RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/educational-freedom-update/

As I wrote just two months ago, 2023 has seen Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and Florida establish universal school choice programs, giving all parents in those states control over the spending of their state’s education monies. According to the EdChoice dashboard, as of April 23, there were 12 states with education savings accounts (ESAs), 26 voucher programs in 15 states, and 25 tax-credit scholarship programs in 21 states.

But now, that is old news.

On April 26, Indiana expanded its voucher program so nearly all students will be eligible. The state raised the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any family under the income limit can apply. “Tens of thousands of additional students could qualify, and a legislative analysis projects that some 95,000 students might use the program in 2025, up from about 53,000 in 2023.”

The Indiana program is almost universal. Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education told the Indiana Capital Chronicle, “Early estimates suggest only 3.5% of families with school-age children in Indiana would not be eligible for the program under the new income limit.”

On May 25, Oklahoma enacted a universal choice law. Gov. Kevin Stitt asserts, “School choice shouldn’t be just for the rich or those who can afford it. Now it’s available for every single family in the state of Oklahoma.” At least $5,000 will go to parents who want to send their child to a private school or home school.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/16/lesson-learned-study-shows-charters-outperform-traditional-public-schools/

If traditional public schools want to succeed, they should follow charter schools’ lead.

People debating school choice have long had a difficult time finding a comprehensive study to really show the difference between charter schools — publicly funded schools that are run independent of a district or union — and traditional public schools. In most instances, the variables are too numerous for anything to be conclusive. Charter schools seemed to be better, but only certain charters in certain states with certain kids during certain years.

Finally, a new study has come out that indicates charters are indeed generally better than traditional public schools. Tabulating the academic progress of 1.8 million charter school students, researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes determined that these students were the equivalent of 16 instructional days ahead on English and six instructional days ahead in math. To make sure they weren’t comparing apples to oranges, these students “were each paired with a ‘virtual twin’ (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.”

Naturally, the gains varied from state to state and school to school. In states such as New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Rhode Island, charter school students outpaced traditional public school students by more than a month of instruction in reading and math. Additionally, charter schools that operate under a charter management organization (CMO), like the Knowledge Is Power Program or Founders Classical Academy, did better than their non-CMO counterparts, particularly in math.

And before skeptics give the “But Covid!” excuse, it’s worth noting that these results follow a pattern of steady progression over a decade: “The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math.” Unlike most traditional public school systems, charter schools are relatively young and have accordingly experienced growing pains; Covid was incidental to this. Even among charter schools that were part of the same CMO, older campuses outperformed newer ones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stanford-credo-charter-schools-study-student-performance-traditional-schools-education-math-reading-1d416fe5?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

School choice is gaining momentum nationwide, and charter schools are a large part of the movement. A new study shows that these independently run public schools are blowing away their traditional school competition in student performance.

Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo) report is the third in a series (2009, 2013, 2023) tracking charter-school outcomes over 15 years. The study is one of the largest ever conducted, covering over two million charter students in 29 states, New York City and Washington, D.C., and a control group in traditional public schools.

Credo’s judgment is unequivocal: Most charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” In reading and math, “charter schools provide their students with stronger learning when compared to the traditional public schools.” The nationwide gains for charter students were six days in math and 16 days in reading.

The comparisons in some states are more remarkable. In New York, charter students were 75 days ahead in reading and 73 days in math compared with traditional public-school peers. In Illinois they were 40 days ahead in reading and 48 in math. In Washington state, 26 days ahead in reading and 39 in math. Those differences can add up to an extra year of learning across an entire elementary education.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-other-crt

Public education authorities and teachers’ unions aren’t all wrong when they argue that critical race theory, referring to graduate-level legal theory, is not “taught” in K–12 schools. But with that calculated half-truth, they obscure something more troubling. Teachers in many states are being trained to suffuse critical theory throughout the entirety of the traditional curriculum, pursuing what academics call “the other CRT”: culturally responsive teaching. In fact, a majority of state education departments have adopted some form of the pedagogy.

This other CRT hasn’t faced much pushback—until now. Families, teachers, and administrators in three western Pennsylvania school districts are suing the state Department of Education over its “culturally-relevant and sustaining education” (CR-SE) guidelines, arguing not only that it illegally skirted public scrutiny but also that the competencies listed in the guidelines violate state and federal civil rights guarantees.

