RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thecollegefix.com/freshman-orientations-push-dei-propaganda-over-free-speech-nationwide-survey-finds/

Free speech conversations ‘strikingly absent’ from most freshman orientations, and DEI topics covered 7.37 times more than free speech issues 

Almost all — 91 percent — of university freshman orientation programs across the country emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion topics, a recently released investigative report found.

By contrast, free speech and viewpoint diversity topics are only mentioned in about 30 percent of orientation programs, and are often “strikingly absent” from the conversation, the Speech First survey found.

Speech First, a 4-year-old nonprofit that advances free speech on college campuses through advocacy and litigation, obtained the results by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to over 50 public universities asking for freshman orientation materials.

The group found DEI topics are covered in “3.71 times more orientation slide material, 4.9 times more orientation handout material, and 7.37 times more orientation video material” than free speech topics.

Speech First Executive Director Cherise Trump told The College Fix that the process of developing the report, which took nearly a year to finish, was “wrought with delays, excuses, additional fees, and redactions.”

Many universities were reluctant to comply with the Freedom of Information Act requests. While 51 universities ultimately complied, 3 universities—Arizona State University, Colorado State University-Fort Collins, and University of California-Berkeley—did not respond.

Examples of orientation DEI issues highlighted by Speech First include a Northern Kentucky University orientation video that labels the phrases “Where are you from?” and “I don’t see race” as microaggressions and a James Madison University PowerPoint featuring 34 slides on diversity, power and oppression.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/enormous-amounts-money-continue-flow-bottomless-larry-sand/

Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America now spends even more on k-12 education, with an outlay of about $900 billion dollars a year, which includes an additional $122 billion from the Covid-related American Rescue Plan. While we have a military that is second to none, our education spending does not lead to a similar result. Our annual education outlay is second highest in the world, trailing only Norway. But in achievement, we are in the middle of the pack. For example, the 2018 rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has the U.S. 36th out of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, which is given to 15-year-olds.     

So where does all this money go?

Not much for the kids. In fact, Over 80% of it goes to salaries and benefits for teachers and other employees.

Maybe the money will help alleviate the teacher shortage?

Hardly. The teacher shortage writ large is non-existent. Using data from a National Education Association report, Mike Antonucci writes that  there were 48,985,186 students enrolled in the nation’s public school system in 2021, about 256,000 fewer than in 2012. But school districts hired an additional 276,000 instructional staff during the same period. He adds that student enrollment fell 2.4 percent in the U.S. from fall 2019 to fall 2020, falling in every state and the District of Columbia, yet 17 states added teachers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/parent-sues-school-over-transgender-brainwashing-matthew-vadum/

California parent Jessica Konen is suing her local school district for secretly indoctrinating her 6th grade daughter into the cult of transgenderism, convincing her to change her gender identity, all while urging her not to discuss the situation with her mother because she could not be “trusted.”

The behavior of these woke teachers matters not only because parents – as opposed to the government – are supposed to be in charge of raising their own children, but also because transgenderism is a treacherous ideology that threatens the very underpinnings of both our society and Western civilization as a whole.

It is not about homosexuality or bisexuality, which Americans have become increasingly tolerant of in recent years. Many Americans are even supportive of transgender people when they are consenting adults, but they do not support groomers’ efforts to force impressionable children to renounce their birth sex and pretend to be something they are not. The rise of groups such as Gays Against Groomers, whose members are aghast at reports of little kids being forced to attend drag queen performances, shows that plenty of gays recognize it is wrong to push transgender ideology onto children.

It is about totalitarian thought control. The advocates of transgenderism, backed by the Biden-Harris regime, would force Americans to recognize an individual’s professed gender identity even if it doesn’t match the person’s birth sex. Forcing people to say things they know aren’t true is the essence of totalitarianism.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/democrats-are-woke-but-parents-are-awake

Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel became the second woman ever elected as the leader of the Republican National Committee in 2017.

