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EDUCATION

We Need a Reckoning on the 1619 Project By Peter Wood

https://tomklingenstein.com/we-need-a-reckoning-on-the-1619-project/

The New York Times launched its torpedo at American history on August 18, 2019. I speak, of course, of “The 1619 Project,” which first emerged as a special edition of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. In the ensuing five years and five months, the 1619 Project outgrew its original 100 pages of newsprint. It became a somber 50 second television commercial on February 9, 2020, that aired during the Academy Awards and featured the singer, song-writer, and actress Janelle Monáe. In 2021, it ballooned into a 590-page hardback book, supertitled “A New Origin Story.” In 2023, Hulu turned it into a six-part “docu-series” with Oprah Winfrey as executive producer.  

During those five-plus years, the New York Times ran thousands of print advertisements for the “project.” It substantively revised the magazine text without any public acknowledgment, which means unless you saved the original copy, you can’t know exactly what it said. 

One thing it said, on the inside back cover, was that the 1619 Project was on its way to the nation’s schools as a curriculum, including “a lesson plan that introduces this issue [of the magazine], summaries of the articles, an index of historical terms used, suggested activities that engage students creatively and intellectually and opportunities to connect with New York Times journalists featured in this issue.” 

That declaration came from the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit founded in 2006 that attempts to amplify journalism that it judges to have broad public importance. It describes itself as “the venue for the world’s most innovative and consequential reporting, with journalism as the key element for mobilizing society through audience engagement strategies.” In other words, the Pulitzer Center is an activist organization that eschews the old journalistic ideal of providing the information people need to decide for themselves. It instead seeks to “mobilize” the public. And, as it happens, the reporting it selects for this mobilization is entirely of a progressive character.

Before the New York Times unleashed the 1619 Project, it entered into an agreement with the Pulitzer Center, in which the center became the Times’ “educational partner” for the project.  The center assumed the task of translating the 1619 Project into “programs for K-12 Classrooms, out-of-school time programs, and higher education programs.” 

Enough Is Enough Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/enough-is-enough/

The campus experience at Columbia University over the last week is illustrative of the hell to which America’s students have been consigned since the October 7 massacre.

As students embarked on the spring semester last week, a “band of masked keffiyeh-clad students” intruded on a course on modern Israeli history where they threw “flyers featuring a smashed Star of David underneath a boot, a burning Israeli flag, and weapon-carrying militants at students,” Fox News reported. The vandals continued to distribute literature insisting that “the enemy will not see tomorrow” and announcing their intention to “burn Zionism to the ground,” until this week, when they resorted to insurrection. “We cemented the sewage lines of the entire building,” the Columbia branch of Students for Justice in Palestine announced, “forcing them to shut down business-as-usual.”

It’s almost as if Columbia’s administrators learned no lessons from their efforts to appease the violent professional demonstrators who took over their campus last year when they threatened and harassed Jews, did violence to their campus, and forced the administration to reluctantly sic the NYPD on them.

The same could be said of colleges across the country. Despite the humiliation Republicans duly meted out to a few Ivy League presidents for their conspicuous tolerance of antisemitism, this menace still plagues colleges across the country. The onset of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has had no effect on this tempo of antisocial activism, revealing once and for all that the unrest is fueled not by the war Hamas started but by the existence of the Jewish state.

Something must be done to force American colleges to do their jobs — elementary stuff, such as protecting from physical injury and stultifying intimidation the students who pay exorbitant sums to be there. “This failure is unacceptable,” an executive order promulgated by the president last night read, “and ends today.”

Test Scores Take Another Dive As Schools Pocket $Billions

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/31/test-scores-take-another-dive-will-anyone-be-held-accountable/

Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.

Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”

Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.

Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.

Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.

“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”

“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.

“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.

This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”

Ray Domanico New York Schools Spend the Most, but Students Are Falling Behind A new report highlights how the state trades big bucks for middling results.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-public-schools-spending-students-ranking

For 18 years, up to and including Governor Kathy Hochul’s most recent proposal, the budget messages of New York’s last three governors have proudly noted that the state leads all others in school-district spending. What they omit is that, over that period, New York has remained in the middle of the pack on the National Assessments of Educational Progress. A recent report from the centrist Citizens’ Budget Commission, amplifying trends that I observed in 2022, presents a sobering picture of Albany’s failed policies.

The CBC observes that New York fourth-graders rank 32nd and 46th, respectively, on reading and math NAEP exams nationwide. Eighth-graders are 9th and 22nd, respectively. The state “now spends $36,293 per student, a 21 percent increase since the 2020-21 school year,” the report observes. “Given these middling results and the $89 billion New York School districts will spend this year—with $39 billion coming from the State budget—it is disappointing that education policy reform efforts have not focused on examining and rectifying New York’s unsatisfactory performance.” Instead, the education debate has “mostly centered on increasing State school aid even more and modestly shifting how dollars are allocated.”

New York’s political leaders continue to pump money into our public schools without regard for efficiency or effectiveness. If California has shown us how to fail at fire prevention, New York is the nation’s paragon of failing at educational improvement.

