RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-are-ditching-homework-deadlines-in-favor-of-equitable-grading-dcef7c3e

Las Vegas high-school English teacher Laura Jeanne Penrod initially thought the grading changes at her school district made sense. Under the overhaul, students are given more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines, in recognition of challenges some children have outside school.

Soon after the system was introduced, however, Ms. Penrod said her 11th-grade honors students realized the new rules minimized the importance of homework to their final grades, leading many to forgo the brainstorming and rough drafts required ahead of writing a persuasive essay. Some didn’t turn in the essay at all, knowing they could redo it later.

“They’re relying on children having intrinsic motivation, and that is the furthest thing from the truth for this age group,” said Ms. Penrod, a teacher for 17 years.

The Clark County School District where Ms. Penrod works—the nation’s fifth-largest school system—has joined dozens of districts in California, Iowa, Virginia and other states in moves toward “equitable grading” with varying degrees of buy-in. Leaders in the 305,000-student Clark County district said the new approach was about making grades a more accurate reflection of a student’s progress and giving opportunities to all learners.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/advanced_placement_us_history_books_defame_trump_and_conservatives.html

Whether you have children or remember your high school days, you remember that Advanced Placement (“AP”) classes attracted the strivers in any schools, the ones who wanted to take an ostensibly college-level class in a given subject, whether to have a more interesting class, to gain college credits or (nowadays) to get extra grade points. These are the kids who pay attention, and who will soon be voting, so it matters tremendously that many of today’s AP U.S. History books defame Donald Trump, a treatment they do not give any other president, including Bill Clinton.

Greg Price took the time to “review five of the most commonly used AP U.S. History textbooks that cover all the way through the presidency.” It was an eye-opening experience and a very disturbing one. Without exception, they repeat as true defamatory claims about Trump, including the disproven Russia collusion hoax, and Clarence Thomas, as well as giving the leftist version of Trayvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s deaths. One even implies that Trump supporters murdered Brian Sicknick on January 6. Some generally disparage conservatives.

Here’s Price’s summary of the books but I urge you to read beyond the summary. Price backs up his claims with screen grabs from the books:

Nearly all of the textbooks claim “Russian meddling” was responsible for the 2016 election of Donald Trump, despite that narrative being debunked through multiple studies and news reports. A New York University Center for Social Media and Politics study found that Russian Twitter accounts had no measurable impact on the 2016 election. Facebook’s internal investigation also found that 56% of the $100K worth of Facebook ads purchased by Russians in 2016 were viewed on the platform after the election was over.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/24/will-school-choice-be-the-winning-issue-in-2024-ii-tipp-poll/

It’s been said we live in one of the most divisive and bitterly antagonistic political eras in our nation’s history. That’s certainly true for some of the public debates over tough issues we face today. But data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll show there’s one policy issue about which both major parties have near total agreement: school choice.

Fed up with substandard public schools and feeling trapped, Democrat and Republican voters heartily support greater school choice by more than 2-to-1, according to April’s online I&I/TIPP Poll. The survey, taken March 29-31 from a national sample of 1,365 adults, has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Specifically, we asked voters the following question:

“This week, Florida enacted an education savings account (ESA) policy for all K-12 students “regardless of race, income, background, or zip code.” ESAs allow parents to withdraw their children from public districts or charter schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts. Families can use the ESA funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculum, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. Generally speaking, how would you describe your support for this education reform?”

Support was surprisingly strong. Overall, 58% of all Americans back the Sunshine State’s new law, while just 25% oppose it and 17% are “unsure.” And a whopping 82% of parents with children under 18 support the law. Only 12% oppose it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/do-humanists-care-about-academic-freedom

On April 12, the psychologist Steven Pinker and the psychobiologist Bertha Madras announced in the Boston Globe the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH), a faculty-led organization devoted to the principles of free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse. This is welcome news. After all, everyone looks up to Harvard. Unfortunately, however, all is not well at America’s oldest university. Noting that Harvard ranks 170th of 203 in FIRE’s “2023 College Free Speech Rankings,” Pinker and Madras state with depressing force that “we know of cases of disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions. More than half of our students say they are uncomfortable expressing views on controversial issues in class.”

As I write, the CAFH has 71 members, many significant presences in academia. Among them are three university professors (Harvard’s highest rank), including former president Lawrence Summers, and all but six are tenured or tenure-track; only four are retired. As Pinker and Madras put it, “We are diverse in politics, demographics, disciplines, and opinions but united in our concern that academic freedom needs a defense team.”

Consider the diversity of disciplines. Nine of the 71 are from the law school, eight from the medical school, and five each from the schools of business and government. Along with two members each from the schools of divinity, education, and public health, plus one from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, they constitute 34—almost half—who are affiliated with Harvard’s professional schools and are not members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). One former director of admissions is also on the list. As for the remaining 36, 19 are social scientists, six are scientists, five are humanists, and another six are members of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), which is technically part of FAS, though Harvard often assesses it separately.

These figures are, at one level, not unbalanced: the total number of faculty members in the seven professional schools just mentioned (1,196) is comparable with the total in FAS plus SEAS (1,102). But at least three reasons for concern stand out.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/04/a-is-for-activist-indoctrination-in-the-classroom/

If, through omission or commission, I have inadvertently displayed any sexist, racist, culturalist, nationalist, regionalist, ageist, lookist, ableist, sizeist, speciesist, intellectualist, socioeconomicist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, heteropatriarchalist, or other type of bias as yet unnamed, I apologize … —James Finn Garner

James Finn Garner’s 1994 satirical children’s book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times has aged very well, albeit ironically. What was once a farcical parody of the trend towards political correctness and an incisive comment on the censorship of children’s literature could now be mistaken for one of the many earnest attempts to “clean up” the canon. The depiction of the woodsmen in “Little Red Riding Hood” as “sexist’, “species-ist” bigots and Garner’s reimagination of Cinderella’s fairy godmother as a male “Fairy Godperson” is now perversely de rigueur. Indeed, it would have Helen Adam of Edith Cowan University—one of the most recent Australian academics to call for traditional children’s books to be cancelled—very pleased indeed. Adam has highlighted ten classic children’s books that fail to showcase “diverse characters” and “perpetuate gender stereotypes” and she wants them scrapped.

