RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here’s a suggestion for America’s new secretary of education: Forget about federal education policy.

Not that policy isn’t important. But if Betsy DeVos wants to make her time count, she’d do best to use what her critics fear most: her bully pulpit. Because if Mrs. DeVos does nothing else in her time but lay bare the corruption of a system failing children who need a decent education most—and shame all those standing in the way of reforming it—she will go down as an education secretary of consequence.

“The temptation for an education secretary is to make a few earnest speeches but never really challenge the forces responsible for failure,” says Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform.

“But the moms and dads whose children are stuck in schools where they aren’t learning need better choices now—and a secretary of education who speaks up for them and takes on the teachers unions and the politicians on their own turf.”

Excellent advice, not least because education is (rightly) a state and local issue and Secretary DeVos has neither the authority nor the wherewithal to transform our public schools from Washington. What she does have is the means to force the moral case out into the open.

New York City would be a good place to start. In Bill de Blasio, the city boasts, if that is the right word, a mayor who fancies himself the nation’s progressive-in-chief, along with a schools chancellor who has all the credentials Mrs. DeVos is accused of lacking, including experience teaching in public schools.

Unfortunately, these credentials haven’t done much to help students. Only 36% of New York City district-school pupils from grades 3 to 8 passed math, and only 38% English. For black students the numbers drop to 20% proficient in math and 27% in English. As a general rule, the longer New York City kids stay in traditional public schools, the worse they do.

It can’t be for lack of resources. Figures from the city’s independent budget office list New York as spending $23,516 per pupil this school year, among the most in the U.S. And instead of closing bad schools, Mr. de Blasio has opted for the teachers-union solution: More spending!

The result? More than two years and nearly half a billion dollars after his “Renewal” program for chronically failing schools was announced, there’s little to show for it.

How might Mrs. DeVos respond? How about a trip to the South Bronx, where she could visit, say, MS 301 Paul L. Dunbar, St. Athanasius and the Success Academy Bronx 1 grade and middle schools. These are, respectively, a traditional public middle-school for grades 6-8, a K-8 Catholic school, and a pair of Success charters serving K-7.

Imagine how Mrs. DeVos might change the conversation by speaking publicly about the differences among these schools? Or by meeting with neighborhood kids languishing on the 44,000-long wait list for a seat at a city charter? Or by asking the non-Catholic parents at St. Athanasius, whose children are there because of a scholarship program, to talk about the difference this school is making in their children’s lives? CONTINUE AT SITE

People frequently write about academic political bias but rarely about the degradation of academic scientific capacities. Nevertheless, the signs of this degradation are everywhere. One example is embracing the pseudo-science of climate alarmism. The degree of enthusiasm has varied from Caltech’s tacit approval to the full-throat fervor of Harvard University president Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. Another sign is a chronic failure of the $300 billion-dollar-a-year post-secondary educational system to produce enough computer specialists. Lastly, there’s the academia’s failure to distance itself from the Union of Concerned Scientists (Disclosure: the author has a pending lawsuit against the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Ford Foundation and other defendants.) and the ongoing “Bill Nye the Science Guy” media hoax.

In hindsight, over the period from the late 1980s to 2016, many factors had contributed to the downfall of the academic integrity and scientific capacity. The major factors were:

1. Unnatural, politically-spurred growth of college enrollment without regard to the economic or social demand for the increasing number of college graduates and even the supply of sufficiently prepared and motivated college applicants. This quantity instead of quality approach has been known to be harmful, and it was.

2. The takeover of the universities and colleges by the New Left. Apparently, many radicals of the 60s hadn’t learned from the fall of the Soviet Union and continued to think of the U.S. as an evil “system” that needed to be overthrown. By trusting the good will of its faculty, the university system presented the New Left an excellent opportunity to sabotage scientific development. Not all radicals went into social disciplines to poison the minds of the new generation. Some of them went into science, and corrupted scientific institutions through environmental studies and other means. Their impact was amplified by big money from the Ford Foundation and its ilk.

