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EDUCATION

Debunking the grievance industry in our schools A new book shows how the 1619 Project is being taught to students Casey Chalk

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/debunking-1619-project-exposes-the-grievance-industry/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_

City Journal last month released a survey that asked eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts related to critical race theory. These included: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.”

Each of these was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80 percent attended public schools.

That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools. “Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey,” reported NBC in July 2021. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson in June 2021 called the controversy over CRT “manufactured,” while his colleague Karen Attiah the same month called it “hot air.”

Since then, the narrative has evolved into “well, various themes associated with CRT may be taught in public schools, but not CRT itself.” A November 2021 report from PBS, for example, explained, “There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it… have been.”

That’s naïve if not disingenuous. Few high-schoolers know the names of the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and scientific materialism, but most of them are trained in their premises.

There’s an added dimension to this, given that the 1619 Project’s curriculum has been disseminated across the country to public schools responsible for teaching millions of students. There are other CRT-friendly public school curricula: the Southern Poverty Law Center for years has been pushing its “Teaching Hard History” program, which has been adopted by many school districts, including in my home state of Virginia.

Concerned parents need guides to effectively respond to these anti-racist curricula, and thankfully scholar Mary Grabar has written one, called Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.

RADICAL GENDER THEORY IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS My investigative reporting establishes the facts. Christopher Rufo

https://christopherrufo.com/support/?mc_cid=569a7c5199&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

I’ve finished my investigative reporting series on radical gender theory in America’s schools. These stories had a dramatic impact on the national conversation, driving nearly 500 million direct media impressions and changing the national debate. But, more than anything, they established the facts: America’s public education system has taken the most destructive principles of academic Queer Theory and injected them into the public school curriculum—starting in kindergarten.

Here is a summary of the stories:

The War on Innocence: A Kentucky summer camp teaches “sex liberation,” “BDSM,” and “self-pleasure” to minors.
Radical Gender Lessons for Young Children: The Evanston–Skokie School District adopts a curriculum that teaches K-3 students to “break the binary” of gender.
“Banging Beyond Binaries”: The School District of Philadelphia encouraged teachers to attend a conference on “kink,” “BDSM,” “trans sex,” and “masturbation sleeves.”
The Gender Variant Universe: A consortium of publicly funded nonprofits wants to “decolonize gender” and normalize male genitalia as a form of authentic womanhood.
Sexual Liberation in Public Schools: Los Angeles Unified School District adopts radical “trans-affirming” programming and instructs teachers to work toward “the breakdown of the gender binary.”
In Portland, the Sexual Revolution Starts in Kindergarten: The city’s public schools teach K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”
The Dismantlers: San Diego public schools want to overthrow “heteronormativity” and promote “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit” identities.
Soldiers for the Gender Revolution: Left-wing activists have smuggled radical gender theory into more than 4,000 schools.
How Gender Radicalism Conquered Sacramento Schools: Sacramento City Unified School District instructs teachers to “normalize gender exploration” and promotes such identities as “genderqueer,” “polysexual,” and “two-spirit.”
Radical Gender Theory Comes to the Heartland: A Missouri school district promotes the idea that “gender is a universe.”
Unholy Alliance: In Chicago, local school administrators and the city’s largest children’s hospital promote “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for minors.
Concealing Radicalism: Michigan’s Department of Education encourages teachers to facilitate child sexual transitions without parental consent.
Sexual Disturbance: The teachers union promotes a how-to guide for “anal sex,” “bondage,” “sadomasochism,” and “fisting.”
Pronouns Unbound: San Francisco Unified School District facilitates secret child sexual transitions and allows students to identify as “it.”
The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour: Aimed at children, the phenomenon is far more subversive than its defenders claim.
My work on radical gender theory is shaping the national agenda. Please support it with a $5 or $10 monthly contribution here.

