I remember how it was -- JR
Saturday, January 28, 2023
College Board to Change Course After DeSantis Stands Up to 'African-American Studies' AP Class
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has once more found himself in the news as he's weathered standing up to woke ideologies and agendas. Last week, as Guy covered, the governor's office expressed concern that the pilot version of an AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course violated state law, with Guy providing subsequent information in defense of such concerns. On Tuesday, however, the governor's office released a statement indicating that the College Board has said it would revise the course.
A statement from the College Board is included in Lydia Nusbaum's report for Florida's Voice:
“Before a new AP course is made broadly available, it is piloted in a small number of high schools to gather feedback from high schools and colleges. The official course framework incorporates this feedback and defines what students will encounter on the AP Exam for college credit and placement,” the College Board said. “We are grateful for the contributions of experts, teachers, and students and look forward to sharing the framework broadly.”
The governor's office also rereleased a statement from Florida Department of Education (FDOE) Communications Director Alex Lanfranconi. "We are glad the College Board has recognized that the originally submitted course curriculum is problematic, and we are encouraged to see the College Board express a willingness to amend. AP courses are standardized nationwide, and as a result of Florida’s strong stance against identity politics and indoctrination, students across the country will consequentially have access to an historically accurate, unbiased course," Lanfranconi said.
Lanfranconi also referenced Gov. DeSantis' commitment to stop wokeness in Florida schools. "As Governor DeSantis said, African American History is American History, and we will not allow any organization to use an academic course as a gateway for indoctrination and a political agenda," his statement continued.
In December of 2021, the governor signed the Stop WOKE Act as a way ensure Critical Race Theory (CRT) is kept out of schools and the workplace. DeSantis and the legislation were granted a win earlier this year thanks to a decision from U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker.
Additionally, DeSantis has spoken out against woke indoctrination time and time again. During a Monday announcement on pay increases for Florida teachers, the governor defended the rejection of the APAAS.
"In the state of Florida, our education standards not only don't prevent, but they require teaching black history--all the important things that's part of our core curriculum," he reminded, pointing out that it "was a separate course on top of that for advanced placement credit."
DeSantis also went on to discuss what kind of "guidelines" and "standards" Florida has. "And the issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida. We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we're going to decline. If it's education, then we will do [it]. [W]hen I heard it didn't meet the standards, I figured, yeah, they may be something [concerning] here. It's way more than that. This is a course on black history—[and] what's one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now who would say that an important part of black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids," he explained. "And so, when you look and see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons--that's a political agenda. That's the wrong side of the line for Florida's standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes."
Lanfranconi's statement also made reference to specific issues with the curriculum. "We look forward to reviewing the College Board’s changes and expect the removal of content on Critical Race Theory, Black Queer Studies, Intersectionality, and other topics that violate our laws," he concluded.
As Guy included in his subsequent reporting, the governor's office had indicated in a letter from the FDOE to the College Board that "FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion."
Guy also was able to get a copy of the curriculum. Not only did it contain problematic content, but, as Nusbaum had also mentioned in her piece, the curriculum had been kept hidden from public view, despite being having already released as a pilot program in 60 schools.
In his initial coverage, Guy predicted that "the stupid, knee-jerk reply in some quarters" would be because of their claims that "Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans who run the state are racists." How right he was.
Chief among them, of course, was MSNBC's Joy Reid. During last Thursday's episode of "The ReidOut" she claimed, that DeSantis wanted a pro-slavery curriculum. Kevin Tober highlighted and clipped the segment for NewsBusters.
Given that the College Board has agreed to come back to the table, the responsible course of action would be for Reid to mention that during a show in the near future, preferably this very week. We're not holding our breaths though, that she would let facts get in the way of her narrative, given how many times she's tried to smear the governor as a supposed racist.
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Harvard’s New President Embodies Everything Wrong with Higher-Ed
In its last issue of 2022, The Crimson, Harvard University’s undergraduate newspaper, ran a column from one of its editors containing the following sentences:
“Like superheroes, Black women are supposed to be reliable and resilient. When buildings are burning and people need to save the day, we are often called on to put the fire out… We run into each crisis with the weight of the world on our shoulders.”
This was a column of celebration. Harvard had just announced that Claudine Gay, the current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, would be its next president. Gay is the superhero; Harvard is the burning building. When she officially takes over in June, Gay will be the first-ever black president of Harvard.
The Crimson column accidentally captures the scandal in this announcement. Think of everything wrong with higher education: the fetish for diversity at the expense of merit; the rapid expansion of anti-intellectual administrative bloat; the censorship of dissident voices; the popularity of a progressive politics that prefers performing victimhood over making substantive improvements in the lives of real people.
All these trends find their purest manifestation in Claudine Gay.
Consider her “diversity.” It’s the skin-deep “brochure diversity” decried by Justice Samuel Alito in oral argument for Harvard vs. Students for Fair Admissions, the pending Supreme Court case against Harvard.
Harvard stands accused of rigging applicant “personality scores” to artificially cap the number of Asian admits and of considering certain racial categories not merely as the simple “plus factor” approved by existing Court precedent, but as an enormous advantage comparable to hundreds of additional points on the SAT.
