RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-devastating-education-schemes/

Little did I know that when I was teaching in the 1990s and “multicultural education” became all the rage, that it was just the beginning of an onslaught of radical endeavors that shows no sign of abating. As 2022 winds down, let’s take a glimpse at a small sampling of the schemes that have been inflicted on America’s children over the past few years.

Critical math

 As a former teacher, I loved teaching math because there was clearly a right and wrong answer. Feelings, opinions and political dogma didn’t matter. Now however, with the ascendance of racialism, if you insist on right and wrong answers, you just might be considered a racist. Really.

In fact, in 2021, the proposed California math framework recommended eight different times that teachers use “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction ” as a resource. This radical drivel insists that addressing student errors, focusing on getting the right answer, and requiring students to show their work is a form of white supremacy. Objectivity, you see, is now racist.

Another iteration of the framework stressed “student-led instruction.” But it’s been shown repeatedly that direct instruction led by a qualified teacher is more effective in teaching the subject.

However, due to citizen outrage during the “public comments” period, the state walked back some of its wackier ideas, notably dropping the over-the-top “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The battle still rages, and now the state won’t be adopting a framework till some time in 2023.

But whatever is ultimately decided, 2+2 still equals 4.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/02/at-canadian-universities-race-and-gender-quotas-have-become-a-way-of-life/

On March 21st, the University of Waterloo—a Canadian public research university renowned for its STEM programs—published an unusual job posting for a professor in the Faculty of the Environment. “This opportunity is open only to individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit,” read the announcement. The rationale? “Improving the representation, participation and engagement of equity-deserving groups within our community is a key objective of Waterloo’s Strategic Plan.”

A worthy goal, one might suppose. But you’d be excused for being unsettled by the way the university was pursuing it. Perhaps you’re surprised by the unusual specificity of the listed groups (including “two-spirit,” a term that recently has become popularized in Canadian academic and government circles to signify Indigenous people whose identity “predate[s] colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation”). Or perhaps you simply thought such explicitly discriminatory hiring was illegal.

And so it is—in the United States. But in Canada, where such practices are protected under the nation’s constitution, they’ve increasingly become mandated by governments, human rights commissions, and major funding bodies. Academic institutions such as the University of Waterloo not only tend to enthusiastically comply with these affirmative-action mandates, but also top up the officially prescribed requirements with their own initiatives.

At Canadian universities (virtually all of which are public, state-funded bodies), the most prestigious positions are Canada Research Chairs (CRCs)—funded federally under a “national strategy to attract and retain leading and promising minds.” In order to benefit from this program, universities must “set and meet equity targets in recognition of the persistent systemic barriers faced by researchers who are women, gender minorities, racialized individuals, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.” The task of meeting such quotas has given rise to a burgeoning administrative bureaucracy, charged with documenting the personal characteristics of faculty members in excruciating detail.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/george-harbison/2022/11/27/the-babylon-bee-publishes-a-hysterical-spoof-of-a-college-english-course-description-oh-wait-n1648938

The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet.  Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis.  Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-choice-tremors/

The election on November 8th was good for the school choice movement. As Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, explains, 76% of candidates supported by his organization won their election. Govs. Kim Reynolds (IA), Chris Sununu (NH), Kevin Stitt (OK), Bill Lee (TN) and Greg Abbott (TX) were victorious after making school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns.

In Florida, where there are four different private options for families, Gov. Ron DeSantis annihilated Charlie Crist, who drew a distinct line in the sand when he chose the president of Miami’s teachers union as his running mate. DeSantis not only won by almost 20 percentage points, he outperformed Crist by 13 points with Latino voters, according to exit polls. This should not come as a surprise, as 38% of students using the state’s largest private-school choice program are Hispanic.

While the above governors are all Republicans, some victorious Democrats had become education freedom advocates. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was elected governor after campaigning hard for school choice. Also, Illinois J.D. Pritzker found religion and supported his state’s tax credit scholarship program during his campaign.

But the choicers weren’t the only ones claiming success on November 8th. After the election, the National Education Association crowed, “Educators, Parents, Students Won Big in Historic Midterm Elections.”

NEA President Becky Pringle triumphantly asserted, “Parents and voters explicitly rejected extreme politicians who engaged in the politics of division, politicizing our classrooms, banning books, dragging their culture wars into our public schools, and pushing failed privatization schemes.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2022/11/25/biden-education-dept-deputy-director-says-democracy-and-everything-else-is-white-supremacy-n1648648

“Kristina Ishmael [she/her],” a Biden deputy director to the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, made her Twitter account private after Fox News caught her claiming that democracy, “fatphobia,” and, well, pretty much everything else is “white supremacy.” Considering that Ishmael said she was tuning out white people, while she/herself is white, should we follow her example and exclude her from public expression?

Fox News reported that said she also tweeted, “Learning to be comfortable in my own skin & weight and really ready to reject the White supremacist ideal body? F*ck yes. Fatphobia is real. The ‘ideal’ weight, shape & look is white supremacy baked into our everyday lives. I’m so over it. We deserve more than diets.” Because apparently only white people have ever criticized fatness?

“[Democracy is] also built on white supremacy, which I see perpetuated in education circles when BIPOC folx are being told they’re too negative by addressing real issues instead of superlatives,” Ishmael tweeted. The Biden official also tweeted an accusation that the “white evangelical church” has “welcomed” both “White supremacy and hate.” Ishmael commented, “Amen.” Which would seem to lower her woke score, since she did not add “awomen.”

Over a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical, Fox News reported.

In 2019, Ishmael pontificated, “I walked away from a conversation because a white male dominated the conversation that was being facilitated by a woman of color. Sometimes walking away is the only thing to do.”

Ishmael also seemed to ponder if white homosexuals ought to be considered marginalized in school curriculum. Which is clearly a consideration of paramount importance for an educator. “In most ‘inclusive’ materials, the most dominant folx are still represented in the marginalized group (e.g. white, cis, gay men). This does not include the nuance of this group,” Ishmael whined. But she’s always focused on the most important aspects of education: “[M]ost of my curriculum was written from a very narrow and white perspective.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-without-lsats-american-bar-association-11669157733?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The flight from merit continues across America, and it’s spreading fast in the legal profession. An arm of the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools, voted on Nov. 18 to end the requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test. And here we thought torturing prospective lawyers was a widely accepted public good.

The vote is pending approval from the ABA House of Delegates in February. If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional in preparation for a career that demands a lot of standardized knowledge.

The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.

The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first.

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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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.”