According to their complaint, the guidelines dictate what teachers must believe and how they must behave. For instance, one competency requires teachers to acknowledge “that biases exist in the educational system” and to become internal activists who “disrupt harmful institutional practices.” Another requires that teachers “believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real” and then commit to ridding their classrooms of them, notwithstanding the dubious research behind the concept. And yet another tells teachers to be aware of their “own conscious/unconscious biases,” implying that all must accept their guilt.

“How do you measure whether someone believes or doesn’t believe?,” said Thomas Breth, special counsel for the Thomas More Society and attorney for the plaintiffs. “Must they sign an oath and have it notarized? And how does one objectively determine a microaggression? For school districts, if they don’t comply and make students comply, they could lose their basic education subsidies. We’re dealing with very serious issues and very serious consequences.”

Donna-Marie Cole-Malott, co-director of the Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium (PEDC), which helped draft the guidelines, contends that the plaintiffs are “misunderstanding what they are reading.” The guidelines offer resources to educators, she says, to help them “create an environment of respect, to create more welcoming and confirming spaces.” And proponents claim the pedagogy will bring “equity” to public education by training teachers to use the “cultural nuances” of each student’s background to make curriculum more understandable.

Cole-Malott also said, echoing claims by the State Board of Education, that culturally responsive teaching will help improve the state’s educator shortfall. She pointed to research by the left-leaning non-profit Research for Action showing that there are 1,200 fewer black teachers in Philadelphia than two decades ago and blaming the problem on “the cumulative impact of racism—systemic and interpersonal, as well as racial microaggressions.”

But it’s not readily apparent that demanding that students question “economic, political, and social power structures,” in the words of one competency, will aid in teacher recruitment. Nor is it clear that “culture” issues explain an across-the-board, 66 percent decline in newly issued Pennsylvania teaching certificates over the past 11 years.

A deep dive into the intellectual foundations of culturally relevant pedagogy show that the Pennsylvania plaintiffs are right to be concerned about the guidelines. The term “culturally relevant pedagogy” was coined by pedagogical theorist and University of Wisconsin–Madison emerita professor Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995, when she published two influential articles: “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” and “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.” The latter aimed to adopt critical race theory from the legal sphere to education. The article is an unrelenting broadside against capitalism, objectivity, and merit, which Ladson-Billings argues underpin American public education’s real goal of reinforcing “whiteness as property.” Even the civil rights reforms of the 1960s and the pluralistic multiculturalism employed in today’s schools are “mired in liberal ideology that offers no radical change in the current order.” Her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy emerged from this radical basis. In “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” she proposed that “particular kinds” of teachers must be recruited into the field—ones who “meet the cultural critique criteria” and must therefore “be engaged in a critical pedagogy.”

It took decades, but state departments of education eventually took up Ladson-Billings’s mission. In New York, for example, the Board of Regents directed the state education department to convene a panel of experts in 2018 to draft a Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework. The department credits David Kirkland of New York University’s Metro Center, a critical theorist, for drafting the “springboard” document, and several like-minded radicals from academia were members of the expert committee that contributed to the final report. Unsurprisingly, the Metro Center’s professional development training for New York teachers says that its culturally responsive education series is “based on Critical Race Theory.” And far from merely making essential curriculum understandable to students of various cultural backgrounds, districts like Buffalo Public Schools are using the pedagogy to create “social justice warrior” teachers who “liberate and emancipate” students “from predominantly eurocentric learning structures,” according to a webinar by Fatima Morrell, the district’s chief of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives.

New York’s framework is tame compared with Pennsylvania’s guidelines, which include speech and belief requirements: “The guidance and competencies created by the Wolf Administration go well beyond the intent of what the State Board of Education approved,” said Pennsylvania state senator Scott Martin, who chaired the chamber’s education committee until this year. “There was no communication from the administration about how these policies would be distorted and implemented, and there was never even a hint that this process would be misused to implement radical teaching strategies in our schools.”

Pennsylvania took the first step to adopt the pedagogy in 2020, when the State Board of Education proposed altering the regulation governing teacher certification and training to include the phrase “Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education” (CR-SE). The state’s bipartisan regulatory review board gave its support, and the General Assembly’s House and Senate education committees, both Republican-controlled at the time, received the final regulation in January 2022 and made no protest at the time. However, the regulation those committees received included none of the details that would subsequently be featured in the controversial guidelines, except for a PowerPoint Slide with a relatively innocuous and brief list of competencies.

Like New York, the Pennsylvania Department of Education had tasked a group of outside academics with drafting the more expansive and idealistic competencies. That group was led by Cole-Malott’s PEDC, which also credits the U.S. Department of Education’s regional Comprehensive Center as a co-developer. This group completed its draft in April 2021, nine months prior to the legislature’s receiving the regulatory documents that were largely free of any potentially controversial details.

