RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/frisco-frolics-larry-sand/

It started in January 2021, when the school board in San Francisco decided to rename 44 public schools, claiming their namesakes were “unworthy of the honor.” The names of such American icons as Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, et al. were to be placed on the chopping block.

February was no less contentious – and at the same time provided some comic relief – when the art department of the school district bizarrely announced that acronyms such as VAPA (visual and performing arts) are “a symptom of white supremacy.” The month also saw the school board decide that top-rated Lowell High School should no longer admit students based on their academic performance. Instead, the school was to use a lottery to admit them. This, of course, was very discriminatory toward Asian American students who made up 50.6 percent of its student body at the time. And if February wasn’t already absurd, the city government of San Francisco sued its own school board to reopen schools. After 327 days the city fathers and mothers decided that enough was enough. But in reality, kids, especially minorities, were not terribly well educated in Fog City before the shut down – just 19 percent of blacks passed a recent state test in reading – so perhaps the school board figured eliminating in-person learning couldn’t do that much more damage.

Then, in March, it was revealed that school board member Allison Collins had made some rather nasty comments on Twitter about Asian Americans in 2016, and left the posts intact five years hence. She accused them of many things, including the use of “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board was pretty much forced to do something, but they didn’t fire her or take away any of her six-figure salary; they merely removed her as vice president, and stripped her of committee assignments. March went out like a lion when Collins filed a lawsuit against the district and five fellow board members, asking for $87 million in damages for violating her free speech rights. Among other things, her lawsuit alleged that the demotion caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and – I am not making this up – “spiritual injury to her soul.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-related-mandatory-top-medical-schools-report

At least 23 of America’s 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education. 

“The racialization of medical school education is troubling. It’s one thing to recognize the health needs of different populations, it’s entirely different to inject racial politics into medical care. Demanding that medical school students become activists is dangerous,” William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. 

At least 23 of America’s 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training of coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org. (iStock)

Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and founder of the Legal Insurrection website, founded CriticalRace.org’s sprawling database that previously examined elite K-12 private schools and 500 of America’s top undergraduate programs. 

“The mantra of the so-called ‘antiracism’ movement has no place in medicine. Current racial discrimination in order to remedy past racial discrimination is wrong generally, but is downright dangerous in medicine,” Jacobson added. 

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. Of the top 25 colleges and universities, 23 had some sort of mandatory training and 21 have offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-judge-ho-georgetown-racism-ilya-shapiro-cancel-supreme-court-black-woman-justice-11645471956?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

From prepared remarks delivered Feb. 15 by Judge Jim Ho of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to the Federalist Society’s Georgetown Law School chapter:

Months ago, I was scheduled to talk with you all today about a subject that I’m very passionate about. . . . But I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead. . . . I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro, who was recently appointed to serve as executive director and senior lecturer at the Center for the Constitution here at Georgetown. As you all know, there is now a heated debate—first, over the content of a recent tweet that he made and then deleted, and second, over what, if anything, Georgetown should do in response to his tweet. . . .

Ilya has said that he should have chosen different words. That ought to be enough. . . . If you asked Ilya, I am sure he would say that he’s the one standing up for racial equality, and that his opponents are the ones who are supporting racial discrimination. You don’t have to agree with him—but it’s obvious that’s where he’s coming from. And yet I don’t hear Ilya trying to punish others for taking a different view on racial equality. . . .

About a year ago, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “The Importance of a Diverse Federal Judiciary.” I’m honored that the committee invited me, along with four other federal judges, to testify to express my own views on the topic, and I agreed to do so. Here’s what I said:

“Equality of opportunity is fundamental to who we are, and to who we aspire to be, as a nation. . . . But here’s the kicker: Once everyone has had full and fair opportunity to be considered, you pick on the merits. Both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act make clear that it is wrong to hire people based on race.

https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/the-gender-cult-marches-on?utm_source=url

A reader sent me a trove of materials for “Equity Month” courtesy of the Chicago Public School System, available here. It’s worse than you think.

