Cruz Launches Investigation into Yale Law School’s Treatment of Christian Students, Organizations

On Tuesday, Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced that he is looking into potential “unconstitutional animus” and discrimination by Yale Law School against Christian students and organizations.

Cruz has sent two letters to Yale regarding his concern that the school is targeting traditional Christian values and sexual ethics, the senator’s press release explains:

“U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution, on Monday sent a letter to Yale Law School requesting that the school turn over documents related to its discriminatory policy against students serving in organizations professing traditional Christian views or adhering to traditional sexual ethics.

“The letter follows Sen. Cruz's letter in April, where he notified Yale Law School's Dean Heather Gerken of his intent to investigate Yale's policy, which he described as brought about by "unconstitutional animus and a specific discriminatory intent both to blacklist Christian organizations and to punish Yale students whose values or religious faith lead them to work there."

Monday’s letter requests documents pertaining to Yale’s “public interest funding” decisions, policies and practices.

In particular, Cruz asks for information on how much public interest funding has been provided to abortion activist and other liberal groups, such as Planned Parenthood, compared to conservative organizations like The Heritage Foundation and The Beckett Fund:

“Any and all documents stating the amount of funding that the following entities or organizations have received, or the amount of funding that students have received for their employment with or employment arranged through the following entities or organizations, over any time period, related to any or all of Yale Law School’s public interest funding programs:

a) Planned Parenthood

b) NARAL

c) The Center for Reproductive Rights

d) The National Right to Life Committee

e) Susan B. Anthony List

f) Americans United for Life

g) Human Rights Campaign

h) Amnesty International

i) Lambda Legal

j) GLAAD

k) ACLU

l) The Heritage Foundation

m) Beckett Fund

n) First Liberty

0) Alliance Defending Freedom, including the Blackstone Legal Fellowship program

p) The Cato Institute

q) Southern Poverty Law Center

r) The Organization of Islamic Cooperation

s) Any foreign government

The letter also asks Yale to disclose the amount of funding, of any kind, the school receives from the federal government.

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New Adversity Scoring Of S.A.T. Exam is unhelpful

A common defense of affirmative action in college admissions is that it simply adjusts for difficult childhood circumstances. Under this theory, students from underrepresented groups score below their true ability level on the SAT due to poverty or discrimination or a lack of fancy test prep, but they will thrive once brought to an enriching university environment.

Many parents feel this is a backdoor way of using race as a factor over merit. National Review reports,

If true, affirmative action would not involve any lowering of admission standards, but rather a fairer appraisal of each applicant’s abilities.

It’s not true. Researchers have known for decades that SAT scores predict college performance for poor and minority students about as well as they do for everyone else. To the extent there is a difference, the SAT actually over-predicts their performance. Therefore, if the goal is to find the students who will be most academically successful, colleges should not bump up applicants’ SAT scores on the basis of poverty or race.

That’s one reason why the College Board’s new “adversity score” is so troubling. By providing schools with a secret quantification of each applicant’s childhood environment, the College Board furthers the myth that the SAT is predictively biased along socioeconomic lines. According to the New York Times:

Admissions officers have also tried for years to find ways to gauge the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores. The new adversity score is meant to be one such gauge.
If so, we already know it doesn’t work. The College Board’s own data (see page 42) show that test scores and high school grades predict college performance about equally across all adversity levels. An exception is for students at the highest levels of adversity where, once again, their college GPA is slightly below expectations, not above.

In reality, there is no merit-based case for affirmative action in college admissions. Proponents should acknowledge that their chief interest is not merit, but social justice. “Diversity is so important to our schools and to broader society that lowering standards is a worthy price to pay,” they should declare. That would be a reminder that affirmative action — like all hotly debated issues — involves inherent trade-offs, and it’s up to the public to decide how to weigh them.

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Australia: Mother is furious after teacher THROWS OUT her child's sweet lunchbox treat because it's 'not fair' to other students

An outraged mum has sparked conversation about school lunchbox rules after her child's sweet treat was thrown out by the teacher.

Posting in an Australian budgeting group on Facebook, the Queensland-based woman asked members whether they thought it was appropriate to do this. 

'Do you think it's okay for a teacher to throw away an item of your child's lunch that you packed just because it's a "sweet" and the teacher believes it's not fair as not every other child has a sweet?' She wrote.

'When I say sweet I mean anything like a chocolate biscuit, chocolate coated muesli bar, cake, chocolate mousse etc. Regardless of whether it's fat, sugar reduced or not.'

Group members were quick to share in her anger with hundreds of commenters saying they thought the teacher was in the wrong.

Some said they should have just sent the treat home instead of throwing it in the bin.

'No. You paid for that. If the teacher is not happy, then by all means she can hold onto it and let you know why she took it,' one group member said.

'It’s never okay to throw it out! What a horrible experience for a child; we’ve gone insane when it comes to food but they cross a line when they shame a child like that,' said another.

Members agreed that although they support teaching nutrition, they think what was described in the post is 'shaming and hurtful'.

'This is not how we teach nutrition; I hate the way lunchboxes are policed now. Demonising food groups; embarrassing children,' a woman said.

Other people told the original poster to make a complaint to the school and a woman who used to work in a school office said teachers can advise but they cannot throw out food.

She added that it isn't up to teachers to police children's lunchboxes and suggested the mother put a note in the child's lunchbox to that teacher advising the same.

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