As a mother of two, I’m well acquainted with the tradition of back-to-school shopping. But this time, preparations look different for many families. From invasive COVID-19 vaccine requirements and woke curricular materials to surging costs for school supplies, back-to-school season has parents peeved — and for good reason.

From the beginning, President Joe Biden and Democrats have put special interest groups over students. The Biden administration slow-walked school reopenings and prioritized teachers unions’ demands over parents’ needs, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky meeting with families just once while granting “instant access” to union bosses. In fact, Walensky even admitted that she changed the CDC’s school reopening guidance to give teachers unions “what they need.” Emails show she went so far as to recommend that schools keep their doors shut — just because the unions said so.

Children paid the price. Studies show students who learned remotely for the majority of the 2020-2021 school year “on average … lost the equivalent of about 50% of a typical school year’s math learning during that time.” The fallout was especially dramatic for low-income, black, and Latino students, leading to “the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

Now, Democrats in Washington, D.C., have handed families in public, charter, and private schools an ultimatum: Get the COVID-19 vaccine or be expelled. This mandate disproportionately affects minority families. Roughly 40% of black school-age children in Washington, D.C., are unvaccinated, which means they could be banned from returning to school in person. The learning losses they will suffer as a result will have long-term consequences.

https://www.city-journal.org/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.”

Sacramento City Unified School District has adopted a queer theory–based pedagogy that encourages teachers to “normalize gender exploration,” confront their “cisgender privilege,” and maintain strict secrecy when facilitating a child’s gender or sexual transition.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents from Sacramento City Unified that traces the evolution of the district’s sexual politics. The process began a decade ago, when the district invited Elizabeth Meyer, a professor of Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies at California Polytechnic State University, to conduct presentations on how the district could adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy. The “foundational concepts” of this approach, according to Meyer’s presentation, follow the standard left-wing narrative. Western society has created a “Heterosexual Matrix,” composed of “Hegemonic Masculinity,” “Emphasized Femininity,” “Heteronormativity,” and “Heterosexism,” that underpins an oppressive system of “patriarchy,” “homophobia,” and “transphobia.” To liberate schools from this system, administrators and districts must adopt “queer pedagogy” and “anti-oppressive pedagogy,” which will disrupt the “commonsense view of the world” and replace it with queer alternatives, emphasizing “gender non-conformity” and “gender and sexual diversity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/putting-parents-back-charge

Arizona governor Doug Ducey is brimming with optimism. The businessman-turned-politician has spent the past eight years campaigning for universal school choice—and he has finally achieved it. Today, the governor is hosting the signing ceremony for H.B. 2853, which will provide every family in Arizona with an “empowerment scholarship account” (ESA) and an annual $7,000 per child to take to any educational institution of their choice, including private schools, religious schools, and homeschool programs.

I first met the governor last year at a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where, in between firing rifle and pistol rounds at the shooting range, he spoke with me at length about the Founding Fathers, his own Jesuit education, the threat of critical race theory, and his vision for school reform. The governor had tried to pass universal school choice last summer but came up short by one vote in the legislature. This year, after rallying parents and negotiating with legislators, he has his redemption. Universal school choice has long been the Holy Grail for conservative education reformers. Governor Ducey has achieved it.

I spoke with the governor as he prepared to lead the signing ceremony for this historic victory. The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_battle_for_our_children_and_their_minds.html

In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding.  Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board’s woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who “sometimes wears a skirt.”

The sexual assault was later confirmed and the assailant arrested.  He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center.  But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn’t let Smith speak.  Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”  For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a “SWAT team.”

Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district.  The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board’s cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda.  Smith’s story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.

