RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/vanishing-families-shrinking-schools

Public school districts in large cities, many facing budget squeezes from plunging enrollments driven by parental discontent over Covid-19 policies, are unlikely to find relief anytime soon. The latest census data show that families with the preschool-age children who would form the next generation of students are abandoning cities, especially big ones, at unprecedented levels. The combination of outmigration and a slowdown in births is thus accelerating a trend that emerged even before Covid: cities with fewer and fewer children as a percentage of the overall population. Though the trend is most pronounced in states where population growth has lagged, like New York and Illinois, it’s also happening in growing places like Texas, suggesting a broad retrenchment by families with young children, especially to so-called “exurban” areas beyond cities and suburbs. Struggling school districts from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles have seen “massive” hemorrhaging of students, in the words of New York City mayor Eric Adams.

The population of young children, from newborns to age four, has been declining nationally because of a shrinking birth rate, but the losses are most pronounced in big cities, according to a new study by the Economic Innovation Group. Since the pandemic began, the under-five population of large urban areas has shrunk at about 6.1 percent, nearly twice the national rate. Declines in suburban counties are much smaller—about 1.6 percent since April 2020. And in the exurbs, the youthful population has grown modestly since the pandemic began.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/racial-preferences-charter-schools-and-the-teachers-unions/

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a university’s consideration of race in accepting students violates the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, explains that the admissions processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The 6-3 decision saw the three liberal justices dissent.

In addition to being unconstitutional, affirmative action has not worked out well in the real world. Only 42% of black students nationally graduate college within six years, which is far below the 66% rate for white students.

As Jason Riley writes in City Journal, racial preferences are counterproductive. “They mismatch students with schools that recruit minorities for window dressing and then fail to graduate them in a timely manner or in the majors they initially wanted to pursue. Many bright black students who could have graduated from Xavier with a degree in engineering were instead lured to Duke, where they struggled academically, perhaps switched to a softer discipline, or simply flunked out. The upshot has been fewer black mathematicians, lawyers, and physicians than we would have had in the absence of race-based admissions.”

It’s worth noting that affirmative action was never meant to last forever. When the policy was first implemented in the 1960s, it was assumed that gaps in educational achievement between black and white Americans would eventually shrink, thereby rendering racial preferences unnecessary. Along these lines, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 2003: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Needless to say, the left was delirious and then some over the SCOTUS decision. Leading the wackadoodle parade was union boss Randi Weingarten, who has never been shy about wearing hysteria on her sleeve. “Make no mistake: Today’s draconian ruling by the Supreme Court is a catastrophic decision that will have dire outcomes for millions of Americans for decades to come. This decision ignores the original sin of this country—it’s a throwback to a cruel, racist past that admissions policies like this tried to repair. This decision doesn’t simply end affirmative action, it has huge consequences for public life far beyond higher education. Ignoring the facts before them, the majority pretends that both discrimination and the effects of discrimination simply do not exist and do not need to be tackled.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/07/15/california-approves-new-math-guidelines-that-emphasize-social-justice-n1710863

“Those poor kids. They’ve become “warriors for social justice” without being asked. And the price they pay will prove to be far more damaging to their futures than anything any white person will ever do to them.”

For nearly two years, California has been fiddling with new guidelines for teaching math that “de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons.” Now those guidelines have been finalized, and the state board of education is thrilled to announce that math is no longer “racist.”

“This framework provides strategies to challenge, engage, and support all students in deep and relevant math learning by building on successful approaches used in nations that produce high and equitable achievement in math,” State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond said in a statement.

“High standards” are desirable. But “equitable achievement”? Which nations produce both?

Darling-Hammond added, “It also draws on the experiences of educators who have worked for a decade to develop successful strategies for teaching California’s rigorous standards, carrying those lessons to others across the state. This framework provides teachers and schools with a path to greater excellence with greater equity.”

The 1,000-page document is a triumph of idiocy. The idea is to make math instruction “culturally relevant” and “empowering” and to “instill confidence in learners by dispelling myths about who can and cannot learn math.”

“Cultural and personal relevance is important for learning and also for creating mathematical communities that reflect California’s diversity. Educators can learn to notice, utilize, and value students’ identities, assets, and cultural resources to support learning for all students. Additionally, because culture and language can be intertwined, attending to cultural relevance may also enable teachers to attend to linguistic diversity – a key feature of California and relevant to the teaching and learning of mathematics,” the document reads.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/16/christopher_rufo_examines_crts_roots_and_reach_149500.html

Following the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd and amid the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, controversy erupted over the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s K-12 schools. The mainstream media adopted a contradictory approach. Journalists reported that American schools generally did not teach critical race theory; at the same time, the prestige press contended that opponents of CRT’s presence in the curriculum obstructed students’ encounter with the harsh realities of race in America. The journalists’ conflicting denial of its presence and endorsement of its radical ideas reflect CRT’s extensive influence. A perverse mixture of doctrines deriving from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, CRT undergirds much of the hard-left agenda that has burrowed deep into America, not least the mainstream media.

