RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/still-stupid-in-america/

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Then in January 2006, John Stossel’s eye-opening documentary, Stupid in America, was aired. The investigative ABC show was billed as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it…The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic, and South Korea…This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.”

Sadly, since Jobs’ comments and Stossel’s documentary, public school performance has not improved. The latest example of our descent is shown by the scores on the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an assessment administered to 650,000 4th and 8th graders in 64 countries.

The 2023 test, the results of which were released on December 4, revealed that average U.S. math scores declined sharply between 2019 and 2023, falling 18 points for 4th graders and 27 points for 8th graders. Internationally, this puts the U.S., a purported world leader, at 22nd of 63 education systems for 4th-grade math and 20th of 45 education systems for 8th-grade math.

Additionally, average U.S. math scores for both 4th and 8th graders reverted to performance levels of 1995, the first year the TIMSS assessment was administered, meaning any progress made since Steve Jobs’ damning comments has been erased.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-michigan-nixes-diversity-statements-in-faculty-hiring-promotion/

The University of Michigan will no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure, joining a number of elite universities that are moving away from progressive identity politics in an effort to expand diversity of thought and free expression on campus.

Provost Laurie McCauley announced the decision Thursday after an eight-member faculty working group recommended the university abolish diversity statements. While there was no institutional requirement for such statements, UM did implement the practice in its hiring decisions.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are three of our core values at the university. Our collective efforts in this area have produced important strides in opening opportunities for all people,” McCauley said in the University Record, an internal faculty publication. “As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach.”

In June, the provost charged the faculty working group with examining the university’s use of diversity statements. The group published its report on October 31 after reviewing literature on the topic and considering DEI policies at other universities and colleges.

The group also conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 faculty, most of whom believe diversity statements “put pressure on faculty to express specific positions on moral, political or social issues,” per the University Record. Furthermore, a slight majority of respondents said soliciting diversity statements for hiring purposes does not demonstrate an institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conspiracy-against-specialized-high-schools

New York City’s racial polarizers are back, targeting academic excellence in public schools. This time, they’re mobilizing to oppose the standardized test that the city’s specialized high schools use to achieve race-blind, meritocratic admissions.

To understand the polarizers’ scheme, take a step back. The Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT), which determines admissions to eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools, had been provided by Pearson Assessments to the New York City Department of Education under a multiyear contract. That contract expired on October 31, and the decision to renew the deal falls to the city’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP).
 
PEP itself has a history of racial politicking. The panel infamously helped kill the department’s gifted and talented program in 2021, with members claiming that the G&T admissions test was racist. They declined to approve the vendor contract for G&T testing—with Pearson. “A yes vote on this contract would be a continuation of white supremacy,” said one PEP member. Other members suddenly discovered frugality and objected to the test’s cost.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in his final year in office and no friend of G&T, used the panel’s denial of the Pearson contract to terminate the program entirely. Mayor Eric Adams restored it, but without the admissions testing that PEP had rejected, rendering the program far less effective in delivering rigorous K-8 education that, among other things, prepares top students for the SHSAT.

This time, the racial polarizers’ pretext for objecting to the proposed Pearson contract renewal is the proposal to replace paper-and-pencil testing with computerized (“digitized”) testing, which, they claim, “could worsen inequities.” The notion that, in our digital age, the city’s sharpest eighth-graders would be intimidated by computers is ridiculous. Indeed, the SAT, Advanced Placement tests, and New York State’s proficiency tests—the last administered even to grade schoolers—have all been successfully computerized without fuss. The GRE and MCAT have been computerized for decades.

https://tomklingenstein.com/will-racial-quotas-survive-scotus/

Now that the first slate of undergraduate admissions statistics following the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case has been released, it is clear that elite colleges are following one of two paths. 

The first path is largely one of prudential compliance with the Court’s ruling. Elite colleges following the first path feature incoming classes of first-year students with higher proportions of Asian and white students than in previous classes while maintaining stellar secondary school class rank and standardized test scores. Call this the path of least resistance, demonstrating prima facie that these colleges’ admissions practices hew toward the race-neutrality the SFFA decision requires. 

The second path is one of greater resistance toward the Court’s ruling. With the composition of incoming classes of first-year students unchanged from previous admissions cycles or even in some cases featuring increased numbers of black and Hispanic students, elite colleges following the second path are taking increased risks of future litigation. Such litigation, even if unwelcome, would demonstrate fidelity to a regime that preserves race-based affirmative action and quotas, in spirit if not in name.     

Affirmative action in college admissions has redounded toward greater percentages of black and Hispanic students, to the detriment of Asian-American and white applicants. The problem at root though is that race-conscious admissions, a group quota regime which Tom Klingenstein has rightly decried on this website and in his public remarks, runs contrary to the first principles of moral and legal judgment. As philosopher Hadley Arkes has observed, “It is the fallacy of assuming that we can draw moral inferences about persons, their goodness or badness, their moral deserts, as though race determined or controlled their conduct and character.” Setting aside the fundamental injustice of using race as a proxy for an individual’s moral standing, racial categories in modern America are imprecise groupings of individuals motivated to further political goals, as the scholar David E. Bernstein demonstrated at length in his 2022 book Classified, on which I worked as a research assistant. Elite colleges signal fidelity to these political goals by reporting racial quotas as a sign of commitment to group diversity rather than individual merit. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/dei-is-deflating/

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has, over the past several years, become part of the fabric of American institutions, notably businesses and schools. In a nutshell, DEI pays no mind to quality but, instead, is a system whereby racial bean counting is the sine qua non of our culture. While this has already been a disastrous policy for all concerned, a recent study delves into the serious damage it has done.

