RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/1619-project-story-weeks-mary-grabar/

“It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s guide for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. “The first step in mitigating harm to children as you teach the hard and triggering history of the enslavement is confronting yourself.” This sentence is bolded.

This guide for those teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is linked at the page of the publisher, the multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House, but is produced by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a criminal, conservative-smearing non-profit. It was the SPLC’s “survey” claiming that students were not being taught about slavery that was used as a pretext to justify The 1619 Project, published as an issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019. A guide for high school teachers is also provided for the 600-page hardcover edition, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

New York Times “race” reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the much-criticized 1619 Project, co-author of the children’s book, and co-editor and contributor to the hardcover edition, accuses those introducing or passing laws forbidding classroom use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory of “censorship.”

At the same time, she has been publicizing a collaborative effort by her publisher, bookstores, and the nonprofit diversebooks.org (which receives donations from Penguin Random House!) to encourage fans to buy and donate her books to “low income classrooms, libraries, and educational organizations.” The non-profit Pulitzer Center, which produced the original curricular materials for over 4,500 schools, has sponsored events for librarians and after-school initiatives, including the “1619 Freedom School.”

Hannah-Jones insisted that the first stop on her nationwide book tour be at West High School in Waterloo, Iowa, where the celebrity author appeared “in conversation” with Mr. Dial, the high school teacher who radicalized her thirty years ago by introducing her to the writings of Lerone Bennett, a 1960s Ebony Magazine polemicist and coiner of the term Black Power. She tweeted on November 22, “Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature might not respect me or my work as they sought first to ban the 1619 Project explicitly and then passed one of these anti-history laws, but my community always supports and I can’t wait to see you all.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-schools-without-de-blasio-education-gap-chancellor-banks-charter-mayor-adams-11639518269?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

New York’s departing mayor, Bill de Blasio, has spent eight years at loggerheads with law enforcement and school reformers. When he wasn’t siding with Black Lives Matter demonstrators at antipolice protests, the mayor was busy thwarting the expansion of high-performing charter schools, attacking gifted-and-talented middle-school programs and denouncing public high schools that admit students based on a standardized test score.

This was all done in the name of racial equity, but New Yorkers apparently have tired of wokeness-driven governance. Last month, voters opted to replace Mr. de Blasio with a former police officer, Eric Adams, who in turn has tapped education innovator David Banks to be the city’s next schools chancellor. Mr. Banks is a former teacher and principal who founded the six-school Eagle Academy network, which serves low-income black and Hispanic boys in New York City and Newark, N.J. Eagle Academy is a network of public schools that, like charter schools, operates mostly outside the strictures of the traditional public-school system, which Mr. Banks believes has long ill-served minority communities.

Unlike Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Banks has not called for dumbing down the admissions standards of the city’s elite public high schools to produce more racial balance. He wants to expand gifted-and-talented programs rather than phase them out. He is refreshingly outspoken about the city’s bloated and unaccountable school bureaucracy, which operates as though public education were, first and foremost, a jobs program for adults. That 65% of black and Hispanic students in New York never reach proficiency on standardized tests is “a betrayal” of those kids, he said last week, joking that “if everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results.” Or maybe he wasn’t joking.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s 800-pound public-education gorilla, did not endorse Mr. Adams in the Democratic primary. Michael Mulgrew, the UFT’s president, was conspicuously absent from the news conference announcing Mr. Banks’s appointment. That chilly reception from the teachers union is one reason education reformers tell me they are cautiously optimistic about the Adams administration. One early test of the new mayor’s resolve will be how hard he fights to lift the cap on charter schools in the city, where no new ones can open even though more than 163,000 children are on waiting lists, according to the school-choice advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.

A related test will be whether Mr. Adams can find locations for any new charter schools that get approved. In New York, where space is at a premium, charter schools often seek to co-locate in buildings where traditional public schools are operating below capacity. Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a champion of charters and accelerated their expansion though this co-location process. One of the ways that Mr. de Blasio kept charter growth in check was by denying operators space in underused public-school buildings. A 2018 report by the Manhattan Institute noted that “in the last five years of the Bloomberg administration, 150 co-locations were approved, an average of 30 per year. In the first five years of the de Blasio administration, 59 co-locations were approved, an average of 12 per year.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-dissident-voice-at-cornell/?itm_source=parsely-api

The administration at Cornell University has gone absolutely mad with its “antiracism” crusade. Critical race theory education becomes mandatory, and it even appears to think it can compel people to accept the curriculum.

Law professor Bill Jacobson is speaking out against this astounding perversion of academic values. He explains what has been going on at Cornell in this Legal Insurrection article:

Here is a slice from his statement in opposition to the administration’s reeducation mandates:

Proposal F starts with the compulsion that “Faculty must understand structural racism and the forces of systemic bias and privilege” (emphasis added). Later, Proposal F “requires” that faculty accept that “structural racism, colonialism, and injustice, and their current manifestations have a historical and relational basis.” That CRT worldview, which in its current incarnation is often misleadingly referred to as “antiracism,” is off the table for debate under this proposal. Rather, CRT becomes the official ideology of the University. The rest of the proposal dictates how that mandate will be implemented, including dictating “a framework for interacting with other faculty, with students, with members of the staff, and the broader community” with the faculty “educational requirement . . . to support the faculty in this effort.” Why such compulsion? This campus already is awash in CRT-driven programs, courses, events, workshops, and faculty and student activism, and the separately proposed Center will further the breadth of CRT-based education.

