RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/the_voters_throw_cbs_a_curve.html

By chance, I was looking for the Cowboys pre-game show and ended up at “Face the Nation.”  What I saw was rather interesting and a good sign about the upcoming midterms.  This is from Fox News:    

A “Face the Nation” focus group featuring a Republican, Democrat and an independent unanimously agreed that “woke culture” has become a prime concern for parents raising children in America.

In a segment called “Eye on America: Election Influencers,” CBS host Margaret Brennan asked a group of parents to get candid about the issues they’ll prioritize when voting and their struggles raising kids in a post-pandemic era.

John, a Texas Republican, cited the “woke” overhaul of U.S. education as a key issue for parents.   

“The whole woke culture affecting our children, all these elementary, middle schools having woke culture pushed on them from the LGBTQ+ community for sexual identify and gender. We should be pushing the actual school studies. Math, social studies, science,” he said. “Not gender studies.”

Lashawn, an Illinois Democrat and mother of eight, largely agreed.  “I can agree with some of his points,” she said. “I will say sex education, I feel like some things are brought to the children’s attention they wouldn’t even think about.”

“Children are really influenced,” she continued. “You can teach them one thing at home, but when they go to school, they’re just as much influenced by their teachers and their surroundings.”

Lashawn said parents should have more of a say over what children are taught.

Stephanie, an independent from Arkansas, also agreed, spotlighting the struggles children are facing as they get back in their classrooms after extended school closures.    

https://www.city-journal.org/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools

To what extent, if at all, are critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology being taught or promoted in America’s schools? With little data available, and no agreement about what constitutes the teaching of critical social justice (CSJ) ideas, the answer up to now has remained open to political interpretation.

Motivated by the work of Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo, many on the right allege that CRT-related concepts—such as systemic racism and white privilege—are infiltrating the curricula of public schools around the country. Educators following these curricula are said to be teaching students that racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are fundamentally the result of racism, and that white people are the privileged beneficiaries of a social system that oppresses blacks and other “people of color.” On gender, they are being taught that gender identity is a choice, regardless of biological sex. But are the cases Rufo and others point to representative of American public schools at large—or are they merely outliers amplified by right-wing media?

The response to these charges from many on the left has been to deny or downplay them. CRT, they contend, is a legal theory taught only in university law programs. Therefore, what conservatives are up in arms about is not the teaching of CRT, but the teaching of America’s uncomfortable racial history.

But strong connections exist between the cultural radicalism of CRT and the one-sided, decontextualized portrayal of American history and society that Democratic activists endorse. And these ideas have also influenced many Democratic voters. Indeed, according to a 2021 YouGov survey, large majorities of Democratic respondents support public schools’ teaching many of the morally and empirically contentious ideas to which opponents of CRT object. These include the notions that racism is systemic in America (85 percent support), that all disparities between blacks and whites are caused by discrimination (72 percent), that white people enjoy certain privileges based on their race (85 percent), and that they have a responsibility to address racial inequality (87 percent).

Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they are hardly “settled facts” on the same epistemic plane as heliocentrism, natural selection, or even climate change. To the contrary, they are a moral-ideological just-so theory of group differences, an all-encompassing worldview akin to a secular religion, whose claims can’t be measured, tested, or falsified. They treat an observed phenomenon (disparate group outcomes) as evidence of its cause (racism), while specifying causal mechanisms that are nebulous, if not magical. Their advocates have not refuted counterarguments; they’ve merely asserted empirically unverified statements about the nature of group differences.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/high-school-test-scores-are-plummeting-and-not-just-because-of-the-pandemic/

The numbers are as shocking as they are undeniable: American high school students are more ignorant and ill-equipped than they have been in decades or more; in fact, it’s likely that their abilities are at their lowest level ever. The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that “average scores on the ACT [American College Testing] college admissions test dropped to their lowest in 30 years, revealing more evidence of the pandemic’s alarming impact on American education.” But it’s not just the pandemic. This is the result of the wokeification of the American public school system. Far too many teachers are spending their time filling their students’ heads with trans and Critical Race Theory nonsense instead of giving them an education. It’s dereliction of duty on a grand scale.

The Free Beacon added that “the average composite score for the class of 2022 was a 19.8 out of 36, according to a report released Wednesday, falling under 20 points for the first time since 1991. This year’s graduates endured the effects of the pandemic for three of their four high school years.”

The pandemic wasn’t even close to being the only thing they endured. In Georgia, PJM’s Chris Queen reported in August, “Gwinnett Schools are now adding gender propaganda to the mix with what one group calls ‘inappropriate gender lessons’ on school-issued Chromebooks that parents can’t access when logging into their children’s accounts on other devices.” In San Juan Hills High School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., teacher Danielle “Flint” Serio has an entire “queer library” in her classroom. And down the road at Madison High School in San Diego, a teacher has defined “fascist” with words including “Trump,” “white,” “Christian,” and “heterosexual.” The Republican Party, this sage wrote on his classroom whiteboard, “is a fascist organization that no longer fits the category of a conventional Democratic Party.” In a rural, conservative school district in Minnesota, the ninth-grade curriculum includes a book that features explicit rape scenes.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/tufts-university-criticized-after-launching-diversity-event-separating-white-attendees-from-bipoc-colleagues/

Tufts University is in a tough spot.