New York’s families have noticed. Enrollment in the state’s public school districts for grades K–12 fell by more than 320,000 students between 2014 and 2024. The drop-off is even worse in the earlier grades, with K-to-8 enrollment down 17 percent over the decade. Some of the decline is offset by enrollment growth in public charter schools, which grew by nearly 90,000 students in the same years. Yet the state legislature has capped charter school growth in New York City, home to almost 80 percent of the state’s charter school enrollment—even though charters receive less public funding than district schools, while their students score higher on state tests.

The Great Education Escape Student and teacher absences expose the failure of government-run schools; parents must step up. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/26/the-great-education-escape/

Late last month, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published the enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year. The report showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years.

All in all, the loss amounts to a 2.5% drop between fall 2019 and fall 2023. Schools at the pre-K-8 grade level showed the greatest declines, where enrollment dropped by 4.5% over the four-year period.

And the exodus is ongoing. According to the latest federal estimates, public schools are projected to lose 2.7 million students, for a 5.5% decline, from 2022 to 2031. That includes a loss of 1.8 million students in pre-K-8, a 5.4% loss, and 883,000 students in grades 9-12, a 5.7% decline.

On a similar note, the Fordham Institute recently reported that nearly 1 in 12 public schools nationwide saw student enrollment declines of about 20% since the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Chronically low-performing schools were hit particularly hard. According to the study, they were more than twice as likely to have sizable enrollment drops compared to other public schools.

It follows that the loss of students in the pre-K-12 sector is a harbinger of what’s to come in higher education. In early January, the Hechinger Report disclosed that the public university system is struggling to reduce a deep deficit that threatens to “permanently shutter several campuses after dramatic drop-offs in enrollment and revenue. While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate—at least 17 of them in 2024—public universities and colleges face their own existential crises.

“State institutions nationwide are being merged, and campuses shut down, many of them in areas where there is already little access to higher education.”

The question then becomes, “Why are people shunning public schools?”

Freedom Center Targets Pro-Terror Professors on Social Media Exposing the “Hamas Loyalists” who are teaching terror on our campuses. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/freedom-center-targets-pro-terror-professors-on-social-media/

A paid social media ad campaign launched this week by the David Horowitz Freedom Center is targeting pro-terror “Hamas Loyalist” professors at ten prestigious American universities who choose to promote the ideology of the genocidal terrorist cult, often in direct violation of university policy.

The professors targeted in the campaign not only defend Hamas’s brutality—the slaughter of over a thousand Jews, the rape and mutilation of women, the beheading of children—but outright celebrate it as a form of liberation that should be emulated across the globe.

Consider San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi. On October 7th 2023, following Hamas’s massacre, mutilation, and rape of over 1200 innocent Israelis, and the taking of hundreds more as hostages, Professor Abdulhadi quote-tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar—who has her own long record of anti-Semitism—not to agree with the Congresswoman’s remarks but to chastise her for condemning Hamas’s actions. Abdulhadi tweeted: “Seriously @IlhanMN? ‘Senseless’ #PalestineUnderAttack are merely defending themselves. Are you saying that #Palestinians should be exceptionalized from the right to defend themselves against colonial & racist violence? Check your facts! #FreePalestine #IsraeliCrimes.”

Cornell Professor Russell Rickford spoke at a pro-Hamas rally to extoll the virtues of the terrorist group. “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence,” Rickford said, adding that the Palestinians “were able to breathe for the first time in years” thanks to the bloody October 7th massacre.

“[I]t was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! And if they [Palestinians] weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated!” Rickford concluded, expressing sheer joy at the extent of Hamas’s slaughter.

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites Ilya Shapiro

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ILYA+SHAPIRO&i=stripbooks&crid=15XHIMNH860HR&sprefix=ilya+shapiro%2Cstripbooks%2C82

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a build­ing and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect oppo­nents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
File and fight constitutional lawsuits
Advise Fortune 500 companies
Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

Ilya Shapiro, Noam Josse The Hypocrisy of Pro-Palestinian Activists They’re not consistent proponents of open debate.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-israel-protests-pro-palestine-activists-columbia

The post-October 7 conflict on U.S. campuses has been framed as a battle between free speech and hate speech. Anti-Israel protesters claim that universities are stifling their right to expression, while many Jewish and other pro-Israel students respond that “pro-Palestinian” activism has led to violence, intimidation, and a general disruption of educational programs—and they note as well that before October 7, universities had often censored politically incorrect speech.

This framing is mistaken. “Pro-Palestine” advocates are not consistent proponents of free and open debate. Instead, they want to express crude and often menacing sentiments, as Columbia University’s example shows. Columbia students last April insisted that “Zionists” weren’t welcome on campus, even as they denounced other groups’ attempts to air alternative views.

