RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mailchi.mp/harvard/into-practice-monikjimenez-1412968?e=b8a501ae37

Dr. Monik Jimenez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, uses different pedagogical approaches to elevate diverse voices and styles of learning. In her Mass Incarceration & Health in the U.S. course, she balances speaking time between a traditional scholar and an impacted community member, and emphasizes to the latter (and to students) that they are an expert. Dr. Jimenez also provides a variety of ways for students to participate and ask questions that include different cultural and neurodivergent learning styles. “It’s important to think about decolonizing the classroom in a layered way,” she reflects. “What are the multiple ways in which systems of power and white supremacy have impacted what we consider to be an ‘optimal’ student through the metrics we’ve been taught?”
 

The benefits: “Creating a space that demonstrates everyone’s voice is valued allows students to engage with one another in ways that are far more authentic and that last.” Students open themselves to learning, engaging more deeply with the material, and practice challenging stigmas in a carefully cultivated space. Emphasizing that voices outside the traditional scholar have deep value, permits students to feel comfortable thinking of themselves as experts. Dr. Jimenez notes that her students are often more interested in what impacted community members have to say.
 

“We’re challenging who you can be in this space and that your presence – your whole presence, everything that brought you to this point – is valued, not just where you went to school, but all your lived experience and distance travelled.”

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/05/03/why-school-vouchers-matter-and-how-to-get-them-right/

After a year of missed schooling and inadequate online learning, after months of teachers unions delaying the return to classrooms, it is time to reconsider school vouchers. Many “red” states are already doing so. Indiana is the most recent, and Florida, with one of the largest programs in the country, is about to undertake a major expansion. As these programs are implemented, we should learn which policies work best and build on those lessons.

The pro-voucher debate so far has focused on two features shared by all voucher programs. They offer more choices to parents and kids. And the schools supported by them appear to perform a bit better, on average, than existing public schools (after taking into account differences in student populations).

We need to refocus the debate on two other points that are crucial to designing effective programs. One is whether the payments are actually large enough to benefit poor families. Vouchers are useless to the poor unless they cover nearly all the costs of tuition, books and transportation. (The federal government already covers food costs.) The other issue is whether the programs foster genuine market competition, forcing schools to do their best for students or pay a high price for failure.

Well-designed voucher programs should accomplish the following:

Encourage new schools to enter the market,
Drive out schools that don’t meet students’ and parents’ needs, and
Shift public resources swiftly and decisively toward the best schools and away from the worst, as determined by the parents themselves.

These goals can be achieved only if resources follow the students, not the schools, teachers or administrators. They happen only if voucher programs are large enough and if bad public schools aren’t kept on life support. Right now, we don’t have that kind of vigorous competition, and it shows. Our children suffer for it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-prof-were-cutting-you-off-11619974459?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

The current political uniformity of college faculty illustrates the point. It meets the needs of the substitute purpose very well, but only by annihilating the authorized one. Analytical thinking requires exploring a range of alternatives, but political crusades require the opposite: exclusive belief and commitment. That’s how far off course academia has gone in its capricious self-repurposing.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/biden-administration-cites-1619-project-as-inspiration-in-history-grant-proposal/2021/04

The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.

In describing the basis for the new grant priority for American History and Civics Education programs, the administration cites the scholar and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that highlights slavery and its legacy as a central element in America’s story.

“It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions,and experiences of all students,” the April 19 notice in the Federal Register states. 

https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/college-professor-berates-student-for-calling-police-heroes/

An adjunct professor teaching her first-ever course at a California college was placed on leave this week after she ripped a student during a class presentation because he said he regards police officers as  “heroes.”

The unidentified Cypress College educator was apparently triggered Wednesday during 19-year-old business major Braden Ellis’s Zoom presentation on cancel culture in the US, in which he noted how even animated kids TV shows such as “Paw Patrol” have come under fire from unhinged cop-haters, Fox News reported.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-1-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#1: Harvard University:

Harvard University is widely regarded as America’s most prestigious university. It is also one of its most racist, deliberately using discriminatory and stereotypical ratings of Asian applicants’ personalities as “lacking” and “one-dimensional” to reduce their chances of obtaining admission to the prestigious university.

In 2014, Harvard was sued in federal district court by a coalition named Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits all schools which receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race. The suit charged that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants in undergraduate admissions decisions, using an admissions formula that hinders Asian applicants’ chances of admission by consistently giving them a low “personal rating”—a subjective measure of personality traits such as kindness, courage, and likeability. Through an examination of Harvard’s previously secret admissions data, SFFA was able to show that Asian-American applicants to Harvard face rampant racial discrimination.

Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University who testified in court on behalf of SFFA, concluded that Asian-American applicants have the lowest chance of admission to Harvard out of all races despite scoring highest in all objective measurements of achievement.

“Race plays a significant role in admissions decisions,” Arcidiacono wrote in his expert report. “Consider the example of an Asian-American applicant who is male, is not disadvantaged, and has other characteristics that result in a 25% chance of admission. Simply changing the race of this applicant to white—and leaving all his other characteristics the same—would increase his chance of admission to 36%. Changing his race to Hispanic (and leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 77%. Changing his race to African-American (again, leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 95%.”

http://getinsight.pro/

Are Your Teachers Telling You the Truth?

Is America a racist country?
Is the earth heading for climate catastrophe?

Should we Discriminate in Favor of Blacks and Against Whites?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/how-social-justice-education-coddles-young-minds/

Increasingly popular curricula don’t just miseducate our kids. They prepare them poorly for adulthood.

A parent, Ndona Muboyayi, recently told Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic the following story about her son:

“My son has wanted to be a lawyer since he was 11. Then one day he came home and told me, ‘But Mommy, there are these systems put in place that prevent Black people from accomplishing anything.’ That’s what they’re teaching Black kids: that all of this time for the past 400 years, this is what [white people have] done to you and your people. The narrative is, ‘You can’t get ahead.’”

Such stories are becoming more prevalent today, with the rise of what are often referred to as “social-justice educators” in the classroom. These teachers are typically concerned with equity in education — how to reckon with the unequal distribution of resources and services to achieve equal educational outcomes across students. Many believe that education is intersectional: “We cannot talk about schools, without addressing race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics, because education is a political act,” wrote Crystal Belle, a teacher-education director at Rutgers University–Newark. Their goal, as Belle put it, is to use “curriculum as a primary mechanism for making the world a more equitable place.”

This goal sounds nice. But too often in practice the perspectives of these teachers regarding race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics take precedence in teaching and learning over eliciting and developing the worldviews of their students. Such teachers shield students from practices, ideas, or words that they perceive as harmful, and punish students who inflict harm.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their article and subsequent book The Coddling of the American Mind, call this “vindictive protectiveness.” According to Lukianoff and Haidt, vindictive protectiveness creates “a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/02/an_open_letter_to_swarthmore_president_valerie_smith_145684.html

Dear President Smith,

Thank you for your “Reflections on Yesterday’s Verdict,” which you sent to Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff on April 21 and posted on the college’s website. Prompted by the announcement that Derek Chauvin had been found guilty of murdering George Floyd, you offered brief thoughts on the connection between liberal education and racial justice, social movements, and political change. As a Swarthmore graduate grateful for the long-ago introduction that the college provided me to liberal education, and as an observer of American politics troubled by the nation’s widening schisms, I read your message with great interest.

In the spirit of my Swarthmore studies, your reflections have left me with a number of questions. They revolve around the relation between politics and liberal education.

Your message asserts that “[a]lthough the verdict can never truly bring justice for Mr. Floyd and his family, it signals the impact of a powerful social movement.” You summon us to join in that social movement, stating, “We must dedicate ourselves anew to the struggle for lasting, meaningful change” in America to bring about “a more just, equitable, and safe society.”

You envisage a distinctive role for colleges and universities. “As an institution of higher learning, Swarthmore College is committed to contributing to that change — by continuing to foster an environment in which students can engage in deep, thoughtful, and frank conversations about the challenges facing our society,” you write. “This shared and vital work can and will continue to ensure we provide a transformative liberal arts education grounded in fearless intellectual inquiry.”

https://www.city-journal.org/elementary-schools-go-woke

Many American parents may assume that culture-war battles over critical race theory and “wokeness” are fought on legitimate terrain, involving such matters as how high school students can best grapple with our nation’s complex past. Perhaps they think that the suddenly ubiquitous topics of gender identity and preferred pronouns rankle only those parents who are old-fashioned in their thinking. If only. America’s youngest students are being bombarded with classroom activism and indoctrination that is inappropriate not only developmentally but for public school systems in general.

The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.

If this sounds extreme, that’s because it is. It is not happening everywhere—but it is happening enough to have juiced a multibillion-dollar, nationwide industry. Sometimes the source is a rogue teacher whom the principal and superintendent admit they are trying to rein in; but increasingly, it is simply public officials implementing approved policies.