It wasn’t until the guidelines were issued to local districts in November, during the waning days of Wolf’s administration, that they became public knowledge, sparking the lawsuit. “This is the government saying, you will believe this, you will state that you believe this or there will be consequences,” said Breth. “I’m against that whether its conservative, liberal, progressive, non-progressive.”

Intermingled with the sly radicalism in Pennsylvania’s guidelines, however, is a sense of desperation about improving the state’s failing public schools. Students in Philadelphia, for example, consistently trail their national peers in reading and math despite the district’s spending more than $7,000 per-student above the national average. But training teachers to see their students and peers as unwitting micro-aggressors, their schools as hotbeds of bias, and the broader society as made up of interwoven systems of oppression won’t help anyone.

Finding ways to make academics more approachable to all students is a worthy goal. So is recruiting teachers of every race. Pennsylvania’s culturally relevant guidelines, unfortunately, stray far from that path.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-howard-zinn-industry/

His parents were peasants from Russia and the Ukraine. Had they stayed in that part of the world, any children they had would’ve grown up under Stalin – and, if they’d dared to say anything critical of Uncle Joe in public, they wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. In fact, both mom and dad emigrated to America, where their son, like so many other offspring of destitute immigrants, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. He became rich and famous, in fact. And how did he become rich and famous? By celebrating Communism and savaging America.

That Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a card-carrying Communist, a daily fixture at Party meetings in New York, an inveterate Soviet apologist, a member of a range of Kremlin front groups, a cheerleader for Mao’s “people’s government,” a supporter of Castro and Ho Chi Minh, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and an associate of such groups as ACORN, the Democratic Socialists of America, and International ANSWER, is routinely dropped down the memory hole by the countless teachers and professors who enthusiastically use his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States as a classroom text. Those instructors don’t tell their students that they’re being taught to think like Marxists; rather, they tell them that they’re finally learning the real truth about America, not patriotic propaganda.

For example, Zinn maintains that America was founded as – and has always been – a totalitarian state. Yes, Americans today are richer and freer than pretty much everybody else who’s ever lived on this planet; but Zinn’s readers are presented with a picture of an America whose economic inequality and political oppression are virtually without parallel. American heroism? American accomplishment? American ingenuity? Your kids won’t learn about these things from Zinn’s jeremiad. In his hands, even the most admirable chapters of American history become evidence of the depths of American perfidy.

Today, Zinn’s diatribe is used at schools and colleges all over America, at virtually every level, and in a wide range of disciplines.

The feminist golf course consists of 11 holes, each of which focuses on a “reproductive justice” topic such as “foster care, incarceration, abortion, contraception, sex education [and] crisis pregnancy centers.”

The first-ever “feminist” mini-golf course debuted recently at Middlebury College’s Kenyon Arena, courtesy of professors and students from a class called “Feminist Building.”

Middlebury College is famous—or infamous– for its unparalleled wokeness. For example, the school’s counseling director purports to believe that all psychological suffering is due to “whiteness, heteronormativity, [and] patriarchal systems.” Alrighty then. Its administrators have promised students that they would do everything in their power to prevent conservative speakers from coming to campus. (Middlebury students rioted when Charles Murray attempted to give a talk there.)

According to the Addison County Independent, the feminist golf course consists of 11 holes, each of which focuses on a “reproductive justice” topic such as “foster care, incarceration, abortion, contraception, sex education [and] crisis pregnancy centers.” Fun for the whole family! Course design director Rayn Bumstead stated, “The places where reproductive injustices occur are all around us, which means that possibilities for resistance are also all around us.” (Especially on hole number 3!)

Valley News dutifully reported: “[A]s players traversed the hand-built greens, putting balls through landscapes built to replicate sites where reproductive issues play out — a hospital, a kitchen, a courthouse, a classroom, a bar — they were confronted with manifestations of feminist ideas that were grounded in physicality.” A kitchen?

Yes. At the hole dubbed “Care Work,” participants must hold a baby doll “while putting their golf ball through a makeshift kitchen.” Because?

But there are other notable holes, of course. To wit, hole 6 offers players two entrances — one to an abortion clinic and the other to a crisis pregnancy center. The latter has “an infinitely more difficult putting trajectory” because it “articulate[s] the impact of crisis pregnancy centers, which aim to discourage people from getting abortions.” Which, of course, is bad.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/d-a-boudin-goes-to-uc-berkeley/

“Rather than seek another elected office in 2024, I’m choosing a different path for now — one that is still consistent with my lifelong commitment to fixing the criminal legal system, ending mass incarceration and innovating data-driven solutions to public safety challenges.”