Consider in this light Columbia Law Students for Palestine. The group, which has complained of being censored, also fires off emails to its members intended to discourage them from attending events hosted by pro-Israel students. These so-called SpeakerWatch messages undermine any notion that CLSP is interested in the open exchange of ideas. Ahead of Israeli historian Benny Morris’s Zoom event with Columbia Law students last January, for instance, CLSP lambasted the talk as “justification for Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity.” The group labeled Morris a racist and Islamophobe and urged its members not to support the Zoom meeting and to instead attend events hosted by CLSP.

In March, when Columbia Law School’s Center for Israeli Studies invited a panel of Israeli legal scholars to speak, CLSP sent a long SpeakerWatch decrying Israel’s alleged crimes and disparaging each member of the panel, describing one as “enabling violence against Palestinians.” Instead of suggesting that its followers attend and express their views, CLSP denounced the Center for Israeli Studies for merely hosting the event.

The group’s insistence that its members not attend pro-Israeli speeches, along with its baseless accusations of violence, undermines respectful campus dialogue. In its place, CLSP helps create a climate of fear—one reason why students still feel more comfortable shouting down a professor than expressing an unpopular opinion.

Lessons in antisemitism from the NEU The powerful teachers’ union is obsessed with Palestine Nicole Lampert

https://unherd.com/2025/01/lessons-in-antisemitism-from-the-neu/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_yFAhbURchNuZp4BR0L9vfyjgbV0AxKPiW

Perhaps the clues were always there. When the “national education union” was formed in 2017, it dispensed with the rules of grammar for its new image. Capital letters, typically used for proper nouns, were dispensed with in its logo. This new union said it planned to “shape the future of education”.

Today, with nearly half a million of the nation’s teachers in its ranks, the NEU (capitals allowed) is the biggest education union in Europe. It is also the most powerful. During the pandemic, it was sufficiently influential to close Britain’s schools. For such services, Mary Bousted, its leader at the time, was made a Dame in this year’s New Year honours.

Under her replacement as general secretary, Daniel Kebede, the NEU has remained a campaigning organisation, lobbying on gender equality, racism and LGBT rights. But in recent years, it has dedicated itself to one cause in particular: Palestine.

One might wonder what a British teaching union has to do with a geopolitical conflict 3,000 miles away, but the question would be moot. Every year — excepting wars and pandemics — the NEU subsidises two propaganda trips to the Palestinian Territories, while its magazine Educate frequently denounces Israel. In one recent editorial, Kebede wrote: “As educators whose instincts are humanitarian, members are appalled by the willingness of political leaders to let this situation go on. Why do arms sales continue? Why has the verdict of the International Court of Justice not restrained their behaviour?”

To understand this obsession, one need only attend the NEU’s annual conference. Even before the conference, different branches were thinking up novel ways to attack Israel. Natasha Brandon, a Jewish secondary school teacher based in North London, was surprised to find it top of the agenda for the LBGT+ division when they got together ahead of conference.

Keeping BDS Out of Academia: A Canadian Case Study Recordings from a recent Brock University faculty union meeting illustrate the tactics that anti-Israel activists use to co-opt ostensibly neutral academic institutions. Jonathan Kay

https://quillette.com/2025/01/07/keeping-bds-out-of-academia-a-canadian-case-study-2/

A Canadian professor once complained to me that academia is nowhere near as radically leftist as conservative culture critics tend to imagine. Yes, there’s plenty of “wokeness” on display. But almost all of these woke controversies, he argued, originate with a tiny minority of dedicated extremists. Most of his colleagues—well over 90 percent, by his estimation—would prefer to stay out of the public eye, avoid political fights, and focus on their areas of specialised research.

He may well be right. But as numerous examples reported by Quillette have shown, even small groups of highly motivated ideologues can exert an outsized influence on the intellectual climate at their schools—especially if they succeed in co-opting ostensibly neutral bodies such as hiring committees, DEI oversight teams, and academic unions.

Intersectionality’s Cosmic Inquisitor
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has made a name for herself as one of STEM’s most implacable activists. Now the targets of her online attacks are fighting back

A recent case study concerns the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA), the labour union that represents about 600 full-time faculty members and professional librarians at Brock, a large public research university located about two hours west of Toronto. At BUFA’s general meetings, quorum requirements may be satisfied by just 5 percent of the membership—or about 30 people.

According to one Brock professor who monitors BUFA’s activities closely, most meetings attract just a few dozen people. Few workaday profs can even spare the time required to scrutinize the agendas, which are sent out five days before each meeting.

And so it apparently wasn’t difficult for an assistant professor of sociology named Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz to get his “Motion on Scholasticide in Palestine” onto the agenda of BUFA’s December 16, 2024 meet-up—where it was duly seconded by his old master’s-degree supervisor, Nancy Cook (an expert on, among other things, “critical mobilities studies, and feminist, postcolonial and poststructural theory”).

Consistent with other campaigns inspired by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Tanyildiz accuses the Jewish state of not only “scholasticide,” but also apartheid, genocide, and war crimes. He calls for Brock’s administration (and its pension planners) to execute a “complete divestment” from any organization that’s even indirectly “complicit” in this regard—including multinational corporations and Israeli universities—and demands that Brock enact a long laundry list of pro-Palestinian policies.