Things to note:

Preschoolers (age 3-5) are to be taught what “Queer” means, what “Non-binary” means and told: “When someone is not a boy or a girl, maybe they feel both, they are non-binary or queer.”
Teachers of preschoolers are told to read from The Story of Harvey Milk, stopping at “Harvey was proud of the flag, and proud of himself.” Are you proud of yourself, little one?
Even Special Needs kids (including the non-verbal and those on the Autism Spectrum, who tend to fixate) are to be instructed to create BLM flags and indoctrinated in the alleged difference between sexuality and gender.
Every single part of the school day becomes a reason to teach children about being transgender, or America’s systemic racism. The lessons are inserted into every part of the day — even P.E., Visual Arts, Drama, Library Lessons and Music. The P.E. materials for grades 4-5 must be seen to be believed:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/14/why-the-well-educated-see-racism-everywhere/

We are repeatedly told that racism is all around us today. It is supposedly systemic, surreptitious and present everywhere, from the boardroom to the university. It can be glimpsed in everything from disparities in income to microaggressions.

But if you dig a little deeper, a different picture emerges. It seems that racism is often in the eye of the beholder. So while some ethnic-minority individuals do indeed perceive racial discrimination everywhere, others do not. Interestingly, a clear disparity emerges when you look at educational attainment.

In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 81 per cent of black American respondents with ‘at least some college experience’ said they experience racial discrimination ‘from time to time’, and 17 per cent said they experience racial discrimination ‘regularly’. In contrast, just 69 per cent of black American respondents educated up to high-school level reported experiencing racial discrimination ‘from time to time’, while fewer than one in 10 said that they regularly experience racial discrimination.

The relationship between attending university and heightened reporting of racial discrimination among ethnic minorities is clear in Britain, too. During my PhD research, based on survey data collected in the aftermath of the 2010 UK General Election, I found that more highly educated ethnic-minority Brits were far more likely to report racial discrimination than other sections of the ethnic-minority population.

https://www.city-journal.org/rocky-top-diversity-equity-inclusion-agenda

Since 2020’s summer of racial unrest, universities across the country have increasingly embraced radical “antiracist” agendas, commonly under the guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies or programs. Even public universities in deep-red states aren’t immune to the trend—as the case of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), discussed in a new report, demonstrates.

In May 2016, Tennessee’s legislature defunded UTK’s fledgling Office of Diversity and Equity for one year, diverting its monies toward minority scholarships. The office’s four employees either left the university or were assigned elsewhere. UTK thus had zero dollars and zero personnel dedicated to DEI during the 2016–2017 school year. While minority scholarships reflect the DEI cast of mind, they are probably a better use of such funds than hiring more DEI personnel.

Shortly after the legislature defunded the office, UTK released a strategic plan, Vol Vision 2020, that listed promoting “Diversity and Inclusion” as one of six priorities. Nevertheless, the school allocated no money to the achievement of that priority and proposed no metrics for its DEI policies. The Chancellor’s Council for Diversity and Inclusion also launched a “Campus Diversity Metrics Plan” but did so outside of the strategic plan process.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/witch-closet-larry-sand/

I was afraid of witches as a child. Indeed, I was convinced that there was an old crone hanging out in my bedroom closet just waiting to pounce. Not sure where or how it began, but it ended when I decided to take every bit of clothing and assorted junk out of my closet to convince myself that there was no witch stirring her cauldron there. Tragically, kids today have so much more than one imaginary hag scaring the living daylights out of them. In fact, there are enough witches these days to make a sizable coven.

Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gets to the meat of the matter in “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” He writes that “this pedagogy of the depressed—America the Problematic—is thought to be a virtue among professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication.” He goes on to point out that “contemporary education fetishizes the bad and the broken in American life.” Clearly this has become all the rage. At the heart of the problem is that it really isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. The doomsters see only problems to be solved. Teaching about the existing good – and even celebrating it – is nowhere to be found in the indoctrinator’s playbook.

