RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/putting-parents-back-charge

Arizona governor Doug Ducey is brimming with optimism. The businessman-turned-politician has spent the past eight years campaigning for universal school choice—and he has finally achieved it. Today, the governor is hosting the signing ceremony for H.B. 2853, which will provide every family in Arizona with an “empowerment scholarship account” (ESA) and an annual $7,000 per child to take to any educational institution of their choice, including private schools, religious schools, and homeschool programs.

I first met the governor last year at a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where, in between firing rifle and pistol rounds at the shooting range, he spoke with me at length about the Founding Fathers, his own Jesuit education, the threat of critical race theory, and his vision for school reform. The governor had tried to pass universal school choice last summer but came up short by one vote in the legislature. This year, after rallying parents and negotiating with legislators, he has his redemption. Universal school choice has long been the Holy Grail for conservative education reformers. Governor Ducey has achieved it.

I spoke with the governor as he prepared to lead the signing ceremony for this historic victory. The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_battle_for_our_children_and_their_minds.html

In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding.  Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board’s woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who “sometimes wears a skirt.”

The sexual assault was later confirmed and the assailant arrested.  He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center.  But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn’t let Smith speak.  Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”  For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a “SWAT team.”

Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district.  The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board’s cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda.  Smith’s story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.

The global leftist agenda for the control of young minds runs deeper than patriotic Americans might suspect.  After a virtual takeover of the humanities departments of our universities, the leftists have been targeting schools by implementing gender-fluid bathrooms and woke curricula without consulting parents.  And then that last formidable frontier — the American family, which they hope to destroy by wresting away control of children from parents.  Should that happen, American values and American society as we know it will self-destruct.

ttps://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/eisgruber-emails-princeton-katz

In a stirring recent address to the students of the startup University of Austin, Bari Weiss described the ideology that has taken over America’s institutions of higher education: “Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with dis-invitation and de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion with exclusion. Excellence with equity.” To change this calamitous development requires nothing less than a revolution.

All successful revolutions start with local rebellions, and one has been taking place over the last year at Princeton University—the prestigious institution where I have taught mathematics and made my home for the last 35 years, but which is being destroyed from within by an administration committed to the ideology that Weiss accurately identified.

The saga has been well documented in these pages: In July 2020, tenured classics professor Joshua Katz published an article criticizing several illiberal demands made by a large number of Princeton faculty members to correct the university’s alleged “systemic racism,” including the creation of a “committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty …” For his criticism of these demands, and for referring to a by-then-defunct student organization, the Black Justice League (BJL), as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the students (including the many Black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands,” Katz was smeared as a racist by the university in its own freshman orientation program, then fired earlier this year on what is recognized by every sane observer as a pretext: a disputed accusation from a former student with whom Katz had a consensual sexual affair in 2006-07—for which he was already punished in 2018—that Katz had discouraged her from seeking mental health care.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

It would be good for students, good for parents, good for schools

The debates over critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology can feel like people on either side are talking past one another. Truth is, they often are.

There’s a lot more agreement than it seems. Parents and teachers tend to think that the Left has a point when it says schools should do a better job teaching about America’s complex racial history, and that kids should feel welcome in school regardless of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Meanwhile, most Americans share concerns about CRT dogma that demonizes hard work or personal responsibility as legacies of “white-supremacy culture” and don’t want teachers discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with eight-year-olds.

Indeed, it’s pretty clear that most Americans reside in both camps — think of it as the “inclusive but sensible” coalition. The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life has found that, among Republicans and Democrats alike, more than four in five say social-studies textbooks should discuss slave-owning by the Founders, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the maltreatment of Native Americans, and agree that students should read “works by a racially diverse set of authors.” 

At the same time, polling by the Economist and YouGov finds that more than half of Americans who are familiar with CRT say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of it and 55 percent think teaching CRT is “bad for America.” This spring, Public Opinion Strategies found that two-thirds of registered voters deem it “inappropriate for teachers or school personnel to discuss gender identity with children in kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

Given that kind of commonsense agreement, why are schools riven by bitter fights over whether educators should teach that America is a “white supremacist” nation or talk to first-graders about gender identity? Who is responsible for pushing this toxic tripe?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/dont-let-woke-math-ruin-your-childs-education

The Washington Examiner reported last weekend on the depressing fact that millions of dollars have been wasted attempting to shoehorn critical race theory and other ” woke ” concepts into math curricula, of all places. This means in school districts in which most students can neither read nor do math, race hucksters and charlatans are getting rich teaching them to hate one another because of the color of their skin .