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School Board Battles Are Raging Teachers unions finally have some competition in all-important school board races. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-board-battles-are-raging/

It’s no secret that the teachers unions have control over most aspects of public education in the U.S. The school boards, which negotiate with unions over salary, work rules, etc. are particularly important for the unions to dominate. To that end, Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, recently quantified the unions’ stronghold on the all-important boards.

Hartney asserts that union-endorsed candidates win about 70% of all competitive school board races. Union support helps both incumbents and challengers, and union-friendly candidates also tend to win in both conservative and liberal school districts.

As teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci notes, union involvement has been going on for years, and it’s been a massive effort. The largest union in the country, the National Education Association, has 13,000 local affiliates in all 50 states. A study conducted by the National School Boards Association found that in 2018, 24% of school board members surveyed were current or former members of a teachers union.

Not surprisingly, California leads in union involvement in school board races. Per Antonucci, in the recent election, the California Teachers Association funded 287 board candidates in 125 school districts – large and small – dispensing more than $1.8 million for its candidates.

The process is simple. The teachers unions fund left-wing school board candidates, who, when they win, then support generous pay and benefits for teachers as well as various radical causes. Then, via union dues, a portion of teacher pay is routed back to the union to start the cycle again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Union leaders clearly know the game. As former Los Angeles teacher union boss Alex Caputo-Pearl once explained, “We have a unique power – we elect our bosses. It would be difficult to think of workers anywhere else who elect their bosses. We do. We must take advantage of it.”

IED Explodes On MIT’s Campus Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/ied-explodes-on-mits-campus/

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, seems to be everywhere these days, from the White House to the boards of directors at Fortune 500 companies and to admissions and hiring policies at universities. We prefer to reverse the acronym, because IED – as in improvised explosive device – seems more apt, given the IED explosion in creating administrative bloat, invasive control of speech, and what used to be called “affirmative action.”

In a recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speaker characterized the zeitgeist thusly: “Diversity is being invited to the dance. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And equity is sharing in the planning of the dance.” But for MIT and other academically rigorous universities and programs, the goal has always been to develop the brightest minds for the betterment of humankind in all fields of endeavor, not to create social butterflies.

MIT does not “invite” participants, because it is tantamount to a science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) Olympics. You compete feverishly to get in. You must be highly self-motivated to participate once there in absorbing every possible iota of knowledge and technique in your field of study. And it defies reality to assert that intellectual capacity and specialized aptitude are evenly distributed to allow equal contributions. The same applies to other higher education programs committed to advancing knowledge through its students and faculty. The dance metaphor for these schools is a gross distortion that reeks of the entitlement mentality of many in today’s younger generations.

In fact, the very assumption that there is a significant educational benefit of identity diversity is questionable for these academically rigorous schools, just as the Olympics are focused only on athletic excellence and have retained their exalted status as a result. Intellectual diversity, which is not the within the purview of IED departments, is what fosters advancement of knowledge. In any case, the similarities and intense focus among those students who are truly qualified tends to make identity diversity largely inconsequential in comparison. 

Yale and Harvard Law Unrank Themselves The schools may be adapting ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on the use of race in admissions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-and-harvard-law-schools-unrank-themselves-u-s-news-and-world-report-rankings-college-heather-gerken-11668726298?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schoo

Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken in a statement this week called the U.S. News rankings, which have long influenced the perception of prestige, “profoundly flawed.” Yale has “reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.” Harvard Law School quickly followed, and on Thursday UC-Berkeley Law pulled out.

The U.S. News rankings have plenty of shortcomings, though being run by a “for-profit magazine,” as Yale swiped in its statement, isn’t one of them. Dean Gerken says the U.S. News methodology penalizes law schools that send students into public-interest fellowships, and that its metrics on student debt don’t account properly for loan-forgiveness programs. Berkeley also noted a per student expenditure rating that pushes tuition prices up and is not a proxy for an excellent legal education.

But Dean Gerken gave away the game when she wrote: “Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

This sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation. Yale has long been No. 1 in the U.S. News rankings.

