RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/02/12/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders-cant-really-read-n1669964

On Saturday, I wrote about the 230,000 children who failed to show up for class when public schools reopened after the pandemic. It’s a tragedy without parallel in American history as many of the no-shows are very young — K through 3rd grade. Critical skills learned in early education were not taught to these kids, who are now hopelessly behind.

The pandemic didn’t necessarily cause the problem. It exposed problems that already existed and were exacerbated because of incompetence and, as it turns out, wrongheaded teaching.

Consider the fact that 65% of American fourth-grade students can barely read. This is a result of a radical shift to a new way of teaching children how to read.

What was wrong with the old way? Well, it was old.

The Free Press:

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

It’s incomprehensible to me. The good and blessed nuns who taught us to read made us “sound out” words, which not only drilled good habits into our heads but exercised our minds so that the more we read, the quicker we were able to “sound out” words.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-university-of-north-carolina-fight-escalates-unc-belle-wheelan-sacs-higher-education-college-accreditation-free-expression-d2077882?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The kerfuffle we reported two weeks ago over a new school for free expression at the University of North Carolina keeps getting more complicated, and not in a good way. Opponents are now suggesting that UNC’s accreditation could be in jeopardy over the board of trustees’ plan to create the new School of Civic Life and Leadership without the blessing of the faculty.

At a meeting Tuesday of the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina, accreditation official Belle Wheelan declared that the UNC board would be getting a letter from her agency. Ms. Wheelan is president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS), which accredits UNC, and she referred to “a news article that came out” on the plan to create a new school.

“We’re waiting for them to explain that, because that’s kind of not the way we do business.” she said, according to a report by HigherEd Works. “We’re gonna . . . either get them to change it, or the institution will be on warning” with SACS. Ms. Wheelan also brought slides to illustrate “What a Board Member is NOT,” including “Solver of all problems” and “One who runs the institution.” Instead, the role of board members should be “Eyes in, hands off.”

In a phone call with UNC Trustee Marty Kotis the following day, Ms. Wheelan said that her agency would be sending a letter to UNC because she was encouraged to do so by Margaret Spellings, who was Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, “I was asked to mention it . . . I will tell you it was Secretary Spellings who asked me to mention that.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/desantis-calls-the-bureaucrats-bluff/ar-AA17jGOb

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has a plan for freeing public universities from the stranglehold of their diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies. Before DeSantis launched this effort, it was widely believed, even among those who recognized the dangers of DEI, that there was really nothing public officials could do about the problem. Just like the weather, it was simply something we would all have to learn to live with. Public universities were thought to be outside of political control, and academic culture was thought to be too committed to DEI goals. But DeSantis is proving that something can be done. His plan is likely to make significant progress in dismantling DEI in higher education.

DeSantis is showing that DEI is not beyond the reach of elected officials, at least not at public universities. In most states, public universities are state agencies, just like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Game and Fish Commission. They may have their own boards of trustees, but those boards were created, and can be modified, by legislation, and their activities are governed by state laws and regulations. States can reorganize how public universities are structured to achieve public purposes better, just as they can reorganize the DMV. Lawmakers may alter the size and composition of the Game and Fish Commission, as well as the process for appointing those officials, and they can do the same with the boards of public universities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dei-spells-death-for-the-idea-of-a-university-diversity-equity-inclusion-academia-college-hillsdale-new-college-of-florida-open-discourse-1d2ca552?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The first object of government, James Madison tells us in Federalist 10, is the protection of “the diversity in the faculties of men.” By diversity, Madison meant different opinions to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice in particular cases, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. Inclusion simply means to make a part of, as in defining a mathematical set by what it does and doesn’t include.

All good words with respectable origins. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.

Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to flatter and grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than character, competence and merit. Inclusion now means creating a social environment where identity groups are celebrated while those who disagree are maligned.

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—the compound form of these modern concepts—is especially toxic. It divides us by social identity groups, ranks those groups on privilege and power, and excludes those who fail to honor the new orthodoxy. Rather than being equally endowed with innate dignity and fundamental rights as human beings—best judged by our character and not skin color—we are supposed to discriminate and confer status based on race, sex and cultural affinity.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-combat-gender-theory-in-public-schools

As radical gender theory has made its way into public schools across the United States, children as young as five have been exposed to ideas that encourage them to question their gender identities, sometimes with life-changing and irreversible results. Despite Americans’ broadly shared skepticism about gender-identity curricula and practices in schools, many ideologically motivated teachers and administrators have not relented in their mission to advance radical gender theory, even in otherwise-conservative areas.