The Massachusetts university is being heavily criticized for the structure of its upcoming “Dialogue Series” that is reportedly set to commence on Oct. 17. Launched by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the event is supposedly aimed toward understanding a “cross-cultural dialogue.” Eyebrows were raised when the public learned that the sessions would be split based on the race of attendees.

The sessions are set to separate Black and ethnic minority staff from white colleagues and discussions are reportedly specifically structured for each group, according to Daily Mail. In one part of the series, labeled Radical Healing, Tufts faculty and staff who racially identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are encouraged to join.

Although white colleagues are not banned from attending, the free sessions are reportedly designed for BIPOC who’ve experienced being the “only or one of a few in predominately white spaces on campus.”

According to the university, Radical Healing attendees who meet the said criteria will assemble to discuss how marginalized and oppressed groups should live “free of discrimination, racism, and oppression.”

The other part of the series, called Unpacking Whiteness, is designed for Tufts colleagues who identify as white. They are invited to practice “anti-racism” and participate in discussions specifically for white people “holding spaces of privilege.”

According to Fox News, a description for the series states, “Anti-racism is an active and ongoing process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes in a way that redistributes power, policy, and structures to be more equitable while drawing attention to the lived experiences of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.”

Since launching, the university has received harsh criticisms toward the upcoming dialogue series.

Daily Mail provides that one response exclaimed that the university was setting their students back by years, while another called the separated sessions discrimination.

A response from a person who claimed to be a Tufts alumni said, “As a once proud alumnus of Tufts, I am speechless that they are promoting SEGREGATION and RACE SHAMING.”

“I am cancelling my annual donation and urging fellow alumni to DEFUND Tufts University until they restore racial compassion and respect.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-education-exodus-advances/

In August, it was reported that over the past two school years, children whose public schools were shuttered during the Covid panic were much less likely to return when they reopened. According to the American Enterprise Institute, k-12 enrollment in the 2020-2021 school year had declined by 2.7%, or about 1.2 million students nationwide.

Updated enrollment numbers and chronic absenteeism

But a new survey has revealed that between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9% drop in families saying their children were enrolled in a government-run school – a plunge of about 4 million students. At the same time, the number of children in charters, private schools, and homeschools shot up. While the dropout numbers aren’t actual data, there is no doubt that a massive education exodus is underway.

Another sign of turbulence is the number of children who are still enrolled in district schools but are “chronically absent,” meaning that they miss more than 10% of school days for any reason. Per the U.S. Department of Education, at least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during the first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data, collected for the 2020-21 school year, is a substantial increase from the approximately 8 million students chronically absent in the prior years. Excessive absences have serious consequences – kids’ learning suffers, and they are more likely to get suspended in middle school, and are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.

The future does not promise a reversal. In fact, chronic absence continued to surge during the 2021-2022 school year. Although no national data have been released yet, several diverse states – Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and California – claim that high absentee rates doubled in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Money flows in; no accountability required

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-the-supreme-court-finally-get-it-right-on-affirmative-action/

Hard on its landmark victories for judicial and Constitutional integrity last term, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this month on two cases challenging admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. If decided rightly, both cases should lead to the banning of unconstitutional, discriminatory racial preferences in university admissions.

After years of previous cases in which the Supreme Court tried various work-arounds to avoid stopping discrimination, maybe this year the Justices will get it right.

From its beginning in the 1978 decision Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the jurisprudence of subsequent cases have, as Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case put it, “refus[ed] to define rigorously the broad state interest” served by “diversity,” and thus demonstrate specifically the “educational benefits that flow from student body diversity,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy in Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) vaguely defined that “compelling state interest” allegedly justifying discrimination on the basis of race.

As we’ve seen for 44 years, this vacuum created by the lack of clarity about what “diversity” is exactly, and how it specifically enhances educational outcomes, has been filled by illiberal ideology and factional politics that serves partisan purposes rather than educational ones. The “diversity,” then, that courts, businesses, educational institutions, and government trade in is so broad and simplistic that it guarantees the concept will be used to pick political and racial winners and losers.

Let’s start with the idea of “diversity” that supposedly justifies violating the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Actual diversity is light-years more complex than the old “scientific” racist categories of “black,” “white,” “Asian,” and later “Hispanic,” based on skin color, hair texture, or other superficial characteristics. Relying on these physical criteria ignores the real diversity that appears at the level of ethnicity: socio-economic class, language, dialects, customs, mores, folkways, regional differences, faith, and political preferences. Indeed, so bizarre has this crude “diversity” become that a poor white kid from a region historically impoverished who supposedly enjoys “white privilege” doesn’t add as much “diversity” to the student body as an affluent black student does.

Race-based preferences, then, ignore all those more interesting and meaningful markers of diverse identities––except the last one, politics. Particularly in education, “protected” categories like “race” and “gender” take precedence, and traffic in a “diversity” that camouflages a rigid intellectual and ideological orthodoxy. We used to called it “multiculturalism,” but now it sports the Orwellian moniker “woke.” The grand narrative of the “woke” is the melodrama of permanent white racial oppression of selected victims “of color.” “Diversity” now has been joined to “equity” and “inclusion” in order to define an ideology that is homogeneous, unequal, and excluding––the opposite of real diversity.