institute report include:

Student proficiency levels have stagnated or declined since the early 1990s, with 4th- and 8th-grade reading proficiency at an average of 30%–31%. Math proficiency for both grades peaked in 2013 (42% for 4th grade and 35% for 8th grade) but has declined to 39% (4th grade) and 28% (8th grade).
Between 2013 and 2024, the lowest-performing public school students (25th percentile) lost an average of 12 points, compared with an 8-point decline among charter school students. Among average-performing students (50th percentile), public schools declined by 5 points, while charter schools remained stable. Charter schools provided more stability across all student performance levels.
States with collective bargaining laws for educators saw steeper declines in reading (–3.7% in 4th grade, –4.9% in 8th grade) and math (–2.7% in 4th grade, –4.4% in 8th grade) compared with smaller declines in non-collective bargaining states. While non-collective bargaining states started with lower scores, their rate of decline was smaller, suggesting that greater flexibility in adapting instructional practices is beneficial.
Even with record-high education spending per student in some states, such as New York, student achievement remains low, demonstrating that funding alone does not drive academic success.

“Our lowest-performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused to right this ship.”

When test scores show that the system is failing, the typical response is that we must spend more money. However, as noted in the Manhattan Institute paper, this argument is flawed. New York, for example, spends $36,293 per student—more than any other state. Yet its 4th-graders rank 32nd and 46th nationally on reading and math NAEP exams.

https://lizpeek.com/daily-rant/graduation-hijacked-columbia-ceremony-marred-by-antisemitic-protests-parents-left-outraged/

Imagine being a parent who scrimped and saved to put your kid through college, only to have Graduation Day, a day that should be a joyous celebration of achievement, turned wretched by ill-informed antisemites railing about Palestine and disrupting the proceedings. That happened yesterday at Columbia University, of course, with students showily burning their diplomas and otherwise wrecking the festivities.

There have long been student protests, of course, but anti-Jew and anti-Israel protests are something new. To have antisemitism increasing across our country, and across the world, is hideous, and far too little has been done to stop it.

The acting president of the school, Claire Shipman, could barely get through her address as students booed her appearance, shouted “free Palestine” and also called for the freeing of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who was arrested by ICE and is now cooling his heels in a detention center in Louisiana awaiting deportation. Khalil led some of the school’s ugliest protests; the Trump administration claims he has allegiance to Hamas, which they have designated a terrorist organization. It was Khalil’s group CUAD, which demands divestment from Israel, that called for agitators to disrupt graduation.

Notwithstanding the interruptions to her speech, and the intentional undermining of the festivities, Shipman chose to reward the agitators by saying, “I know many in our community are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil”, infuriating Jewish students in the audience and, undoubtedly, their parents.

But this is the time of year when college presidents can make headlines through commencement speeches that blast President Trump, or glorify Hamas, or otherwise appeal to the New York Times. Parents be damned.

What do parents actually think about what’s going on in our schools? A conservative group called Defending Education recently did a poll to find out. Turns out, most parents don’t want either admissions or hiring based on DEI, they don’t want biological men in women’s sports or bathrooms, and – guess what – over two-thirds think schools should introduce antisemitism bias training for faculty and staff. No surprise, parents are a voice of common sense.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-left-bias-trump-omar-sultan-haque

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-discrimination-dei-hiring-trump?skip=1

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity.

We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-exposes-the-academic-freedom-hypocrites/

There wasn’t much learning going on at Columbia  but the school provided an important lesson in hypocrisy for those paying attention. A key talking point from defenders of the universities against the Trump administration’s enforcement of civil-rights law has been: If the schools crack down on pro-Hamas protesters at the government’s behest, it will destroy academic freedom as we know it.

I’ve explained in the past why that argument is specious: The anti-Zionists have been erasing academic freedom on campus for decades and punishing the offenders will help to restore it. But honestly I couldn’t have made it much clearer than the fanatical tentifada mobs just did themselves when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying for their final exams.

The first characteristic of yesterday’s chaos was that it was nothing new: It was far from the first time students, even at Columbia specifically, had taken over buildings. It was far from the first time these crowds had disrupted academic environments: Classes have been invaded and hijacked, students taking exams have been disrupted (try concentrating on your exam while a rabid mob outside your classroom window is psychotically chanting that you deserve to be murdered because you’re a Jew), libraries have been taken over by protesters, students have been blocked from attending class and moving freely about the campus.

What these groups did yesterday at Columbia is, simply, what these groups do. There was no escalation, in other words. This is just what defenders of the tentifada groups have been defending all along.

Here is how new Columbia President Claire Shipman described the scene she witnessed:

“I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library, as events were unfolding, to understand the situation on the ground and to be able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our Public Safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged. As I left hours later, I walked through the reading room, one of the many jewels of Butler Library, and I saw it defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Violence and vandalism, hijacking a library—none of that has any place on our campus.”