3. Foreign influence. Science, as a pursuit of knowledge, is international. But scientific recognition can be influenced by politics. Environmental politics of the European Union in the 1990s heavily impacted scientific processes in the U.S.

One of the most important things for a scientist is the ability to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Consequently, editors of the prestigious scientific journals wield enormous power. But most English-language scientific journals have international editorial boards. Furthermore, most scientific journals are owned by foreign publishers. The three largest scientific publishers are: Reed-Elsevier (UK), Springer (Germany), and Holtzbrinck (Germany). The latter two merged in 2015. EU-centric scientific publishing has allowed EU politics to infringe on American science without people noticing.

American academia also corruptly promoted scientists for collaboration with the International Panel on Climate Change and other UN agencies.

4. The rise of “studies” with predetermined results, as opposed to the normative sciences, valued for their understanding of the laws of nature. Certain political developments caused this. Then confrontational environmentalism and tort litigation requested scientists to back their claims, no matter what, and generously paid. This went against all norms. Science starts with empirical facts (observations or experimental results) and arrives to conclusions based on them. “Post-normal science” starts with conclusions (provided by politicians or activists) and contorts itself accordingly to justify these conclusions.

Correct grammar is apparently just a social construct, much like gender, to judge from the sage commentary of the vice chancellor at the University of Washington Tacoma:

The university’s Vice Chancellor, Jill Purdy, claimed that the Writing Center’s new statement is a great example of how academia can fight back against racism. “Language is the bridge between ideas and action,” she claimed. “So how we use words has a lot of influence on what we think and do.”

Ms. Purdy was praising the leadership of Asao B. Inoue, Ph.D., Director, Writing Center, UW Tacoma: “I do research that investigates racism in writing assessments.” The title of one of the professor’s books indicates the scrupulously fair and even-handed approach he brings to the subject: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The blurb is instructive:

To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts. Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments. Drawing on his own teaching and classroom inquiry, Inoue offers a heuristic …

“White racial habitus… dominant discourses… heuristic” — if that isn’t enough to put you off your feed you have a stronger stomach than I.

The mission statement for the writing centers sounds noble enough: “The University of Washington’s writing centers are staffed by knowledgeable tutors who provide students with customized guidance on writing projects.”

For those unfamiliar with academicese, writing centers are for those “students” (“enrollees” would be more apt) who cannot even perform in freshman English. I’m not certain about the UW, but at a certain Big 10 campus it works like this, or it did several years ago.

High school seniors test out of freshman English if they can. Those who cannot must take freshman English. Those who cannot even perform at that level must take up to three quarters of remedial English without credit. But even that is not sufficient, so writing centers provide tutors to meet one-on-one with the students. Students who complete the remedial, noncredit classes must then take freshman English.

I know this because I taught freshman English. One of my students was writing at the level of a sixth grader, at best. It was not just the broken grammar, missing punctuation, and mangled spelling, there was no logic whatsoever, not even a wisp of an argument. After I got back his second writing assignment I took his paper to the director of writing, who suggested we look up the student’s records. He had taken two quarters of remedial English, receiving Ds. The director remarked that those were probably social passes. He then looked up the man’s ACT scores: fours and sixes. “My God! An ape could have done better!” I burst out laughing. “It’s true,” he said seriously. “You would get higher scores by guessing randomly. I think this person should not be at university.” I asked what I should do. “Give the paper the grade it deserves.”

I assigned an F, and the man dropped out a few weeks later. Was he well served by a chance to go to a large public university and collect another failure?

Now that Betsy DeVos has been selected as secretary of education, it is important to consider the issue of charter schools in a reasoned and logical fashion.

Parents should have the ability to choose the school they deem best for their children. But how will this actually occur? Will students from an inner-city school opt to go to a wealthier school district, where scores are higher and education more intense? Will they be bused if they live too far? Who will be paying the taxes for the additional teaching staff and materials to accommodate the students?

