RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/24/the-fightback-against-wokeness-has-begun/

One of the most significant events of 2021 was the revolt of frustrated and angry parents in Virginia, against the teaching of so-called critical race theory in local schools.

The revolt precipitated the shock defeat of a one-time Virginia governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, at the hands of Republican Glenn Youngkin in November’s gubernatorial elections. This was not just a serious setback for the Biden presidency, in a state the Democrats won easily in 2020; it also demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the current phase of the culture wars, that the social-engineering efforts of America’s cultural elites can be contained – and perhaps even defeated.

The parents’ revolt certainly laid bare the arrogance of the cultural elites. This was personified by McAuliffe himself, who responded to parents’ concerns about their children’s education with undisguised contempt. ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’, he declared during a televised debate.

McAuliffe wasn’t alone in this. As the parents’ revolt spread throughout the United States, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to the president demanding that parents’ protests at school-board meetings be treated as ‘domestic terrorism’. US attorney general Merrick Garland seemingly agreed with the NSBA, and called on the FBI to act against those parents threatening ‘school administrators, board members, teachers and staff’.

Others attempted to dismiss this parents-led rejection of woke pedagogy as a Republican stunt. Former US president Barack Obama told Virginia voters to ignore what he called ‘trumped-up culture wars’, and dismissed parental concerns as ‘fake outrage’.

These attempts to denigrate or dismiss the protests ignore their main driver – parents’ concern about the academic and moral education of their children. Many adults may silently put up with manifestations of woke culture in everyday life, but they will react when they realise their child is being encouraged to adopt values antithetical to their own.

This is not confined to the US. Parents in Great Britain and other parts of the Western world are also confronted by similar attempts to inculcate a woke worldview in their children.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/no_critical_race_theory_in_schools_heres_the_abundant_evidence_saying_otherwise_808528.html

Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

Randi Weingarten, teachers union leader: Her denial about critical race theory in schools is at odds with the evidence.

Her claim echoed other education experts, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who tweeted: “We could explain until our last breath that CRT is not taught in K-12, but the actual definition of CRT doesn’t matter anymore in these debates.”

These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.

Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/its-time-abolish-teachers-unions-larry-sand/

The above caveat about government unions – usually known by the kinder and gentler “public employee unions” – was not issued by the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump. The statement was made by none other than progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Additionally, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for 24 years, once stated, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Both men understood that the very nature of government makes it wrong for its leaders to enter into negotiations with any union. When government unions negotiate, they often sit across the table from people they helped put in office with generous campaign contributions. And when these unions go on strike, they walk out on the taxpayer.

In the private sector, if a business is forced to pay its workers more money, those costs are passed on to the consumer. If the cost of a product is raised too high, the purchaser can choose to go elsewhere. Most unions get this and realize they can’t bargain for excessive salaries and perks. But some unions push things too far and ultimately price their members out of a job. An example of the latter is the United Auto Workers, whose exorbitant demands drove car buyers to Japanese models and automakers to produce cars elsewhere, thus sending Detroit down the road to ruin.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/harvard-drops-standardized-test-mandate-for-several-more-years

Harvard College is dropping its requirement for SAT or ACT scores for future applicants as young as those currently in 8th grade.

“Students who do not submit standardized test scores will not be disadvantaged in their application process,” William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Ivy League school, said Thursday in an emailed statement. 

The pandemic has altered the way colleges evaluate applicants. Several others, including Columbia University, Amherst College and Cornell University, previously announced the tests would be optional for current high school sophomores, and the University of California system scrapped them entirely. 

The current admissions cycle is the second for which students have been able to apply to Harvard without needing standardized tests. The scores are one factor among many considered, Harvard said in the statement. The school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also announced that it had accepted 7.9% of the 9,406 students who applied under its non-binding early action program.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/against-world-history/

It’s good to study other cultures; that’s not what progressive educators want.

With culturally leftist school­ing only lately ranked as a top-tier political issue, conservatives have yet to take full measure of the woke education threat. Beyond better-known dangers such as critical race theory, the 1619 Project, action civics, and lessons in gender fluidity lies the “world-history movement” — educators bent on forming a generation of “global citizens” who reject both American patriotism and any sense of indebtedness to our Western heritage of liberty.

For decades, the world-history movement has quietly advanced in the slipstream of higher-profile changes in curriculum. The battle over National History Standards for the United States in the mid 1990s — a breakthrough mo­ment for the education Left — focused on the U.S.-history component of the proposal. Critics largely ignored the equally troubling, and thoroughly globalist, National Standards for World History. The 2014–15 battle over the College Board’s revisionist AP U.S. History and AP European History frameworks did much to highlight their globalist underpinnings. Yet widespread adoption of the still more radical AP World History course went largely unnoticed.

This fall, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem rejected draft state-history and civics standards that mandated political protests (“action civics”), short-shrifted high-school U.S. history, downplayed America’s British heritage, and left the role of religion in American history largely unacknowledged. Yet no one even noticed that the draft standards’ adoption of the College Board’s AP World History approach had ef­fectively eliminated the study of West­ern civilization from South Dakota’s schools.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/15/the-new-dark-ages/

If ignorance is bliss, the Western world should be ecstatic. Even as colleges churn out degrees and collect fees, and technology makes information instantly accessible, the basic level of literacy, as measured by such things as reading books and acquainting oneself with the past, is in a precipitous decline. Rather than building a vital world with our technological culture, we are repeating the memes of feudal times, driven by illiteracy, bias and a rejection of the West’s past.