Consider two 2021 articles that appeared less than two weeks apart.

On July 1 of that year, NBC News journalist Phil McCausland reported that according to a survey, “Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to adding the academic approach to their course instruction.” 

McCausland lacked curiosity. He did not ask whether the ideas teachers were presenting could reasonably be understood as reflecting CRT’s central tenets. And he did not consider whether parents’ concerns about critical race theory stemmed from the shift to online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning onscreen at home, parents could look over their kids’ shoulders and see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears as teachers explained that America was systemically racist, that white people were of necessity oppressors and African Americans were of necessity oppressed, and that group identities and group rights superseded personal achievement and individual rights. Instead, NBC News  implied that parents objected to CRT to suppress the cruel facts about race in America.

Several days earlier, Washington Post reporters Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey published a 3,000-word article tracing much of the furor over critical race theory – “a decades-old academic framework that most people had never heard of” – to the belligerent activism of Christopher Rufo, “a young conservative from Seattle.” The reporters sought to refute Rufo’s claim that critical race theory “has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people” by suggesting that Rufo used “questionable evidence” to gin up CRT as “the latest cultural wedge issue.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/14/its-time-to-acknowledge-americas-education-crisis/

Tina Blum Cohen is a Republican running for Congress in Texas District 7.

The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding college admissions has once again thrust America’s educational system into the spotlight. A major question that has come from this ruling is whether America’s children are being intellectually and academically prepared to even enter or succeed in these colleges and universities. The tragic answer is that America’s public education system is failing to equip our youth with the tools necessary to succeed in higher education and in their future professional lives. We are failing America’s most valuable asset—our children.

According to the Department of Education’s own report on the state of education in America, we are experiencing what is essentially an educational crisis. Scores in every subject and grade level have been declining over the years. While illogical and unscientific Covid policies certainly worsened the crisis to a point that lawmakers can no longer ignore the problem, the situation has actually been declining for years. Especially concerning are scores in reading and mathematics, with close to one third of students in elementary school behind in grade-level reading and only about a third of fourth graders able to perform grade-level math.

Earlier this year, the nation was shocked to hear that 55 Chicago schools reported zero proficiency in math or reading despite billions of dollars of federal funding for the schools. But this crisis is not unique to Chicago. In my own Houston community, the Texas Education Agency has had to intervene in the leadership of the state’s largest public school district after years of failing to adequately educate our community’s children.

Unfortunately for America’s youth and the future of our nation, public schools have put core educational instruction on the back burner, instead prioritizing culturally sensational philosophies. We now see schools artificially inflating grades in order to ‘pass’ students who do not have the educational tools necessary to succeed in higher grades. While this is done under the guise of “equity,” it is unfortunately setting kids up for future failure when they find themselves unprepared for the next steps in their education, and ultimately, for adulthood and success in society.

Likewise, we see schools ditching the concepts of expectations and consequences, both educational and behavioral, including things like homework deadlines. Besides the negative effect this has on mastering educational principles that will be used to learn more difficult concepts later, this lack of personal accountability and consequences has our youth growing accustomed to an unrealistically lenient reality which does not exist in our society. We do our children a disservice when we do not intellectually and emotionally prepare them to deal with reality, including things like personal consequences or meeting deadlines. Imagine their shock when their first employer sets a hard deadline for a project, and they have no experience with being required to meet a deadline. They will have been set up for anxiety and potential failure rather than confidence and success.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

An unsurprising consequence of the recent Supreme Court decision to expunge race-based affirmative action for college admission was the resolve to sue select colleges for an unfair bias toward legacy students, children of wealthy donors, and, as former Harvard President Larry Summers intoned, those colleges that have a preference “for those who excel in ‘aristocrat sports.’”[1] He added, admissions officers should “resist being impressed by those who have benefitted from high-priced coaching through the admissions process.”

While the suits may have some merit, admitting students on the basis of name and legacy peaked in the 1950s, though money still talks. From my perspective, selection should be based on merit, but universities need support from all stakeholders: alumni, donors, faculty, and students. Those needs are matched against the demands of government, which is a major source of funding. As an aside, it is a curious fact that economic underclasses are rarely considered. Writing in The New York Times last week, David Leonhardt wrote: “The skew is so extreme at some colleges that more undergraduates come from the top one percent of income distribution than the entire bottom 60 percent.” Nevertheless, in the quest for a perfect solution, universities must keep in mind the aphorism that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

Laws of economics play a role: What happens when supply fails to keep pace with demand? College, over the past sixty years, has been a growth industry. The number of high school graduates has roughly doubled during that time to 3.9 million, while the percentage of each graduating high school class going to college has increased from 7.7% to 37.5%. Despite that ten-fold increase in demand for a university education, select colleges have not increased student bodies commensurate with increased demand. For example, consider the Ivy League, where demand has been augmented by women who now comprise more than 50% of student bodies and by foreign students who today represent about 11% of their student bodies, yet their total student bodies have increased only about 50% from 1960.

