RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ivy-league-acceptance-rates-fall-to-record-lows-due-to-covid-19-11617767857?mod=searchresults_pos1&page=1
Ivy League Acceptance Rates Fall to Record Lows Due to Covid-19 Harvard accepts just 3.4% of applicants, while Columbia admitted 3.7%

A pandemic-fueled surge in applications translated into record low acceptance rates this year for the country’s elite colleges, including most of the Ivy League.

Harvard University admitted 1,968 candidates, or 3.4% of the 57,435 people who applied. The previous lowest acceptance rate was 4.6% two years ago. Applications surged 43% over last year.

Yale University accepted 4.6% of the 46,905 people who applied. The applicant pool grew by 33% over last year, when the school accepted 6.6% of applicants.

Columbia University in New York City was the second hardest school to get into among the Ivies. Of the 60,551 students who applied, just 3.7% were accepted—down from 6.3% last year.

The eight schools making up the Ivy League and several other highly selective colleges late Tuesday notified applicants whether or not they had secured a slot for the coming fall’s first-year class. Notices went out a week later than in previous years to give admission officers time to vet the deluge of applications.

Hundreds of additional colleges, including most elite schools, stopped requiring an ACT or SAT standardized-test score as part of the admissions process this year because it was difficult to safely sit for the exams during the pandemic. The test-optional policy boosted applications as the number of open seats declined when a disproportionate number of students deferred admission due to the pandemic.

“Ten percent of the class entering this fall were admitted a year ago, and decided to take a gap year,” said Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions at Duke University, where a 25% uptick in applications drove the acceptance rate to a record low 5.8% from 8.1% last year. “That left fewer places than usual.”

More than 100,000 students applied to New York University and the school accepted 12.8%—a record low. Among those accepted, 20% are the first in their family to go to college, 20% are low income, and 29% come from traditionally underrepresented groups, the school said.

At Dartmouth, where the acceptance rate dropped to 6.2% from 9.2% last year, 48% of accepted students identify as Black, indigenous or other people of color, the school said, while 17% are the first in their family to attend college.

“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” said Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/systemic-social-justice-activism-college-campuses-jay-bergman/

Amidst considerable fanfare, Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) announced recently the creation of the John Lewis Institute for Social Justice.  In a formal statement marking the occasion, Zulma Toro, the president of CCSU, claimed that the university’s mission was “to prepare students to be thoughtful, responsible, and successful citizens.”

At first glance, this objective seems incontestable, and the advocacy of social justice an excellent means of achieving it.

But when one delves deeper into the purpose of the institute, and learns what exactly social justice means to those who established it, it becomes clear that the institute is a vehicle for turning students into political activists advancing left-wing causes: the next sentence in the president’s statement acknowledges that the institute was created to satisfy students’ desire “to become more informed and involved in social justice initiatives after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.” 

That in the absence of any juridical determination one would describe these two deaths as “killings” is consistent with the common misconception that white police are generically racist and kill black Americans in large numbers because of their skin color.  The truth is the exact opposite: according to Peter Kirsanow, a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, in 2016 police shot to death 16 unarmed black victims and 22 unarmed white victims – while in the same year making 408,873 arrests for violent crime.

The same disparity between perception and reality applies to the larger indictment of America that the creators of the institute apparently share: that our country is “systemically” racist, and absent the intervention of social justice activists like those the institute seeks to generate, irredeemably so.  

This charge is false as a matter of evidence and contradictory as a matter of simple logic.  

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/06/educational-freedom-is-on-the-move/

I wrote early last month that COVID-related lockdowns were leading many states to implement or advance already existing school choice measures. Just a few weeks later, it is happening at breakneck speed.

Legislators and parents have become fed up, and are doing what they can to regain control of the educational lives of children. They have watched as private schools flourish, while many of the government-run variety—typically at the behest of the teachers’ unions—have been shuttered. Also, because of forced online learning, parents have been given a Zoom-view as to just what teachers are—and are not—teaching.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states this year. Kentucky voted in a tax-credit-funded education savings account, its very first school choice legislation. As Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy, explains, “Students from families with incomes below 175 percent of the federal poverty line will have access to education savings accounts. The program is available to students living in counties with more than 90,000 residents, and will initially be capped at $25 million.”

In North Carolina, House Bill 32 is currently working its way through the legislative process. If passed, the “Equity in Opportunity Act” will increase funding for the existing voucher program and allow more students to apply for scholarships.

