RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/two-american-crises/

Last January 6 was terrible. The ongoing abuse of our children in schools will do far more lasting damage.

A mericans are reflecting on two important crises this week. One, last year’s January 6 Capitol riot, was thoroughly investigated and its perpetrators are being severely punished. The other, the ongoing systemic abuse of our children by the Democrat-run education system, has been shrugged at, has gone wholly unpunished, and is barely acknowledged even as millions of us observe it in horrified disbelief that such hideous mistreatment can be official policy in the greatest country on earth.

One event was properly labeled something that must never be allowed to happen again, and it almost certainly won’t. (Because the Capitol Police will be prepared next time.) One event will continue every day, indefinitely, until Democrats finally get tired of subjugating our children and decide to stop.

The Capitol riot was a series of spectacular crimes that deserved spectacular punishment, as we at NR argued at the time. But what’s going on in schools is likely to do far greater long-term damage to America. The number of children being significantly harmed by nonsensical Covid restrictions such as closed schools, forced masking, forbidden talking at lunch, and canceled extracurricular activities vital for social, emotional, and physical development is in the millions. And how many young people are we killing by driving them into depressions from which there is no exit?

The invaluable David Leonhardt of the New York Times published this week a grueling summation of what pandemic restrictions — not the pandemic, which has more or less bypassed children — are doing to the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Every day our kids spend under this nightmare regime is a day of development that is lost forever. “Kids are resilient,” we tell ourselves. Are they? It seems to me something closer to the opposite is the case: Severe psychological traumas endured in childhood rarely disappear, and very often they mutate into major problems in adulthood. Psychologically speaking, kids are fragile. What kind of future are we building if we allow this horror to continue? It’s been nearly two years of this. How alienated, bitter, antisocial, and resentful are these kids going to be when they’re grown? We are poisoning our most valuable crop.

“American children are in crisis,” Leonhardt baldly and accurately states, citing sagging test scores, a spike in demand for emergency treatment of children, a 51 percent increase in suicide attempts leading to ER visits by teen girls, and anecdotal evidence of an increase in misbehavior by pupils in school. Yet some 2,200 schools are closing this week all over the country — in Atlanta, Cleveland, and some New York City suburbs. In Chicago, in-person classes are canceled. In Massachusetts, the largest teachers’ union is calling for school closings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yales-anonymous/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

The Yale Daily News granted anonymity to a Chinese student who published a column on Peng Shuai’s disappearance by the Chinese Communist Party. The student paper’s editors explained why they published the piece that way:

Editor’s Note: The News has granted the author of this piece anonymity due to a risk to their family’s safety. The author is a University student with family in China who might be harmed by the piece being published with the author’s name. As a policy, the News does not accept anonymous submissions. However, we believed this piece could not be published without guaranteeing the author’s anonymity.

It’s an important piece that, fitting in with other recent events, deserves attention:

As a concerned Yale student, who has to remain anonymous for fear of putting those I love in danger, I’m writing to you so that she won’t be forgotten. We won’t forget her. And I want to tell you what I think #WhereIsPengShuai is really about. If we trivialize Peng Shuai’s allegations as just another social media hashtag, what she did will be for nothing…

The Yale endowment needs to divest from China. The track record of the CCP has made it more than clear that every dollar of investment in China is unethical, until the CCP is willing to positively respond to, and act on, allegations by Peng Shuai and many others. Despite having a significant Chinese portfolio, which includes top-earning tech companies like Tencent and JD.com, the Yale Investments Office currently has no publicly available ethical policy specific to China or a review of its ethical implications.

There are two critical points to take from this.

First, a counter-CCP campus divestment movement is taking shape, and this piece serves as a reminder of its significance. In October, Catholic University of America’s student government voted to support the school’s divestment from firms implicated in the Uyghur genocide, leading school officials to pledge to take steps toward that goal.

Rory O’Connor of the Athenai Institute, the group coordinating a nationwide boycott campaign, told me at the time that his organization is targeting a number of other schools across the country in the coming months.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/04/dei-must-die/

Researchers extraordinaire Jay Greene and James Paul have released a series of three carefully crafted studies on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that detail many aspects of the harmful scheme. In a nutshell, the authors find DEI to be “counterproductive and politically radical.”

The part of the study that examines DEI’s effects on elementary schools is particularly damning. It looks at school districts with at least 15,000 students, of which there are 554, and finds that schools with Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) “actually have larger gaps in achievement between black and white students, Hispanic and white students, and non-poor and poor students than districts without CDOs. And those gaps are growing wider over time. This pattern holds true even after controlling for a host of other observable characteristics of those districts.”

The authors explain that the gaps occur because CDOs “are more focused on promoting a political agenda than they are on finding effective educational interventions.” And that political agenda includes advancing policies that typically exacerbate achievement gaps, such as eliminating gifted programs and advanced math classes “while selecting English and Social Studies content for its political orthodoxy rather than educational quality.”

Why would such a bad idea be such an easy sell? Because when you dress up the words, they can sound good, at least to true believers. But in reality, it’s a nightmare for all concerned, except of course for the “progressive” elites who financially benefit from the racket.

One part of the study deals with the anti-Semitic nature of DEI. Interestingly, Greene and Paul compiled Twitter feeds of 741 DEI officials at 65 universities and find “605 tweets that bash Israel and just 28 that praise the Jewish state.” They add that 62 percent of the tweets that reference China were favorable.

When it comes to educational malfeasance, California, as usual, does its best to be the national leader. In fact, there are potholes galore on Equity Road in the Golden State. For starters State Superintendent of Public Instruction and Indoctrinator-in-Chief Tony Thurmond hired Daniel Lee as the state’s first “superintendent of equity.” But shortly thereafter, Politico revealed that Lee, a psychologist, life coach, and self-help author, is also a Pennsylvanian, and was given a job that was never publicly posted by the California state Education Department. Apparently being buddies with Phony Tony was enough to land Lee the $180,000 a year job. When asked if others were interviewed for the job besides Lee, Thurmond replied, “I can’t recall.” If nothing else, Thurmond is living proof that cronyism is alive and well in California.