There are mixed reviews about the success of charter schools. They hinge on the dichotomy between charter schools and district schools. David P. Magnani, who was the Senate chair of the Education Committee in Massachusetts, reminds readers that “most have forgotten that charter schools were created to serve as ‘laboratories of change,’ disseminating new ideas, not as competitors to existing district schools. To date, very little, if any, of this ‘dissemination’ agenda has been achieved, largely because neither charter nor district schools have any mandate and few resources, incentives or the regulatory environment for such dissemination.” In fact, Magnani maintains that “charter schools have increased inequality overall, contrary to initial intent.” He cites a 2009 UCLA study that confirms this finding. Moreover, in “suburban districts, charter schools hurt district schools in another way: by leaving children with the most severe physical or intellectual disabilities as district responsibilities.”

For those who would argue about the economics of charter schools, Magnani maintains that “in spite of temporary reimbursements from the commonwealth, over time, the district actually loses money for each student it sends to a charter school. This is because the average cost-per-student leaves the district and ‘follows the child,’ but the marginal district ‘savings’ are less than the amount the district is required to send to the charter school.”

But let us set aside the economic concerns for a moment. How have charter schools fared concerning the educational attainment of their students?

First and foremost, it is critical to understand the vital connection between parental interest and school achievement. Parental engagement has always produced more engaged students because the child has a back-up system that promotes student academic success. Moreover, as E.D. Hirsch has noted, “a systemic failure to teach all children the knowledge they need in order to understand what the next grade has to offer is the major source of avoidable injustice in our schools. … It is impossible for a teacher to reach all children when some of them lack the necessary building blocks of learning.”

In her 2016 piece, Kate Zernike of the New York Times writes that “Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.”

John Oliver at Business Insider asserts that “[s]ome charters are “so flawed, … that they don’t make it through the year. The most flawed are in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Charters have also had problems with misuse of funds, as they are supposed to be nonprofit but certain groups aim to make a profit, and there’s been lackadaisical attendance monitoring for online charters.”

We on the right have grown to expect bias in political journalism — but most of us probably thought that science literature would always be objective, and exempt from radical leftist opinion. If so, then our thoughts were mistaken.

Every once in a while, I receive emailed articles from science journals, for example, Scientific American. Most of these are of interest to science junkies like myself — but a disturbing and growing number of them have less to do with science than with left-wing political propaganda. Much of it is unashamedly anti-Trump. It seems (sarcasm here) that by questioning the (questionable) evidence of global warming, President Trump is seeking to inundate the entire world with rising oceans. In reality, thousands of government grants are at risk, billions of dollars of them, unless the scientists receiving the money can prove that global warming is manmade, and that human effort can reverse it.

Of course, the scientists can prove no such thing, which is why their journal articles increasingly give the impression of “hair-on-fire” panic.

More recently, I am beginning to notice an even more sinister trend, one which hints at anti-Semitism. In an article at Space.com, a site oriented toward NASA news, the authors seem to twist and turn through verbal contortions, straining to avoid any mention of the word, “Israel,” even though the science news therein was discovered by studying ancient Jewish records.

The article describes the geography of the featured discovery as being that of “Judah, an ancient kingdom situated around what is now Jerusalem.” This seems like an awful lot of words to substitute for the word, “Israel.”

The article credits Israeli scientist [quote], “Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University,” with analyzing much of the information, but yet again, avoids mentioning that he is an Israeli scientist. In other articles, I find no shortage of phrases such as, a French scientist, or a scientist at Britain’s Oxford University, and so forth.

It is perhaps possible that I am being a bit overly sensitive in my appraisal of this one article, but I noticed its omissions largely because the piece fits the mold of many other science articles I have read over the past year, articles which in my view are ever more politically oriented toward leftist opinions.

“Aren’t you tired of writing your stupid articles?”

I recall Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, Jonathan A. C. Brown, saying that to me on February 7 at Herndon, Virginia’s International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Brown’s brief angry remarks quickly led to my expulsion from his imminent lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery”: an indication of how he and his fellow Islamism apologists handle opposing views.