Over half of American adults have a reading level below the equivalent of sixth-grade level (11- to 12-year-olds), and book reading outside of school or work among the young in particular has declined markedly. A survey conducted in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books ‘for fun’, down from 60 per cent in 2010. This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age 14 and found that only one in 10 ever did any reading in their spare time as teenagers. The Covid-related lockdowns, notes one recent UN study, raised the number of children experiencing reading difficulties from 460million to 584million.

Even before the pandemic, people’s cognitive skills were weakening. Many employers in the US report difficulty finding workers capable of having a serious conversation. Over 60 per cent of applicants are found to be lacking in basic social skills. Today’s teens’ experiences are increasingly limited to what they access on their phones and social media. Rather than opening minds, social media seem to be creating a generation with little ability to communicate in person.

Sites like Facebook and Instagram have been linked to reduced attention spans: research indicates that the average attention span has fallen 50 per cent since 2000, mainly due to social-media use. This loss of literacy comes at a time when much of our education and literary establishment has embraced censorship, while on the right there’s an increasingly Pavlovian embrace of book-banning. Even in defending the common culture, the right forgets the necessity of diverse opinions in a democracy.

Right now, the most influential advocates for banning classical literature from curricula, or removing books non-compliant on issues like gender, are not disgruntled conservatives. No, the assault on studying ‘great books’ and Western culture largely comes from progressive professors with PhDs, and the ever-expanding university bureaucracies and their recent graduates. The embrace of these cultural trends, as former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum suggests, has emerged as Democrats have moved far more to the left than Republicans have gone further to the right. This is sometimes enforced with mandatory indoctrination sessions and even requirements to sign the woke version of McCarthy-era ‘loyalty oaths’.

https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-michigan-medical-school-goes-woke

At the University of Michigan, critical race theory has invaded yet another discipline: medicine. In January 2021, Michigan Medicine’s Anti-Racism Oversight Committee Action Plan called for designing a new curriculum, one that would use an “intersectional framework” and incorporate “critical race theory.”

The story is a microcosm of a nationwide trend that has not spared medicine. In the summer of 2020, senior administrators at Michigan Medicine, like many of their colleagues around the country, called for large-scale change. On June 1, five deans and vice presidents published a letter decrying health disparities, declaring: “We must reject and prevent this manifest . . . injustice.” A few days later, the executive vice president for medical affairs expressed the same urgency in a letter titled “The Time is Now.”

Students pressured the administrators to follow through on their ambitious rhetoric. A coalition of students and student organizations published its own letter, demanding concrete action from the medical school. “Correcting centuries of historical injustices perpetrated against the Black community,” the letter reads, “requires a radical departure from what we are currently doing.” The letter listed over a dozen far-reaching demands. “Michigan Medicine must end traditional policing efforts on its grounds,” it asserted. “Michigan Medicine must support physicians in taking an active role in advocacy efforts”—that is, “a greater role in advocating for change in our communities and government.”

Most notably, the letter demanded a curriculum overhaul. “The redesign,” it dictated, “must use an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory.” It hyperlinked to a journal article on intersectionality in medicine, which surmises that “considering intersectionality could lead to more successful patient-clinician interactions.”

The school was happy to oblige. It created a Racial Justice Oversight Committee, which released its Action Plan in early 2021. The 24-page document lays out concrete steps based on the students’ demands, steps which were then “endorsed by Michigan Medicine Leadership.” Thus, Michigan Medicine promised to integrate racially divisive ideology into its curriculum. Closely following student demands, the plan calls for a redesign of Michigan Medicine’s undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. The redesign should adopt the new framework “in partnership with health justice education professionals.”

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/digital-technology-to-reverse-pandemic-learning-losses-by-henrietta-h-fore-and-david-malpass-2021-12

When schools around the world moved online due to COVID-19, children in developing countries suffered the most. Even though digital learning does not produce the same outcomes as in-person education, technology used effectively can close educational gaps and prevent learning loss.

WASHINGTON, DC – As the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, classrooms remain fully or partially closed for as many as 647 million schoolchildren around the world. Even where schools have reopened, many students continue to lag behind.

It is now abundantly and painfully clear that children have learned less during the pandemic. According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures could drive up “learning poverty” – the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read a basic text – to around 70% in low- and middle-income countries. This learning loss could cost an entire generation of schoolchildren $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. As the Omicron variant takes hold, more governments may be tempted to close schools. Without the online infrastructure in place to support learning, doing so would extend the educational losses and deny children the many other benefits of daily school attendance, like the possibility to connect with classmates and develop social skills for personal growth. Interactions with teachers and peers are essential to develop the abilities necessary to work collaboratively. Being part of a class promotes a sense of belonging and helps build self-esteem and empathy. Throughout the pandemic, marginalized children have struggled the most. When classrooms around the world reopened this fall, it became clear that these children had fallen even further behind their peers. Before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But school closures placed an estimated ten million more girls at risk of early marriage, which practically guarantees the end of their schooling. Unless this regression is reversed, learning poverty and the associated human capital loss will hold economies and societies back for decades. Children must be given a chance to recover the education they have lost. They need access to well-designed reading materials, digital learning opportunities, and transformed education systems that help prepare them for future challenges. Well-qualified teachers and effective use of technology are fundamental to this process. Many countries have deployed massive stimulus packages in response to the health crisis. But, as of June 2021, less than 3% of these funds was devoted to the education and training sector. And most of these resources were spent in advanced economies.

http://christopherrufo.com

Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”

DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.

The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”

As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students  to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”