RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a column by two scientists, Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov, detailing their travails in trying to get scientific journals to publish their “commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit.” They were met with rejection, one editor calling the essay “downright hurtful,” and another one writing that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” It finally was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which champions “free inquiry,” a fast-disappearing virtue in our age of “woke” intolerance.

The politicization of academic disciplines in the humanities or history or the “human sciences” is bad enough, but its dangers are nothing compared to the corruption of the hard sciences by illiberal identity politics. The roots of this dangerous ideology lie in the notion of “equity,” a fancy word for the equality of results. Both “equity” and ideological distortions of science have a long history of destructive outcomes.

The notion of absolute equality or radical egalitarianism was born 2500 years ago with democracy and its extension of political rights to non-elites. As Aristotle defined radical egalitarianism, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” As such it is inherently tyrannical, for given the unequal distribution of talent, brains, opportunity, industry, and sheer luck, only by unjustly reducing the equality of some can absolute equality exist for all.

And as James Madison said in his discussion of “faction,” the clashing “political interests and parties” that can threaten our freedom result from “unequal faculties of acquiring property”––just as we see today with “equity” and “disparate impacts” and the redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate what one faction deems are unfair distinctions based on a spurious “merit” that makes some wealthier and more privileged than others. “Equality of outcome” thus exacerbated this inherently contentious and divisive dynamic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-ed-sec-says-low-civics-scores-show-students-need-critical-race-theory/

You have to give the promo lefties credit for staying on message. No cult member has ever been as determined to ignore everything factual, moral or legal in pursuit of the agenda. They start fires and then show up to pour more gasoline on them while warning that cuts to the arson department will undermine our best defense against fires.

After lefties, doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, closed the schools, the educational system ceased to function leading to catastrophic drops in test scores. None of the lockdowners has been willing to claim their share of the credit and Biden’s Secretary of Education manages to suggest that poor civics scores is proof that we need to teach kids more critical race theory.

Knowledge of civics among the nation’s eighth-graders fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current framework in 1998, according to new results that come amid a broader concern about pandemic-era learning loss.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, also show a 5-point decline in average scores in history.

Biden’s Secretary of Education, who kept trying to close schools, has some thoughts on the matter.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, noting the abysmal math and reading NAEP scores released last fall.

“It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” the secretary said.

We spent insane amounts of money on a school system that did not function because the primary beneficiary of all that ed spend, bureaucrats, teachers’ unions and assorted administrators, decided to close the schools. If we want to increase spending on schools, let’s claw some of that money back from their salaries and budgets.

And no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to get any better because education isn’t a money game. It’s a parent game. All the stats clearly show it. If the parents don’t care, then a student has to be really dedicated to overcome that hurdle. And how many kids are?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/public-educations-days-of-reckoning

Public school districts across the United States closed for unprecedented periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enrollments plunged, as students either headed to private schools or stayed home for schooling. Other children simply disappeared from schools and remain unaccounted for even today by school officials. Now, because of this exodus, school districts nationwide are grappling with another kind of closing: empty classrooms and underused school buildings are prompting waves of school shutdowns, as education officials look to downsize their operations in response to smaller student populations and disappearing Covid bailout funds. In many communities, the process is messy, with parents, teachers, and teachers’ unions objecting. But failing to act will only worsen budget deficits at a time of economic uncertainty.

According to an international study, American schools closed for an average of 70 weeks during the pandemic—far longer than schools shut down in most European countries, though the length of closures varied by state. Schools in Texas and Florida, for example, were closed for just a fraction of the time that schools in California and New York were shuttered. In all, public schools lost some 1.2 million students in the first two years of the pandemic. Some migrated to private institutions, where enrollments grew by 4 percent, while homeschool numbers rose by 30 percent.

Among states sustaining the biggest losses are California, which saw public school enrollment shrink by some 245,000 in two pandemic years, and New York, where enrollments fell 80,000 in the same period. In these states and elsewhere, Covid accelerated a trend already underway. School enrollment had peaked in many states in the mid-2010s and begun slipping shortly after, a result of fewer births, outmigration, and modest growth in homeschooling and alternative schools. New York State, for instance, has lost about 6 percent of its students, or 120,000 children, since 2016. California’s enrollment has dropped by 382,000 students since the 2014 school year.