Among many other examples I’ve uncovered, in Illinois’ Evanston-Skokie School District, kindergarteners read books affirming transgender conversions; in Springfield, Missouri, teacher and administrator training recommends recognizing and affirming a panoply of student gender identities. Over 4,000 schools nationwide feature “gender and sexuality” (GSA) clubs, the national organization which calls for the abolition of the American judicial system and the “cisgender heterosexual patriarchy.”

Too often, teachers and administrators keep parents in the dark or pressure them into “affirming” their child’s claimed gender identity. Indeed, school policies often advise—or require—teachers not to share gender-related information with parents. Michigan’s Department of Education encourages teachers to facilitate students’ sexual transitions without parental consent. In Fairfax, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, teachers are expressly barred from “outing” supposedly transgender children to their parents. The GSA Network instructs adult club “advisors” to keep a child’s involvement in a GSA club confidential.

https://quillette.com/2023/02/07/the-approaching-disintegration-of-academia/

“The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.”

Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.

It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/florida-shows-how-to-combat-woke-indoctrination-on-campus-progressive-ideology-legislation-freedom-academic-college-university-11675883802?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

In the battle for open inquiry on campus, two factions have emerged on the side of free speech. The first camp consists of professors and administrators who consider themselves the true defenders of academic freedom. They seek to create a free-speech consensus in academia across the political spectrum. In the second camp, state legislators seek to restore academic freedom by outlawing advocacy of woke progressivism in schools. This camp views such ideological teaching as discriminatory and outside the bounds of taxpayer-funded education.

A simmering conflict between these two camps has now burst into the open over Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act. In the first camp, the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group of more than 700 university professors from across the U.S., issued a statement against the Florida policy and others of its kind. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is also opposed to policies that limit classroom discussion, scholarly inquiry and public debate in state universities.

I joined the AFA in 2021 as a founding member. These pages heralded the group’s formation. I share the organization’s stated mission: to “defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression” including “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.” But the idea that supporting academic freedom requires opposing anti-woke legislation is misguided.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-diversity-policing-fails-science-equality-equity-education-texas-tech-job-candidates-interview-dei-pronouns-11675722169?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.

Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.

The biology department’s motion mandates that every search committee issue a report on its diversity statement evaluations. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I have acquired the evaluations of more than a dozen job candidates.

To my knowledge, these documents—published in redacted form by the National Association of Scholars—are the first evaluations of prospective faculty DEI contributions to be made publicly available. They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/american_students__dumber_and_more_woke.html

Professors often complain about the current crop of students being less intellectually talented than when they began their careers decades back. Such griping is, of course, easy to dismiss — it has occurred for millennia. Unfortunately, this time around the grumbling may be true and not the usual nostalgia for “the good old days.”  The anecdotal evidence from textbook reading levels, shortened college syllabi, scrapbook-like research assignments, proliferating college remedial classes, grade inflation, and the popularity of “gut” college majors such as Gender Studies, is indisputable. We have also invested hundreds of millions in our schools yet test results such as the SAT are flat over the past half century. Add the countless stories of illiteracy among high school “graduates” despite falling class size and expensive reforms. Judged by the standards of evolution, Americans may be going backwards.

The best evidence of this decline are data from the highly respected General Social Survey on mean IQ by decade among graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students (a tip of the hat to Charles Murray on Twitter). This is a complicated subject given how America’s demography has altered, and measuring IQ via surveys might be iffy, but the numbers, even if a bit unsure, are alarming.

These data are divided into three groups: those with high school diplomas, undergraduate degrees, and graduate degrees. Then the data are then divided by decades beginning in the 1960s through to the 2010 onward decade. The overall pattern is a steady decline in IQ scores for each group from decade to decade. For example, high school graduates in the 1960s had an average IQ of 99.3 but this figure declined so by 2010 and onward, it was 93.5. A similar drop occurred among college graduates — from 113.3 in the 60s to 100.4 in the 2010 decade. For those with graduate degrees, the fall was from 114.0 to 105.8.          

These are depressing numbers. That in 2010 the average college student had an IQ of 100.4 (almost exactly our national average) signifies that we are miles away from trying to educate the brightest youngsters. Worse, with an average of about 100, many of those enrolled must score below 100 and thus suitable only for low-skill occupations. This picture may even be worse than these numbers suggest if we subtract out the many smart international students now enrolled in U.S. higher education.