That was former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, excited about his new post.

“This week, I was named the founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center. The center will serve as a national research and advocacy hub focused on critical law and policy changes to advance justice in the criminal legal system. We will participate in impact litigation and help to educate the next generation of frontline advocates, policymakers and thought leaders emerging from the UC Berkeley School of Law.”

The new executive director explains why he’s qualified for the job.

“Both of my biological parents were arrested when I was a baby and spent a combined 62 years in prison. A lifetime of visiting them behind bars, together with the years I spent as a public defender and then an elected prosecutor, taught me how catastrophically California and the nation’s current approach to justice are failing.”

His biological parents were Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground terrorists and violent criminals. They were arrested for their involvement in a 1981 armored car robbery in New York State in which the terrorists killed security guard Peter Paige and two police officers, including the African American Waverly Brown.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/culture-war-offensive/

Back in the mid and late 1960s, college students rebelled against authority and American traditions. Social mores, government policies, corporate America, schools, and the media were targeted mostly by urban youth eager for radical change. But now, almost 60 years later, we have done a 180. The government, big business, schools, the media, etc., aka “the establishment,” are now the radicals demanding change.

Even the military has not been spared the ravages of the woke insurgence. The armed forces now proudly support “diversity and inclusion.” The military, whose traditional raison d’être has been defending the country by killing people and blowing up things, now concerns itself with such matters as “reviewing hairstyle and grooming policies for racial bias.”

Big business is no better. Bud Light showed its woke bona fides when it partnered with “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to sell its beer. It didn’t work quite as planned, however, and the company lost billions of dollars. The media, of course, blamed right-wingers for objecting to the marketing campaign.

A while back, retail giant Target began to promote “Pride Month,” but now has upped their game by partnering with a British transexual satanist to push his agenda in their stores. One of the items for sale from Abprallen is a messenger bag that reads “Too Queer for Here.” Additionally, one of the label’s sweatshirts states, “Cure transphobia, not trans people.”

Education is clearly a major target in the culture wars. Most recently, the federal Department of Education concluded an investigation into a Georgia school district, arguing that the removal of several books containing pornographic material “created a hostile environment” for LGBTQ and nonwhite authors and readers. In fact, the books contain sexual depictions, including boys performing oral sex on each other. In a video, Joe Biden called out “MAGA extremists” for banning certain books from the classroom, even though they contained pornographic material.

Law schools are no less woke. Georgetown University Law School is demanding that students consider whether the law should any longer be “considered and enforced neutrally.” A professor at Boston College of Law suggests that it’s time to consider scrapping the Constitution.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-officer-and-a-gentlemanand-a-high-school-student-philadelphia-jrotc-office-student-military-army-bd7ec0ef?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Kaheem Bailey-Taylor was leaving a party last August at a cousin’s house in Northern Philadelphia when he heard gunshots. “The suspect started shooting out the door towards us,” he says. Police soon arrived and cleared the house. Mr. Bailey-Taylor followed officers in to assess the situation. Minutes later, he was sitting in the back of a police car applying pressure to a partygoer’s gunshot wounds.

Mr. Bailey-Taylor isn’t a paramedic or a cop; he’s a 17-year-old high-school junior. He is cadet colonel at the Philadelphia Military Academy, where all students are enrolled in the U.S. Army’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. On my visit to the academy, Mr. Bailey-Taylor helps show me around. As we sit in the back of a 10th-grade class on first aid, he leans over and tells me that he used these skills, along with his lifeguard training, the night he helped save the partygoer, one of his classmates.

The class starts like any other, with the buzz of chatty students. It then cuts to silence in unison as a student leader takes his position at the front. Then students recite the cadet creed in one voice: “I will always conduct myself to bring credit to my family, country, school and the Corps of Cadets. I am loyal and patriotic. . . . I will seek the mantle of leadership and stand prepared to uphold the Constitution and the American way of life. May God grant me the strength to always live by this creed.”

Kaheem Bailey-Taylor Photo: Philadelphia Military Academy

Patriotism, duty and accountability may not be in vogue in most public schools, but here—and in the nearly 3,500 JROTC programs across all military branches nationwide—the values of the cadet creed are a proven formula for success. A 2017 RAND study found that JROTC cadets have better-than-average grades and attendance records and are less likely to drop out than other high-school students. The Philadelphia Military Academy’s graduation rate is 92%; the district average is 75%.