I had entered IIIT’s conference room in a small office complex anxious to hear Brown, the director of Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Shortly before the lecture’s evening beginning, he and IIIT Director of Research and Academic Programs Ermin Sinanovićwere preparing at a speaker’s podium before empty chair rows while two veiled IIIT assistants readied for the lecture. After I had taken a seat in the back row, Brown became visibly irritated upon noticing this writer, who has covered his previous appearances.

Before reiterating his previously tweeted disgust at my “stupid” articles, Brown began by asking if I intended to enjoy the IIIT’s food, after my appetite had impressed him at several Georgetown events (the IIIT lecture offered no refreshments). He then mused whether he should photograph me while visiting an Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated institution, observations that most certainly came to him from my reporting on a previous IIIT lecture hosted by Sinanović. Brown then indicated a willingness to speak before most anyone, but felt incensed by my presence at IIIT after my having supposedly “insulted” this institution, whereupon Sinanović asked me to leave.

Given Brown’s background, I was particularly interested in hearing him address the contentious topics of Islam and slavery. A Washington, DC, area native, Brown, like me, is from an Anglican background, but converted to Islam under the strong influence of a Muslim professor his freshman year at Georgetown, as he explained in a2010 interview. She impressed him with “things that I had believed my whole life; the nature of God, the idea of reason, the idea that reason and religion are supposed to be compatible, religion should enhance your life, not make it difficult and not make you suffer.”

Brown’s admiration for Islam’s prophet Muhammad, who “was both idealistic and effective,” is puzzling to many non-Muslims. He

was the best person in every situation….Jesus is always kind and forgiving. But sometimes you can’t be forgiving. You shouldn’t be; sometimes you have to soft and sweet and sometimes you have to be direct and harsh; sometimes you have to be patient and at other times you have to act quickly. There isn’t always one rule that you can apply to your life that will tell you how to act. You have to be able to read the situation and act in the best way. The Prophet knew how to do that; that is inspirational.

What passes for education at many American public schools is too often closer to indoctrination. Consider the seminar day that New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Ill., on Chicago’s affluent North Shore, is planning for Feb. 28.

The title for the all-school seminar is “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights.” That very term, “racial civil rights,” is misleading, since civil rights protect Americans’ freedoms regardless of their race. Judging from the roster of scheduled events, the seminar might be more accurately titled “Inculcating a Progressive View of Social Justice.”

Here are a few of the offerings scheduled for presentation to New Trier’s roughly 4,000 students: “SPENT: A Simulation to See How Long You Can Survive on Minimum Wage”—which touches on race at best tangentially. “Developing a Positive, Accountable White Activism for Racial Civil Rights”—which promotes a divisive view of race as a primordial fact, the essence of identity, a bright line between oppressed and oppressor. “One Person One Vote: Can the Voting Rights Act Be Saved?”—which absurdly suggests that the Voting Rights Act is at risk of being repealed.

There are plenty of sessions on the connections that music, art and culture have with civil rights. Very little programming, however, is devoted to actually explaining to students what civil rights are and what their place is in this country’s political tradition.

Yet the continuing quest to fulfill America’s founding promise is unintelligible without a grasp of how civil rights are grounded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Or without an understanding of the often-heroic struggle for civil rights over the course of American history—the abolition movement, the Civil War, the great Reconstruction constitutional amendments, the grievous setback of Jim Crow, the modern civil-rights movement, the landmark Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education.

Instead of teaching, the school’s aim seems to be hammering home to students that racism plagues America and will persist until white people admit their unjust privilege, renounce their unearned power, and make amends for the entrenched oppression from which they continue to profit handsomely. This despite the school board’s written policy to provide a “balanced view” on “controversial issues,” and the seminar’s stated purpose “not to promote the philosophy of one political party or another.”

On Monday a group of concerned New Trier parents will make a final attempt to persuade the school board to alter the seminar’s programming to include a diversity of views about race and rights in America. The parents have proposed, for example, inviting black conservative intellectuals—such as my Hoover Institution colleague Shelby Steele and this newspaper’s Jason Riley—or people like Pastor Corey Brooks, the director of Project Hood, which seeks to end violence and build communities on Chicago’s South Side. CONTINUE AT SITE