This kind of educational malpractice needs to be purged with fire and the sword. It is the worst of all worlds to waste taxpayer funds on deforming young students’ minds. It’s a classic case of Why Johnny Can’t Read but applied to the extremely dumb and trendy educational theories afflicting schoolchildren today.

Wokeness — whether it comes under the label of “equitable math,” “social justice,” “critical race theory,” or “social and emotional learning” — is not about teaching that racism exists and played an important role in American history. Schools have done that successfully for decades. Rather, it is a hateful and toxic ideology that teaches students to hate and distrust each other because of the color of their skin and nothing more. It has no place in any school curriculum — but least of all in mathematics.

You cannot teach wokeness and math together because they are incompatible. It can never be anything more than a distraction from math to teach children that their country is an incurably racist place, that white people are inherent oppressors, and that there is a ritual intersectional hierarchy of victimhood that must be observed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/i_remember_when_they_called_it_segregation.html

Another day, another story about a college out of control.  Check this one about UC-San Diego:     

Families of white students have been prohibited from participating in numerous college welcome programs at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) during the Fall 2022 welcome week, according to a Triton Weeks of Welcome (TWOW) advertisement.

On Sept. 9-11, for example, UCSD is hosting a “Black, Latinx, and Native American Family Orientation.” Later in the week, between Sept. 12-17, the university will have a “Black Surf Week.” 

On July 26, Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, posted a tweet offering his perspective on “Black Surf Week.” 

According to Rufo, these actions are clear violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which states, “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods [and] services… of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race…” 

https://www.city-journal.org/gsa-clubs-smuggle-gender-ideology-into-k-12-education

Radical gender theory has made sudden inroads in America’s schools. Many parents have watched in confusion as their children repeat the movement’s slogans and adopt synthetic sexual identities such as “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “genderqueer.” The next question for many families is: Where does this surge in left-wing sexual ideology come from? One answer: from a network of professional activists, who have smuggled university-style gender theory into more than 4,000 schools under the cover of “gender and sexuality” clubs, or GSAs.

The main national organization behind this campaign, the GSA Network, is a professionally staffed nonprofit with a multimillion-dollar annual budget. GSA Network serves as an umbrella organization for more than 4,000 “gender and sexuality alliances” across 40 states. Once called the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, the group rebranded in 2016, reflecting a new focus on “the limits of a binary gender system.” The individual chapters, which operate in elementary, middle, and high schools, often use the language of “LGBTQ inclusion” and “anti-bullying” in their public relations, but behind the scenes, the central organization is driven by pure left-wing radicalism that extends far beyond sexuality.

According to the organization’s publicly accessible materials and administrative documents, the GSA Network’s ideology follows the basic framework of radical gender theory: white European men created an oppressive system based on capitalism, white supremacy, and “heteronormativity”—that is, the promotion of heterosexuality, the male-female binary, and bourgeois family norms. In order to fight back, racial and sexual minorities must unite under the banner of “intersectionality” and dismantle the interlocking “systems of oppression.”

https://quillette.com/2022/08/08/walkout-at-milton-academy/

One of us, Harvey Silverglate, recently got “cancelled,” in a sense, for publicly mentioning a notorious term, often used as a slur. In one of those great ironies that characterize our historical moment, the impugned utterance was contained in a lecture on the importance of free speech in academia.

The situation unfolded on April 27th at Milton Academy, a prestigious private high school in Massachusetts. A student group, the Public Issues Board, had sponsored a multi-day series of panels and lectures on subjects of the students’ choosing. Silverglate was invited to give a talk on free speech and academic freedom, a subject in which he specializes.

Approximately two-thirds of the way into the lecture, Silverglate held up before the audience two books. One was entitled The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, which Silverglate co-authored in 1998. The book focused largely on the struggles to protect free speech in higher education. The other book was authored by a Harvard Law School professor, Randall Kennedy (the co-author of this article). The title of that book is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, published in 2002 and recently updated.