RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-administrations-assault-charter-schools-bruce-thornton/

Almost 40 years ago, the report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Reform appeared. It documented the failure of public schools to teach the foundational skills and knowledge necessary for a good education.

The ensuing controversy led to various reform movements, most hampered by powerful teachers’ unions and the educational bureaucracies. One bright spot was the growth of charter schools, which enjoy autonomy from the state and federal regulations that serve entrenched professional interests at the expense of students. “School choice,” also anathema to Democrats, aims to give parents the ability to  move their children to charter schools. This reform is particularly important to minority parents whose children are often trapped in failing public schools.

Both of these reforms have been regularly attacked by a Democrat Party that carries water for the Ed. Inc. establishment, which is one of the Dems’ most lucrative sources of political contributions. So it’s no surprise that Biden’s Ed. Department has issued new regulations designed to cripple charter schools’ autonomy by putting them further under the thumb of unionized public schools.

If these regulations are left unchallenged, one of the best options for helping parents escape “woke” politicized curricula and pedagogical incompetence will be weakened, accelerating our public schools’ already dangerous transformation from educational institutions into political propaganda factories.

One change in the regulations, concerning start-up funds for new charter schools, is so egregious that several Democrat Senators have signed a letter in protest of the changes. As The Wall Street Journal reports,

The Senators take issue with the requirement that schools applying for the money provide evidence of charter demand and declining enrollment in district schools. “This would empower federal reviewers to ignore state and local decisions to authorize new public charter schools,” they write. The requirements could “make it difficult, if not impossible,” for charters to access the federal funds.

There’s another problem with the “community impact analysis.” According to Jared Polis, the Democrat [sic!] governor of Colorado, this rule would give “anonymous grant reviewers in Washington the ability to veto parent, community, district and state efforts to open a new school.” You know there’s a problem when Democrats, the party of centralized, intrusive technocratic power, are speaking up for local autonomy in deciding what benefits people’s children.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-5-14-harvard-progressives-covering-up-for-their-systemic-racist-friends

It has been obvious for quite a while that pandemic-induced school closings and extended remote learning were going to have substantial negative effects on development among K-12 students. Equally obvious has been that Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — which include essentially all of the major cities with high concentrations of poor and minority students in the education system — have indulged in the longest school closures and the most remote learning. Clearly, this would lead to major negative results for the poor and minority students in these jurisdictions, particularly as compared to the students in places where schools mostly remained open for in-person learning.

A big new Report out from the Center for Educational and Policy Research at Harvard (and other institutes with similarly long names) now confirms the facts that we all knew were coming. The Report is titled “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” and has a date of May 2022. The lead author is Dan Goldhaber. This is a very large and well-funded study. It relies on data collected from some 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states.

Two things about the Report stand out: (1) The large extent of the negative effects of school closures and remote learning, particularly in what the authors call “high poverty” districts, which effects are at the highest end of what anyone might have expected, and (2) The extreme lengths to which the Report goes to avoid pointing the finger of blame where it needs to be pointed, which is toward the politicians and bureaucrats — essentially all Democrats — responsible for the excessive closures in the high-poverty districts, and on the teachers unions that control the schools and back the politicians in those jurisdictions.

The May 5 issue of the Harvard Gazette contains an interview with Thomas Kane, Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard and second author of the Report, that gives an idea of the extent of the damage inflicted on poor and minority students by the school closures and remote learning.

https://christopherrufo.com/laying-siege-to-the-institutions/?mc_cid=b3e343d61f&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.

Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s.

The 1960s saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in America that now seem commonplace—ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. There is a direct line between those ideas born in the ’60s and the public policies being adopted today in leftist-run cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.

The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s. By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence. But the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hope of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy—waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites, and specifically of the knowledge elites. It would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture—a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in the 1960s, called “the long march through the institutions.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/rescuing-socrates/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Roosevelt Montás, defender of the Western canon

New York City

‘I knew I was going to drop a grenade in the meeting,” says Roosevelt Montás, with a smile, during a conversation in his office in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 7. He’s referring to an address he gave four years ago in Aspen, Colo., to a gathering of presidents and provosts from colleges and universities. He delivered a message that they probably didn’t want to hear.

“Our students often seem ill informed about the implications of their own political positions and are drawn, unthinkingly, into illiberal and bigoted stances,” said Montás in Aspen. “Our undergraduate curricula have not been educating our students for the life of free citizenship.” He excoriated his audience of left-leaning academics for their abandonment of the old-fashioned liberal arts.

Montás made his remarks behind closed doors. (He prepared a text, but apparently there’s no recording.) Word of his performance nevertheless spread. Eventually he came to the attention of a top editor at Princeton University Press. “I kept hearing his name,” says Peter Dougherty, now editor at large there.

The two men met for lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, where they hatched a plan for Montás to write about his beliefs in a book that is one part autobiography and one part polemic — and whose recent publication marks the rise of a powerful and unexpected voice on behalf of liberal-arts learning. At a time when many of the loudest voices in higher education condemn everything traditional as a manifestation of systemic racism and regard the canon of great books as the polluted products of dead white men, Montás offers a simple but disarming counterclaim: “I’m not the face of white supremacy.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/nina-merrick-unholy-alliance-lloyd-billingsley/

“For decades a collective farm of mediocrity and failure, the government education monopoly now serves the left as a one-stop indoctrination center. Call it the disinformation inherent in the system.”