Chief Justice John Roberts openly wondered if Harvard’s existing admissions practices effectively lump all black applicants into a homogeneous category of “disadvantaged” and blindly provide them with plus points regardless of personal biography. The existing composition of Harvard’s undergraduate student body certainly seems to substantiate that suspicion.
Roughly 70 percent of black Harvard students come from affluent families. And in the Ivy League overall, fully 41 percent of black students are actually first- and second-generation African immigrants. Affirmative action, originally conceived as a systematic counterbalance to the effects of institutional racism on the descendants of American slaves, is now being used to aid the offspring of, say, a Nigerian orthopedic surgeon or a Dominican senior partner at McKinsey.
Or the daughter of a Haitian engineer, like Gay. Her father came to the United States for college, worked in the Army Corps of Engineers and raised her in upper middle class comfort. After graduating from Exeter, Gay went to Stanford, first as an undergrad then as faculty, and then took a tenured job in the Harvard political science department.
To hear Harvard tell it, Gay has rapidly ascended higher ed because she’s a research rockstar, “one of the Academy’s most creative and rigorous thinkers about vital aspects of democracy and political participation,” as a university press release puts it.
And yet, Gay’s official CV barely breaks three pages, boasts just a handful of poorly cited articles, and is devoid of even a single published book–a bare minimum requirement for a tenured position at most major universities. But, she is “diverse,” a black woman in an academic job market that puts a premium on that particular identity.
Gay’s true talent is not intellectual innovation; it’s administration. Her signature achievement as dean is a campus-wide “Inequality Initiative,” which appears to have done nothing more than host zoom calls and finance endless subcommittee “clusters” and add a couple new positions to the university’s already vast army of “equity, inclusion and belonging” administrators. This is exactly the kind of campaign against inequality easily embraced by an institution sitting on a $60 billion endowment and boasting a single-digit undergraduate admissions rate. It’s utterly unthreatening to the status quo.
Gay’s exact opposite is Roland Fryer. Abandoned at birth by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad, Fryer is the youngest tenured black economist in Harvard’s history. He eschews empty bureaucracy and woke incantations in favor of hard science, focusing his work on concrete ways to boost black opportunity.
Fryer pursues provocative research lines and reports the results even when they break neat progressive pieties. Most famously, Fryer found that there was no racial bias in police shootings in the Houston police department. Roughly four years ago, Fryer was the victim of a coordinated professional assassination. And as detailed in my team’s documentary investigation about his case, the chief architect of that assassination was none other than Claudine Gay.
It’s tough not to suspect that Gay is a cynical PR prophylactic. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears ready to strike down as unconstitutional the school’s existing racial preference regime. If it does, black representation among the undergraduate study body is expected to fall precipitously, from 15 percent today to possibly as low as three percent.
An empty diversity hire may be exactly what Harvard wants: a bureaucrat with the right skin tone to keep that $60 billion endowment steadily growing -- and to distract from all the ways the university fails to advance true equality and opportunity.
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Ted Cruz Files Key School Choice Bill That Would Be ‘Most Significant Reform’ Since GI Bill
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, commemorated National School Choice Week by filing two bills to advance school choice, one of which his staff said would be the most significant educational reform since the GI bill.
“We need to provide students with a variety of educational options to fit their needs,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in an email statement Tuesday. “I have often said that school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, and I believe no differently today than I did when I began serving in the Senate a decade ago.
“Each student learns differently and ought to be afforded the opportunity regardless of where they come from, how they learn, or what they plan to do, from pursuing a college degree to attending vocational school,” he added.
Cruz filed two bills, the Student Empowerment Act and the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act on Tuesday.
The Student Empowerment Act builds on Cruz’s Student Opportunity Amendment, an edited version of which passed as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. That amendment enabled families to spend up to $10,000 from 529 tax-advantaged savings plans for various non-public K-12 education expenses. Since 2017, 529 plans have grown from 13.3 million to more than 15.9 million in 2022, according to the National Association of State Treasurers.
“The Student Empowerment Act restores the original intent of Sen. Cruz’s Student Opportunity Amendment,” a Cruz spokesperson told The Daily Signal. The original amendment “allowed parents and guardians to use 529 accounts for almost all K-12 expenses—most notably homeschooling expenses and various types of special needs therapies. In an effort to strip the entire amendment from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Democrats challenged the amendment’s germaneness, and were able to get the Senate Parliamentarian to strip out homeschooling and special therapies from the amendment.”
The Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act creates a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations and workforce training organizations. The bill allocates $5 billion for education and $5 billion for workforce training per year, for a combined investment of $100 billion over 10 years.
“Now more than ever, it is important to give children and their families the freedom to choose alternative educational options,” the Cruz spokesperson said. The pandemic showed parents what their children are, and are not, being taught in schools—parents didn’t like what they saw.”
Cruz has spoken out against critical race theory, the politicization of classrooms, and the stranglehold teachers unions have over education.
“The Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act expands the elementary, secondary, and vocational education options for all children, and allows parents to direct the education of their own children,” the spokesperson added. “The importance of this bill cannot be overstated—if this bill became law, it would be the most significant educational reform since the passage of the GI bill.”
The bills have little hope of passing in the Democratic-majority Senate, but Cruz’s move sets an important agenda for school choice legislation going forward.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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