RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-persistent-presence-of-absence/

The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

Additionally, schools identified by their states as chronically low-performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.

In February 2025, FutureEd disclosed that data from 22 states and the District of Columbia for the 2023-24 school year show significant differences across grade levels, with absenteeism particularly severe in high school.

“In most states, 12th graders have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, often far exceeding state averages. In Mississippi, for example, the overall absenteeism rate was 24%, but among seniors, it soared to 41%. Several other states have senior absenteeism rates above 40%, with rates in the District of Columbia and Oregon exceeding 50%.”

FutureEd also reports that kindergartners have disproportionately high rates of chronic absenteeism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/cornell-university-hiring-race-first-program

At Cornell University, faculty search committees adopted a series of checkpoints to ensure that job candidates were sufficiently “diverse.” Internal documents I’ve reviewed raise questions about whether the university unlawfully used racial preferences in hiring—and offer a revealing look at the tactics of Cornell’s social-justice advocates.

In 2021, Cornell received $16 million from the National Institutes of Health to help start its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, aimed at increasing the faculty’s “compositional diversity” by hiring ten new professors. According to the program’s grant proposal and progress reports, its leadership team screened applicants at four stages—the initial pool, longlist, shortlist, and finalist slate—to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible.” These checkpoints aligned with the program’s stated objective: “Cornell University aims to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences through establishing an NIH FIRST Program at Cornell University.” The university pledged to hire the ten new professors specifically from “groups underrepresented in their fields.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. Had Cornell restricted these faculty positions to certain racial groups, it would have plainly violated the law. The Cornell FIRST program was more subtle, prioritizing diversity throughout the search process rather than at the final hiring stage.

Still, the program’s carefully structured, four-stage process—explicitly designed to shape the racial composition of the candidate pool—raises legal concerns. “Each search will be governed by a clear process and 4 checkpoints,” the FIRST proposal notes, “to ensure that the search has as diverse a pool as possible.” The process is described step by step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBSxdJttGkM

America’s Ivy League universities have long been hotbeds of censorship and intolerance. Unpopular views are deplatformed, unorthodox professors are cancelled and research prioritises PC fads over facts. Donald Trump has vowed to force universities to clean up their act – but is he helping on hurting? Here, Yascha Mounk – editor of Persuasion and author of The Identity Trap – argues that Trump’s campus diktats are only stoking a woke backlash. Free speech and reason are just as imperilled as ever, he says. The university could now be in its death throes. Watch, share and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/25/the-persistent-presence-of-absence/

The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years.

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

Additionally, schools identified by their states as chronically low-performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.

In February 2025, FutureEd disclosed that data from 22 states and the District of Columbia for the 2023-24 school year show significant differences across grade levels, with absenteeism particularly severe in high school.

“In most states, 12th graders have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, often far exceeding state averages. In Mississippi, for example, the overall absenteeism rate was 24%, but among seniors, it soared to 41%. Several other states have senior absenteeism rates above 40%, with rates in the District of Columbia and Oregon exceeding 50%.”

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28625/the-sesame-street-seduction

No stranger has ever seduced a child with spinach. Predators understand that seducing a child requires offering something the child wants or providing something that engages the child. So it is with educational seduction.

Preschool educational television program Sesame Street, originally created to help young children from low-income families prepare for school and stimulate their desire to learn, first aired in November 1969. The show was spectacularly successful with children from all socio-economic backgrounds across America, who watched their beloved Muppet characters, and learned letters, numbers, geometric forms, classification, ordering, problem-solving, and social interactions. Sesame Street revolutionized children’s programming and proved that children could learn through visual media. Edutainment, a new genre in television programming was born.

After decades of success teaching foundational skills in reading and mathematics, and helping children learn through music, iconic characters, and repetition, Sesame Street at 55 years old is no longer recognizable––Sesame Street has gone woke. The astonishing educational success of Sesame Street made it a prime-time target for those who understood how easily the programming could be repurposed and used for anti-American, anti-family woke indoctrination. Education is a dual-use industry, and the fall of Sesame Street represents the capture of the American education industry at the pre-school level. Sesame Street is now a favored edutainment weapon of the globalist War on America that targets our nation’s youngest children.

Globalist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) articulated the power of educational indoctrination. “Chapter 15, Obama’s Grand Plan: Fundamental Transformation” from my 2022 release The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, further explains how educational indoctrination is the long-range tactical strategy for globalism’s strategic goal to rule the world:

The value of educational propaganda in the globalist campaign is described in chilling detail by English aristocrat Lord Bertrand Russell in his 1953 classic, The Impact of Science on Society.81 Educational indoctrination is the primary instrument for eliminating objective reality, dismissing the American family, subverting American culture, and destroying America from within. Russell unapologetically explained the process that drives a society to madness:

It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

Education should aim at destroying free will so that pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Influences of the home are obstructive; not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten; in order to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. . . . It is for a future scientist to make these maxims precise and to discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. (pp. 27–28, Routledge Classics, 2016 edition)