The result is a squeeze on supply, especially at elite colleges.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-preferences-bred-50-years-of-mismatch-harvard-sat-scores-equality-7942bd8e?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for her colleagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in college admissions. She alleged in her dissenting opinion that the six-justice majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had subverted the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, not upheld it, by “further entrenching racial inequality in education.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion slammed shut the door of opportunity to underrepresented minorities, especially black students, who still fight against a society that is “inherently unequal,” she wrote.

Many in academia agreed with Justice Sotomayor. Incoming Harvard president Claudine Gay warned in a video statement that the decision “means the real possibility that opportunities will be foreclosed.” David A. Thomas, president of historically black Morehouse College, asserted that in the absence of racial preferences, black students will rightly conclude that they are “not wanted.” Students “of color” may not feel that they “matter,” according to Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

The charge that colorblind admissions will foreclose educational opportunities for blacks rests on a breathtakingly elitist view of education. And the idea that minority students should now conclude that they aren’t “wanted” on college campuses defies reality. Black students will attend college in the same numbers after affirmative action as they did before, if they so choose. Colleges will be as eager to have them. The only difference, assuming compliance with the ruling (a big if), is that such students will attend college on the same footing as most students from unpreferred racial groups: admitted to schools for which their academic skills qualify them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/in-blow-to-academic-freedom-court-rules-universities-can-punish-faculty-for-lack-of-collegiality/?utm_

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a public-university faculty member can be punished for the “lack of collegiality” he purportedly showed when he criticized a higher-ed-degree program for prioritizing social justice over scholarship.

To academic-freedom advocates, the decision is a blow, and there are fears the “collegiality” rationale could chill unpopular speech at universities throughout the country.

By a vote of 2-1 in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, the court ruled against professor Stephen Porter of NCSU, who had been removed from a degree program for complaints he made during a 2016 department meeting, in a spring 2018 email to colleagues, and in a personal blog post written that fall.

According to Porter, “the field of higher education study is abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’” He also called an academic conference in his field a “woke joke.”

Porter was accused of “bullying” his colleagues, and it was suggested he leave the degree program in question. The professor was soon forcibly removed. Porter also claimed his colleagues were making it impossible for him to recruit new doctoral advisees, jeopardizing his tenure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/appeals-court-rules-university-can-punish-professor-for-criticizing-diversity-hiring/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The academic left has no tolerance for faculty members who aren’t all in favor of the DEI agenda. It will look for any pretext to punish those who dare to disagree.

That was the case at North Carolina State where Professor David Porter complained about a departmental hire that he thought was ill-advised, done just to increase “diversity.” That bit of honesty caused the university to punish him. Porter sued, but the Fourth Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, held that the university was in the right.

Hans Bader examines the case in this Liberty Unyielding post. 

A slice:

Yet the Fourth Circuit ruled that the professor’s email about a diversity-oriented faculty search, which complained that a colleague ‘cut corners [in] vetting’ a black finalist ‘out of a desire to hire a Black scholar whose work focused on racial  issues,’ was not on a matter of public concern — and thus not protected by the First Amendment, because it (a) ‘was an unprofessional attack on one of [his] colleagues,’ and (b) was ‘sent only to other faculty members.’ This “unprofessionalism” claim is diametrically at odds with the Supreme Court’s Rankin decision saying that ‘the inappropriate…character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/majority-of-black-people-support-supreme-court-ban-on-affirmative-action/

While the bulk of the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court decision banning colleges from basing college admissions on race consists of the expected leftist hysteria and propaganda, a small number of inside baseball stories largely aimed at talking Dems down from the high ladder, tell the truth.

You would never know it from most of the media’s coverage but the vast majority of Americans oppose using race to decide who gets into college.

84% of white adults oppose colleges considering race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept

81% of Hispanics oppose it

76% of Asians oppose it

So do 71% of blacks

Asians are not even the top non-white group to oppose racial discrimination in college admissions, Hispanics are.

Black people, on whose behalf the whole affirmative action college debate has been waged, oppose it 71% to 28% and they’re the group most favorably inclined to it.

Awkward. Obviously.

Strikingly, black people don’t much like affirmative action and a majority backed the Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, more of them actually approved of the decision (more than 4 in 10) than disapproved (fewer than 4 in 10). And more Black Americans “strongly” approved (31 percent) than disapproved (26 percent).