A major source of fear in children is climate change, which used to be known as global warming, and before that, global cooling. According to a British poll, one in five children have nightmares about climate change. Another survey reveals that 59% of people aged 16-25 are very or extremely worried and 84% are at least moderately worried about atmospheric change. “More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change.” A full 75% said that they think “the future is frightening.” The reality is, yes, the climate is changing, but then again, it always has. And, while it is possible that we may need to do some very  minor adjusting, the academic alarmists and their hysterical media toadies are doing damage far greater than anything climate change will ever do.

The “America is racist” mantra has been exploited maximally by all the usual suspects. School children are placed in groups, labeled oppressors and victims, and taught that America’s system is rigged against persons of color. For example, an elementary school in Cupertino, California – a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million – recently forced a class of third-graders to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege.’” This type of scaremongering has worked, according to the “Coming Together: Family Reflections on Racism” study conducted by Sesame Workshop, which reports that 86% of children believe that people of different races are not treated fairly in this country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-new-politics-of-school-choice/#slide-1

It is surging in popularity as parents become more activist.

Jessica Bagos is the kind of mom who may be on the verge of transforming K–12 education. “I grew up in public schools, and I’ve always been a proponent of the public-school system,” she says. Then came the Covid-19 lockdowns. The public schools closed in Royal Oak, Mich., the Detroit suburb where she lives. When her twin sons were ready to enter kindergarten at the beginning of the last school year, the schools stayed closed. Her boys could connect with a teacher by video conference, but they couldn’t attend class in person. “You can’t put five-year-olds in front of monitors for hours and hours every day,” she says. Yet for months, her daily challenge was to stop them from wrestling with each other and instead keep them fixed to screens while she tried to hold down a full-time job from her home. “I used to cry in the mornings,” says Bagos. “Then I got mad.”

Last September, she and her husband sued Michigan’s government in federal court, joining several other parents who had suffered from their own frustrations. They seek to overturn an amendment to their state’s constitution that forbids them to pay for private education with money from a state-sponsored savings plan. For more than half a century, the amendment has blocked Michiganders from enjoying any form of school choice (apart from the kind paid for with personal funds) outside the public-school system. Meanwhile, other parent activists in Michigan have launched a petition drive that could create a $500 million program of educational savings accounts (ESAs), allowing families to pay for more kinds of education expenses for their kids, such as transportation costs, speech therapy, and tuition at Catholic schools and cosmetology colleges. Ben DeGrow, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the state’s free-market think tank, says that these combined efforts may lead to a watershed moment: “Everything about education in Michigan could change this year.”

It turns out that education already is changing in a lot of other states: Last year, 18 states enacted or expanded school-choice programs.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_progressives_reverse_midas_touch_in_education.html

Every 3 years, an international assessment of the academic performance of 15-year-old students in the academic fields of reading, science, and mathematics, known as the Program for International Student assessment (PISA) is administered.  79 countries around the world participate in the assessments, most of them developed, economically prosperous first world or developing second world nations. 

As of the latest PISA assessment in 2018, the United States churned out some alarming results.  Of the 79 countries, the average score (of reading, writing, and math) for the United States was 495, which put us at a ranking of 25th internationally.  For Mathematics, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (the organization that administers the assessments) data, the United States ranked 37th internationally, for science, we ranked 18th internationally, and for reading, we ranked 13th internationally.  Thus, for all 3 assessments, we didn’t even break the top 10 in terms of student achievement in 2018. 

We are better than this, we have been better than this, and, if we reclaim the public education system from the Marxists, cretins and left-wing airheads running it currently, we will be better than this.  Now, many may wonder: what are the root causes of these dismal results? 

The answer is: there are several causal factors. The fact that American children do not go to school year-round and have a 3-month gap in their education during the summer does not help, and neither does the fact that most inner-city schools have dismal performances, which negatively impacts the overall scoring in the United States. 

However, the American educational system has suffered devastating blows to in the past few years through the depredations of the left.  Left wing Marxists have systematically destroyed the public education system in America within half a decade.  It was a Blitzkrieg unparalleled since World War II and Americans are still reeling from its effects.