Apparently, “children need to experience affirmation of their identities and respect and understanding for those who may be different to themselves”. That sounds quite reasonable until we delve further into Adam’s article and discover that it is built on the philosophies of critical theory and identity politics: the idea that power shapes all social relationships. She writes that educators’ “unconscious attitudes, practices and expectations” of children in class may “negatively impact self-confidence” and “reinforce gender stereotypes”. Further, these unconscious attitudes are so deeply ingrained they impact teachers’ selection of children’s books, causing further potential harm. Her solution? Read her instructional woke pamphlet (“Gender Equity in Early Childhood Picture Books”, Australian Educational Researcher) and follow! It even has references to the United Nations so it must be right.

What the terribly serious Adam and her ilk fail to recognise is that while unconscious attitudes undoubtedly exist, and may cause harm, like anything else, her iconoclastic position is a conscious, and very loud, assault on individual identity itself. Identity politics reduces individuals to mere mouthpieces of the collective that defines them, and so dialogues between individuals are reduced to power struggles between groups they belong to. You don’t engage with your opponents because there is no “you”—only your group exercising power in the interest of the group’s identity. By this logic it follows that the woodsmen in “Little Red Riding Hood” cannot be read as individual men, and certainly not heroic ones, but must be read as “sexist” and “species-ist” products of a human-centric patriarchal society that must be overthrown. The result? Silence instead of discussion: the bones of cancel culture.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/15/parental-choice-is-proliferating-nationwide/

Just 100 days into the year, educational freedom seems to be unstoppable.

Wresting total control of America’s schoolchildren from the government-union educational complex is moving apace. 2021 was declared “The Year of Education Choice,” when 19 states enacted 32 new or expanded educational choice policies, and West Virginia became the first state in the country to establish universal school choice in the form of an education savings account (ESA). This type of choice allows parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, and other higher education expenses.

While many choice programs existed prior to the Mountain State’s Hope Scholarship, they all came with restrictions—typically limited to special ed students or children whose families were near the poverty line.

Last year, Arizona became the second state to jump aboard the “school choice for all” train. And in the first 100 or so days into 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and Florida have followed suit. 

But wait, there is so much more!

Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming, Texas, Nebraska, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kansas, and Pennsylvania are working on school choice bills. In Georgia, Republicans in the state House recently helped defeat a choice bill, but it may come back for consideration next year.

Why is this happening at such breakneck speed now? Clearly the teacher union-led COVID-related shutdown mandates which closed schools all over the country is a major reason. But as Heritage Foundation scholars Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick explain, there is another factor. While they acknowledge that traditionally, school choice has been successful in red states, that is changing. Now, more and more families in suburban and rural areas are concerned about the kinds of values their children are being taught in public schools. “Radical academic content and school practices are not confined to large urban school districts on the coasts. Even in small towns across America’s heartland, public-school staffs have become emboldened to impose values on students that are strongly at odds with those preferred by parents.”

American Enterprise Institute fellow Robert Pondiscio sums it up succinctly, “School Choice Winning Streak? It’s Culture War, Stupid.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ny-court-vindicates-parental-authority-in-education

Late last month, the ongoing battle between the New York State Education Department (NYSED) and a small group of Orthodox Jewish schools took a surprising turn. For the better part of a decade, the NYSED has been battling these schools over the quality of the education they provide, arguing that they fail to meet the basic educational standards required by New York law. For that reason, this past fall, the NYSED enacted new regulations setting out a process to assess the instruction provided in nonpublic schools and, when a school fails to meet state standards, ensuring its closure. Not surprisingly, a number of Jewish organizations and schools filed suit against the new regulations. But instead of deciding the case based on big-ticket constitutional questions, a New York court invalidated the regulations on grounds that put the obligation to meet educational standards on parents, not on schools. In so doing, the court severely undermined the NYSED’s ability to regulate nonpublic schools.

New York education law requires that, when minors receive “instruction” outside a public school, the instruction “shall be at least substantially equivalent to the instruction given to minors of like age and attainments at the public schools of the city or district where the minor resides.” This “substantially equivalent” standard has been on the books in New York since the late nineteenth century.

Recent controversies have stemmed from complaints that a small group of Orthodox Jewish schools—primarily Hasidic schools—are failing to meet state standards. After some false starts, the NYSED enacted rules this past fall establishing a process for reviewing whether nonpublic schools were meeting the “substantially equivalent” requirement. If a school receives a final determination that it has failed to meet state standards, the penalties are severe. Under such circumstances, “the nonpublic school shall no longer be deemed a school,” in compliance with the state’s compulsory education law, and parents with children in that school are required “to enroll their children in a different, appropriate educational setting.” In sum, the school must close.

Various Jewish institutions and schools filed suit against the new regulations. According to their complaint, the regulations both exceeded the legal authority of the NYSED and, more dramatically, violated their constitutional rights, including their religious liberty, free speech, due process, and equal protection rights. Indeed, the lawsuit seemed destined to be fought out on the terrain of the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures parents’ rights to control the upbringing of their children. This right, to be sure, is balanced against the government’s obligation to ensure that children receive an education that enables them to be economically self-sufficient and civically engaged. Figuring out where to draw the line between parental and government authority appeared to be the crux of the legal challenge.