Perhaps the most interesting state to advance educational freedom is West Virginia, which on March 29 passed the most expansive school choice program in the country. Under the new law, all parents have unrestrained options. If parents choose a private school for their kids, they will receive 100 percent of their state education dollars—$4,600 annually—to help defray expenses. In addition to private school tuition, parents can use the funding to homeschool or for other education expenses.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/academic-freedom-alliance

Booker T. Washington would have liked the Academic Freedom Alliance, a newly announced group of college faculty dedicated to protecting freedom of expression on campus. The group, conceived at Princeton last summer, has quickly scaled up into a nationwide network. Although one of its main founders is Robert P. George, himself a conservative professor at Princeton, the alliance is determinedly nonpartisan and includes liberals and progressives as well as conservatives. The actions of the intolerant mob threaten everyone, regardless of political coloration. As a tribe, academics are not conspicuous for their courage. They tend to look the other way when colleagues are attacked for expressing opinions that do not pass muster with the wardens of wokeness. The afa hopes to change that, encouraging its members to act like elephants, not zebras: when hunted by lions, George noted in an interview, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” Elephants, he said, behave differently. They “circle around the vulnerable elephant” and protect it. Academics need to do likewise and offer support—legal as well as moral—when one of their numbers falls victim to the mob.

We welcome the Academic Freedom Alliance. Like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), it may well become a beacon of sanity in the stultifying and tenebrous atmosphere that prevails in American academia today. You can find out more about the alliance, and donate to support its activities, at its website, academicfreedom.org.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. After social distancing disrupted test taking in 2020, the future scope of the SAT and ACT is uncertain.

But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive. Privileged students are likely to gain the most. A new paper from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that “essay content”—that is, the quality of admissions essays—“is more strongly associated with household income than is SAT score.”

It’s true that high-income students, who are more likely to have highly educated parents, score better on the SAT, on average. But testing critics never explain what would be a fairer metric. That’s because the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/02/communist-and-black-nationalist-angela-davis-speaks-to-k-12-students-calls-on-them-to-dismantle-capitalism/

On Wednesday, former Communist Party activist and black nationalist Angela Davis spoke at a webinar for an elite California prep school, where she told the K-12 students watching online that it was incumbent upon them to “dismantle capitalism,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

The “diversity and inclusion”-themed webinar, titled the CommunityEd Series, was hosted by the Heads-Royce School, a prep school that costs just over $47,000 a year in tuition.

“Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to dismantle capitalism if we really want to move in a progressive direction,” Davis said to the impressionable students on the final day of the webinar. “If we want our children and children’s children and their children to begin to move along a trajectory that is described by freedom.”

Davis went on to bash the United States and voice her support for globalism, saying “I think that we have to struggle against this notion that this is the best country in the world, that we are always the ones to give leadership even when we’re talking about social justice struggles. We have to take internationalism into consideration.”

Davis’s appearance received backlash for her history of radicalism and violence. A former member of the Communist Party, she is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and also supported the Soviet Union’s suppression of Jewish dissidents. She received the USSR’s International Lenin Peace Prize in 1979, and in her acceptance speech praised Vladimir Lenin as “glorious” and “great.” She purchased several guns that were used in an armed attempt to break three murderers out of a California prison in 1970, serving 18 months in jail.

https://www.city-journal.org/christopher-rufo-on-woke-education

In an ongoing investigative series, City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo reports on the spread of critical race theory through American schools.

Senator Cotton’s Stand
The Arkansas lawmaker is introducing a bill to protect the military from critical race theory indoctrination. March 24, 2021
Subversive Education
North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.” March 17, 2021
Revenge of the Gods
California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice. March 10, 2021
Critical Race Fragility
The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate. March 2, 2021
Critical “Race” to the Bottom
10 Blocks podcast with Brian C. Anderson, February 26, 2021
Failure Factory
Buffalo’s school district tells students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”—while presiding over miserable student outcomes. February 23, 2021
Gone Crazy
A New York City public school principal calls on white parents to “subvert white authority.” February 18, 2021
Bad Education
In a Philadelphia elementary school, teachers are putting a premium on radicalism, not reading. February 11, 2021
Spoiled Rotten
Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.” January 28, 2021
“Antiracism” Comes to the Heartland
A Missouri middle school forces teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and watch a video of “George Floyd’s last words.” January 19, 2021
Woke Elementary
A Cupertino elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” January 13, 2021
Radicals in the Classroom
San Diego’s school district tells white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy.” January 5, 2021
Teaching Hate
The Seattle school district claims that the U.S. education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children. December 18, 2020