“Critical race theory has become one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit, frankly have seized on,” said Nina Jankowicz at an October 29, 2021. Profiteering was going on, but not by those Jankowicz accused.

In September, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to Joe Biden claiming that parents who complained about critical race theory indoctrination were engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Days later, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo on “threats of violence” against teachers and school board members.

Parents who complained about critical race theory were guilty of “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime” and Garland wanted to deploy the FBI, DOJ and Department of Homeland Security against the parents. As it turned out, the critical race theory profiteer was a member of Garland’s own family.

Garland’s son-in-law Xan Tanner is co-founder, board member, and president of Panorama Education, a vendor of surveys on the “social and emotional climate.” Last October, Panorama recommended that teachers read “Teaching Toward Freedom,” an essay by Weather Underground alum Bill Ayers.

“You should know that the system you’ll be joining hates Black and Brown and poor kids,” Ayers wrote. “I have factual evidence that the system is organized to miseducate these children, and it includes the shameful lack of resources, enforced racial segregation, the dumbed-down and Eurocentric curriculum accompanied by a stifling top-down pedagogy, and arcane rules and routines that result predictably in social shaming and widespread exclusions.” And so on.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/middle-schoolers-sexual-harassment-gender-pronouns

Three Wisconsin boys are facing sexual harassment charges from their middle school over accusations that they used incorrect gender pronouns on a fellow student.

“I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,” Rosemary Rabidoux, a parent of one of the accused, told Fox 11 News last week. 

“I immediately went into shock. I’m thinking, sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest” Rabidoux continued. “What has my son done?”

But none of the concerns Rabidoux had were at issue. Instead, her 13-year-old son, Braden, was accused of using incorrect pronouns to address another student at Kiel Middle School.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/george-washington-university-should-not-be-renamed/?utm_source=

A recent call by a GWU student to drop the American Founder’s name from the university is totally wrongheaded.

Several days ago, a fellow student of mine published an op-ed in the Washington Post that calls on our university, the George Washington University, to change its name. The op-ed plays into the recent trend of judging historical figures by the standards some hold today. It also indulges in contemporary platitudes by placing the blame for current university issues on “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy.”

The author argues that the logical ways to move forward are by renaming the university (along with several other institutions at the school), by appointing an African-American president, by increasing enrollment of African-American students, and by implementing a “decolonized university curriculum.”

After acknowledging the absurdity of this article, it’s important to first address the main topic: removing President Washington’s name from our school. The main substantiation used here is Washington’s slaveholding. Slaveholding and the subjugation of others is unacceptable by any moral standard and is an understandable grievance. That being bluntly said, we cannot allow that to eclipse his legacy and his vision both for our country and our university. We cannot selectively and arbitrarily apply only that standard of moral decency to simply yield some political currency.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that it was Washington’s desire for a university in our nation’s capital that inspired the founding of this school. Attempting to erase this man from our history does a great disservice even to the motives of those who are propagating this nonsense. Flawed as he may have been, the person who is almost single-handedly responsible for the erection and preservation of our republic still deserves to be recognized and is worthy of our admiration.

https://www.aier.org/article/rescuing-virtue-and-talents-amidst-the-war-on-tests/

On March 28, 2022, Stuart Schmill, Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the school’s plan to restore the consideration of standardized tests to its undergraduate admissions process. A heavyweight bucks against the self-destructive path of attacking merit and standards. Will more follow suit? Or, is MIT’s rebellion too little and too late?

In his 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson laid out his vision for American meritocracy— “a natural aristocracy among men,” grounds of which “are virtue and talents.” This republic of merit separated the newly independent nation from the old world where artificial aristocracies “founded on wealth and birth” hindered the common good. Jefferson stipulated what it meant to have a merit-based education system that diffuses learning democratically and efficiently:

to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.

The Test-Free Movement in a Historical Context

Forces within, from slavery to school segregations under Jim Crow laws to race-based admissions, have tried to corrupt the grand proposal of equality and merit. Like previous illiberal bargains to categorize students by race, the central focus of test-free admissions is also preoccupied with immutable features of the individual, under the fashionable banner of social identities, rather than observable academic performance. But unlike historical race-based practices that were rooted in bigotry and racism, arbiters of “equitable” college admissions in the modern era claim they are waging battles against the evil spirits of white supremacy, systemic inequities, and structural racism.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/reversing-dei/

MIT, caught in a bind, reintroduces standardized testing.

We wrote last November that MIT, our alma mater, “has caved repeatedly to the demands of ‘wokeness’, treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.”  As has happened across academia, total commitment to DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—has become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions part of the canon. MIT’s most recent initiative involves new hiring and programs devoted to:

understanding MIT’s Indigenous history and Native issues more broadly. Leadership in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the History Section also helped us realize that it is past time for MIT to feature cutting-edge scholarship and educate our students in this rapidly expanding discipline.

Why MIT— long renowned for its math, science, and engineering education and research, and currently ranked #2 among all U.S. colleges and universities—needs to expand its focus to the “rapidly expanding discipline” of Native American studies is unclear. Among other things, MIT gave us the Mark 14 gunsight used by U.S. Navy ships during WWII, prominent participants in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs, strobe photography, and the elucidation of the genetic basis of sickle-cell anemia, so one would think that it could allow other institutions to become leaders in championing politically correct social goals. However, MIT’s soon-to-depart president, L. Rafael Reif, has become DEI-obsessed. A search of the MIT website reveals at least 70 professors and staff directly related to promoting DEI, including six new Assistant Deans for DEI who were hired in a single day.