Resistance Is Necessary Craig Trainor

https://americanmind.org/salvo/resistance-is-necessary/

Parents must do everything they can to stop CRT.

The teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in classrooms across America has raised the ire of parents—and for good reason. CRT’s principal claim is that America is systemically racist and incapable of racial justice. It is a wholesale ideological assault on the American experiment and rejects our founding principles—namely, that “all men are created equal” and should be treated as such under the law. Its ubiquity concerns parents, specifically, and citizens, generally, who object to this vision.    

The standard response by CRT apologists to parental pushback is to dissemble. They claim CRT is not really what its critics say it is, and that even if it is, CRT is not being taught in schools. But, even if it is being taught in schools, CRT is a necessary means to understand and interpret America’s racial past, present, and future. This strategy of obfuscation has been successful, because evidence of CRT’s spread in American schools has been largely anecdotal. Until now.   

A new Manhattan Institute study gives the lie to this narrative. The study asked “a nationally representative sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-old Americans” whether they have been taught CRT and related concepts. The answers are troubling. Sixty-two percent of students report being taught that America is a “systemically racist country”; 57 percent report learning that “white people have conscious biases that negatively affect non-white people”; and 67 percent report hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” Among the students surveyed, 82.4 percent attend public schools.   

Ideologically, CRT is uniquely subversive, because it corrupts our future citizens. Its dissemination in public schools threatens the survival of the American regime.   

Preparing Students for Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that the “role and purpose of the American public school system” is to “prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic.” The public school system, the Court has reasoned, is essential to “the preparation of individuals for participation as citizens, and in the preservation of the values on which our society rests.”

Ivy-Covered Fascism The top ten fascist universities in America. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivy-covered-fascism/

Introduction

In the last few decades since the conservative world began to sound the alarm about the disappearance of academic freedom and free speech on college campuses, the situation has grown increasingly dire.  The already unforgiving one-party political climate on college and university campuses has grown exponentially worse. The few professors who have dared to challenge the precepts of Critical Race Theory or other unquestionable tenets of the leftist narrative have found themselves facing immediate disciplinary action and calls for their termination from the cancel culture mob.

Even tenured professors are not fully protected from the puritan zeal of the Ivory Tower fascists who seek to scrub every last hint of dissent from their domains. Candidates for every position from the liberal arts to the hard sciences are now expected to craft Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements pledging their fealty to racial preferences and promoting “marginalized identities.” The mere suggestion that racial differences in performance are not solely due to structural racism and white supremacy is cause for immediate dismissal.

Students on campus fare even worse than faculty in this totalitarian environment. Encumbered by often-unconstitutional speech codes, Students can be suspended, expelled, or forced to submit to re-education for the merest stray remark or attempt at humor. Many universities maintain elaborate “bias reporting systems” to enable students to snitch on their classmates. A University of Arizona student became the subject of such a report when she attempted to draw the word “cotton” for an online Pictionary game. Observers claimed that her depiction of a possibly dark-skinned individual picking cotton was racist and demeaning. The U Conn Stamford College Republicans were reported for a photo which pictured a student making the “OK” sign; the reporter questioned whether it was a “White Power” symbol.

Our nation’s colleges and universities were constructed to be bastions of free and open debate by scholars engaged in the search for truth; instead they have become ideological prisons where the merest stray remark can be cause for expulsion and colleagues and classmates function as Stasi informers to hold the party line.

The following report exposes the worst offenders of this collegiate climate of censorship as the “Top Ten Fascist Colleges and Universities.” In particular, we are targeting those campuses who have instigated disciplinary proceedings or investigations of faculty or students who have dared to challenge leftist narratives and causes, those that censor conservative and libertarian speech on campus, and those campuses that maintain and enforce unconstitutional speech codes that restrict free expression, which should be a foundational principle of higher education.