The global leftist agenda for the control of young minds runs deeper than patriotic Americans might suspect.  After a virtual takeover of the humanities departments of our universities, the leftists have been targeting schools by implementing gender-fluid bathrooms and woke curricula without consulting parents.  And then that last formidable frontier — the American family, which they hope to destroy by wresting away control of children from parents.  Should that happen, American values and American society as we know it will self-destruct.

ttps://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/eisgruber-emails-princeton-katz

In a stirring recent address to the students of the startup University of Austin, Bari Weiss described the ideology that has taken over America’s institutions of higher education: “Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with dis-invitation and de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion with exclusion. Excellence with equity.” To change this calamitous development requires nothing less than a revolution.

All successful revolutions start with local rebellions, and one has been taking place over the last year at Princeton University—the prestigious institution where I have taught mathematics and made my home for the last 35 years, but which is being destroyed from within by an administration committed to the ideology that Weiss accurately identified.

The saga has been well documented in these pages: In July 2020, tenured classics professor Joshua Katz published an article criticizing several illiberal demands made by a large number of Princeton faculty members to correct the university’s alleged “systemic racism,” including the creation of a “committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty …” For his criticism of these demands, and for referring to a by-then-defunct student organization, the Black Justice League (BJL), as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the students (including the many Black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands,” Katz was smeared as a racist by the university in its own freshman orientation program, then fired earlier this year on what is recognized by every sane observer as a pretext: a disputed accusation from a former student with whom Katz had a consensual sexual affair in 2006-07—for which he was already punished in 2018—that Katz had discouraged her from seeking mental health care.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

It would be good for students, good for parents, good for schools

The debates over critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology can feel like people on either side are talking past one another. Truth is, they often are.

There’s a lot more agreement than it seems. Parents and teachers tend to think that the Left has a point when it says schools should do a better job teaching about America’s complex racial history, and that kids should feel welcome in school regardless of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Meanwhile, most Americans share concerns about CRT dogma that demonizes hard work or personal responsibility as legacies of “white-supremacy culture” and don’t want teachers discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with eight-year-olds.

Indeed, it’s pretty clear that most Americans reside in both camps — think of it as the “inclusive but sensible” coalition. The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life has found that, among Republicans and Democrats alike, more than four in five say social-studies textbooks should discuss slave-owning by the Founders, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the maltreatment of Native Americans, and agree that students should read “works by a racially diverse set of authors.” 

At the same time, polling by the Economist and YouGov finds that more than half of Americans who are familiar with CRT say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of it and 55 percent think teaching CRT is “bad for America.” This spring, Public Opinion Strategies found that two-thirds of registered voters deem it “inappropriate for teachers or school personnel to discuss gender identity with children in kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

Given that kind of commonsense agreement, why are schools riven by bitter fights over whether educators should teach that America is a “white supremacist” nation or talk to first-graders about gender identity? Who is responsible for pushing this toxic tripe?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/dont-let-woke-math-ruin-your-childs-education

The Washington Examiner reported last weekend on the depressing fact that millions of dollars have been wasted attempting to shoehorn critical race theory and other ” woke ” concepts into math curricula, of all places. This means in school districts in which most students can neither read nor do math, race hucksters and charlatans are getting rich teaching them to hate one another because of the color of their skin .

This kind of educational malpractice needs to be purged with fire and the sword. It is the worst of all worlds to waste taxpayer funds on deforming young students’ minds. It’s a classic case of Why Johnny Can’t Read but applied to the extremely dumb and trendy educational theories afflicting schoolchildren today.

Wokeness — whether it comes under the label of “equitable math,” “social justice,” “critical race theory,” or “social and emotional learning” — is not about teaching that racism exists and played an important role in American history. Schools have done that successfully for decades. Rather, it is a hateful and toxic ideology that teaches students to hate and distrust each other because of the color of their skin and nothing more. It has no place in any school curriculum — but least of all in mathematics.

You cannot teach wokeness and math together because they are incompatible. It can never be anything more than a distraction from math to teach children that their country is an incurably racist place, that white people are inherent oppressors, and that there is a ritual intersectional hierarchy of victimhood that must be observed.