If I were a Cornell grad, I’d let the school know that I would never donate another dollar to them and would try to convince as many Cornellians that the place is no longer worth supporting.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/will-2022-be-the-greatest-year-for-education-reform-in-a-generation/

The resistance to critical race theory, building on traditional priorities like school choice, is driving a revitalized conservative education movement.

T he conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, has shaped the way that conservative policy-makers think about education: Workforce preparation, test scores, and other utilitarian concerns are often prioritized over character formation and civic virtue, while the question of what we are teaching our children has taken a backseat to the content-neutral language of school choice and decentralization. This framework, Yuval Levin writes, has “made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, at times blinding some of those involved in education debates to the deepest human questions at stake — social, moral, cultural, and political questions that cannot be separated from how we think about teaching and learning.”

All of that is beginning to change. A backlash to critical race theory (CRT) at the grassroots level, with help from activists like Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, has forced the radicalization of the American public-school curriculum to the forefront of the national political conversation. The debates over CRT have also opened up broader questions of what (and how) we teach American students about their country, initiating a serious conservative counteroffensive against the Left’s monopolistic control of American politics and history curricula, with states like Florida and Texas pairing anti-CRT laws with new programs aimed at renewing civic literacy in public education. What began with local, parent-led organizing has grown into a national movement with enormous political momentum.

The anti-CRT backlash “crystallized this feeling that we have an agenda that we can cohere around,” Rufo told National Review. “All of the various threads on conservative education reform can now unite around the framework of critical race theory to make real change and actually get bills passed through state legislatures.” To date, eleven states have enacted bans or restrictions on CRT, and Rufo thinks “we’re going to get another five to ten states passing them in the coming year.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/college-newspaper-suggests-that-abolishing-campus-police-could-improve-student-safety/

A Boston University student newspaper editorial board suggested this week that the campus’s “safety issue” could be solved by “outright abolishing” the campus police.

“From their own public statements to their racist history and present, it is clear the BUPD is not designed, nor does it seem willing, to protect all students on campus. Defunding this institution — or outright abolishing it — and creating new services in its wake that better address student and community needs may actually improve student safety,” the editorial board of the Daily Free Press wrote in an editorial on Wednesday.

The editorial, first reported by Fox News, goes on to note that “abolition requires that we create more community services that would address people’s needs and community safety.”

“To put it simply, you would always have someone to call — the number would just be different,” the editorial said. “For instance, BU could increase funding for Scarlet SafeWalk, a program in which students escort anyone feeling unsafe to their home. BU could create a mental health task force specifically designed to deal with mental health crises and expand funding and resources for BU’s Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Center.”

The editorial board argues that “racist police institutions” cannot create a safe campus, and it claims the campus police department “has an egregious history and present of violence and racism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/the-union-mandated-school-shutdowns-are-having-major-consequences/

Recently, a report compiled by Mike Antonucci for the Defense of Freedom Institute confirmed that the teachers unions had a heavy-handed role in the COVID-related shutdowns that consumed much of the country starting in March 2020. And the “never let a good crisis go to waste” unions were in prime form in the process. The California Teachers Association, for example, issued a “bargaining advisory” in May of 2020, in which it states, “When exercising a ‘get for the give’ approach to bargaining concessions, locals should consider strengthening or implementing consultation procedures language in the CBA (collective bargaining agreement).” The union added, “Now is the time to secure (contract) language improvements that we have wanted for some time.”

While the California Teachers Association was busy instructing its local teachers unions how to milk the shutdown, Antonucci notes that it was successful on a statewide basis by “winning a ban on teacher layoffs, a substantial reduction in required instructional minutes, and the elimination of public accountability data collections for 2020, including those for academics, absenteeism, graduation and suspension rates, and college readiness.”

While most schools opened full time across the country in the fall of this year, many unions are now demanding “mental health days,” thus shuttering the schools once again. This time the closures are of variable time spans, and are, in part, due to kids acting out and often becoming violent. As Burbio, the invaluable school reopening tracker, notes, by November 22, there were 3,145 school closures for “mental health” out of a total 8,692 for the school year.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/08/merit-vs-wokeness-universities-must-choose/

Note: This article appeared in Human Events; it has been republished with permission.

We graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 50 years ago. Though it was a tough place academically, MIT taught us our crafts and the essence of problem-solving and enabled us to thrive in our chosen careers. We owe much to “the ‘tute,” as it is fondly known, and have demonstrated that financially over the years.

But no more.

Today, the 160-year-old-institution, once a bedrock of science and innovation, has caved to the demands of “wokeness.” In autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to students, including those already registered and attending, informing them that if they failed to undergo instruction in “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “sexual assault prevention ongoing: healthy relationships,” they would be unable to register for spring classes.

“You will have a registration hold placed on your account and will be unable to register for [Independent Activities Period] and/or spring 2021 classes if you do not complete both trainings by the Nov. 2 deadline,” the email read.

Portions of the actual training materials are available here. The training turns out to be what you would expect: a bunch of compulsory videos that cannot be fast-forwarded, containing deftly worded but fatuous questions that let you know (without coming right out and saying it) that straight white males are the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim of some sort, with extra victimization points for being a member of multiple minorities. (Fortunately, the passing score is zero, so most students will be allowed to resume their studies.)

This new policy is just one instance of a dangerous trend: MIT’s administration is acting in ways that we consider unfair, hypocritical, and harmful to the university, its student body, and academic freedom generally.