Harvard University Had Most Campus Antisemitic Incidents Last Year: by Dion J. Pierre

https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/11/16/harvard-university-had-the-most-campus-antisemitic-incidents-last-year-report/

Harvard University had the most antisemitic incidents on college campuses during the 2021-2022 academic year, according to a new report investigating previously unexamined ways that anti-Israel activists attack and undermine Jewish identity.

Released on Wednesday by higher education antisemitism monitor AMCHA Initiative, the report, titled “Campus Antisemitism & the Assault on Jewish Identity,” claims that while previous studies have explored whether Jewish students are “safe” on campus, focus must be expanded to look at the ways in which Zionists are becoming increasingly excluded from campus life through classical “tropes of Jewish evil.”

“No other campus identity group is routinely subject to the kinds of well-orchestrated campaigns of identity assault that Zionist and pro-Israel students have had to endure for the last several years across the country,” the report said.  “The threats to Jewish student identity come from their peers, professors, and even school administrators, and reach every corner of campus life — the quad, classrooms, dorm rooms, student newspapers, social media platforms, student government, and more.”

The report cited dozens of antisemitic incidents falling under its categories, including the expulsion of two Jewish women from a support group for sexual assault survivors at SUNY New Paltz, Harvard University’s campus newspaper endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and its claim that “Zionism is Racism,” and a campaign against so-called “S***** Zionist Classes” organized by the University of Chicago’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.

Often prompted by ideas spread by college faculty, antisemitic incidents were likeliest to occur at colleges with large Jewish student populations and increased 100% to 200% percent after Israel’s 2021 conflict with Hamas. Harvard University had the most, 25, scoring the worst in each category of antisemitism examined by the report.

Academic Anti-Semites Who Don’t Like Being Called Out for What They Are Criticizing Israel can be anti-Semitic. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/academic-anti-semites-who-dont-like-being-called-out-for-what-they-are/

In yet another tendentious display of virtue-signaling from a group of self-professed “scholars specializing in Antisemitism, Holocaust Studies, Modern Jewish History and related fields,” 128 academics cautioned the UN against adopting a tool for addressing anti-Semitism.

In a letter published in EUobserver on November 3rd entitled, “Don’t trap the United Nations in a vague and weaponised [sic] definition of antisemitism,” these woke scholars claimed to have “witness[ed] with growing concern politically motivated efforts to instrumentalize the fight against antisemitism at and against the United Nations. How, according to this group, was that occurring? In their delusional view, “Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan has spearheaded . . . efforts . . . to undercut the Palestinians and” of paramount importance to these scholars, “to shield the Israeli government from international criticism,”

Ambassador Erdan had pointed out that the UN itself has been a perennial hotbed of fanatical anti-Israelism, something which apparently offended this group who claimed that Erdan “has gone so far as to denounce the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as ‘anti-Semitic’.” But the group’s primary concern was that “Mr. Erdan now seeks to fundamentally change the rules of the game by pressing the UN to adopt the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA WDA).”

As the 2016 Internal Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism continues to be adopted by organizations and universities who find it useful as a way of identifying instances of anti-Semitism—and especially the “new anti-Semitism” which couches itself as criticism of Israel—predictably, though unsurprisingly, groups that wish to continue to slander and libel the Jewish state, such as this group, have come out in opposition to it. What bothers these indignant individuals? Possibly the section of the IHRA definition that suggests that “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is anti-Semitic.

The Systemic Racism of the Teachers Unions Clearly, the NEA, an organization that frequently rails about “systemic racism,” is guilty of that sin. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/12/the-systemic-racism-of-the-teachers-unions/

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

One of the glaring outrages of the case is that the two national teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—filed amicus briefs in which they pound the racial bean counting drum. The unions insist that “diversity” must remain a factor in choosing who gets to be admitted into a given college.

The NEA brief claims that “elementary and secondary schools remain heavily segregated. In the 2019–2020 school year, the average White student attended a majority White school. By contrast, students of color are far more likely to attend schools where the majority of students are also students of color.”

The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring, because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children – notably poor children of color – in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), in place throughout most of the country, bring to light why government-run schools fail so many kids.