On November 25, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias.” The study examines whether the themes and materials common in DEI training foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors. The study consists of three experiments—one that focused on race, one on religion, and the other on caste.

As noted by National Review’s Abigail Anthony, although proponents of DEI training claim that they are designed to educate individuals about bias and reduce discrimination, “the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators.”

In the experiment that focused on race, the researchers randomly assigned 423 Rutgers University undergraduates into two groups: one control group exposed to a neutral essay about U.S. corn production and the other exposed to an essay that combined material from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. After exposure to the essays, participants were presented with the following race-neutral scenario: “A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”

The results showed that participants who were primed with Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s books perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer, despite the absence of any racial identification and evidence of discrimination. Those participants also believed that the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant, had caused more harm to the applicant, and had committed more “microaggressions.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/michigans-radical-faculty-program

At the University of Michigan (UM), professor Jessica Kenyatta Walker specializes in “critical food studies” and helped develop “in-class activities” on the “racialization of food in the United States.” Professor Adi Saleem’s recent book, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims: Race, Religion, and Representation, focuses on “triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.” Jennifer Dominique Jones, meantime, teaches courses in “Black Queer Histories” and “Black Intimacies.”

These scholars share more than an affinity for critical theory: each was hired through the university’s Collegiate Fellows Program. Established in 2016, the CFP hires postdoctoral fellows who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after two years, bypassing the rigors of a normal competitive job search.

Michigan has previously touted CFP as a success. But after the New York Times published a critical feature on the university’s DEI bureaucracy, UM quietly removed its web directory of faculty hired through program. That directory, accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, lists a total of 44 faculty members. (The UM faculty claim the program has now recruited 55 scholars.) A close look at these scholars and their areas of research demonstrates the perils of screening faculty for their commitment to “diversity.”

Unsurprisingly, CFP administrators heavily favored scholars who conduct their research through the lens of race and gender. Former fellow Rovel Sequiera, now an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, specializes in “global feminist, queer, and trans studies.” Jonathan Cho-Polizzi, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literature, lists “Activism & Radical Diversity” as an area of interest. Margo Mahan, assistant professor of sociology, focuses on the “racial and nativist origins of US domestic violence law.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/reskilling-america

Should fewer Americans go to college? In 2022, 37.6% of adults without a disability had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1990 only 20% of the older-than-25 population had a bachelor’s degree, and in 1970 the share was 11%. And yet according to the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, a decade after graduation with four-year degrees 45% of Americans work in jobs that do not require college diplomas. These unfortunate young Americans have wasted four years of their lives and tuition money, and in some cases have incurred sizable student loan debt, in exchange for coursework that is essentially worthless.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-now-on-campus

With Donald Trump’s election victory, U.S. college campuses have been humbled. The day after, the atmosphere at Columbia University was mournful, as Student Services handed out free pizza for students who needed support processing the results.

Students’ dismay at Trump’s victory contrasts with their jubilant, headline-grabbing anti-Israel activism over the past year. Ironically, student activists probably helped the Trump campaign by alienating moderates and creating an “uncommitted” movement, whose followers may have declined to vote for Kamala Harris.

Regardless of how many young people left the presidential line blank or voted for Jill Stein, college-educated voters generally were one of Democrats’ strongest cohorts in 2024. They were one of the few groups among whom Harris did not lose ground relative to Joe Biden in 2020, roughly matching Biden’s 12-point advantage in 2020. She outperformed Biden among white college-educated voters, which offset her relative underperformance among college-educated racial minorities.

College-educated voters’ preference for Democratic candidates is no surprise. Campuses incubate opposition to many of the ideas associated with the Trump campaign: patriotic pride in America and its history; a desire for the government to treat all Americans equally; and a preference for the interests of U.S. citizens to those of foreigners. DEI grandees and their acolytes consider such views retrograde and even racist; they believe, evidence notwithstanding, that Trump won by riling up a hateful white base. The broader electorate doesn’t see it that way. Their choice of Trump delivered a strong message to students, particularly at so-called elite schools: ravings about decolonization and gender theory are nonstarters for ordinary Americans.

https://www.jns.org/americas-future-depends-on-trumps-promise-to-punish-woke-universities/

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that he will make good on his vow to defund institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But for many observers, the context for the agreement was not so much a belated interest by one school to address the wrongs suffered by its Jewish students. Rather, it was the fact that it came a few weeks after the election victory of Donald Trump. As one headline in a news article about the settlement put it, “College settles antisemitism claims before Trump can make good on accreditation threats.”

Trump repeatedly made clear during the 2024 election campaign that the educational establishment would be as much a target for his second administration as the denizens of the Washington “swamp” such as the liberal-dominated federal bureaucracy that did so much to sabotage and obstruct his first four years in the White House.

More will hinge, however, on whether he makes good on this promise than the fate of school administrators or even the safety of Jewish students.