I remember how it was -- JR
Oregon Training Teachers to Dismantle Racial ‘Systemic Inequities’ in Math Classes
The Oregon Department of Education is instructing teachers on the keys to dismantling “systemic inequities” in the math classroom. High school math teachers should “support equitable discourse and foster positive mathematical identities,” according to a series of teacher training slideshows from the Department of Education reviewed by The Daily Signal.
The Department of Education’s Math Project released three “Ambitious Math Teaching Modules” in August with 19 sessions on “equitable math” practices. Ambitious teaching “attends to student thinking in an equitable and responsive manner,” the slides say.
“Understanding the systemic inequities of schooling, how to disrupt them, and the nature of and strategies to enact ambitious math instruction are central to being successful with this reform,” the overview of the math teaching modules reads. “The modules offer a focus on equitable teaching practices and how to ensure success for all students, especially students of color, emergent bilingual students, and students from families of low income, all of whom have been historically underserved by schooling.”
The Oregon Math Project recommends that teachers reduce rules which that “imply that certain skills and knowledge are valued more than others” and instead prioritize the “rights of the learner.”
“What if instead we organized classrooms around ways to value one another’s ideas and learning?” a slide asks.
Traditional math education harms students’ sense of identity by “gatekeeping” math from students of lower ability levels, according to the modules.
“Society views mathematics as a valued and high-status subject,” a slide says. “Schools perpetuate this through the gatekeeping structures which control students’ access to mathematics.”
The Department of Education told The Daily Signal the modules were developed through a grant with Oregon State University, which worked with the Teacher Development Group, a Portland-based math education nonprofit. The education department piloted the modules during the 2022-2023 school year.
The department’s Math Project defines equity as “the inability to predict mathematics achievement and participation based solely on student characteristics such as race, class, ethnicity, sex, beliefs, and proficiency in the dominant language.”
Meanwhile, only 30% of Oregon students scored proficient in math in tests administered by the state education department in 2023. Proficiency means the student is on track for college or workforce readiness after graduation.
“Obviously, in light of the already failing math scores, Oregon bureaucrats are more concerned with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mantra than providing students with solid academic instruction,” Oregon mother and Executive Director of Parents Rights in Education Suzanne Gallagher told The Daily Signal.
The Oregon Department of Education is instructing teachers on the keys to dismantling “systemic inequities” in the math classroom. Pictured: A screenshot of Oregon’s teacher training slideshow discussing revealing and addressing bias in the classroom.
The Math Project has four guiding principles—focus, engagement, pathways, and belonging—all focused on “engineering a more equitable math system.”
The “belonging” principle presents math as a means to help students develop “positive math identities.”
“Participation in mathematical learning builds students’ identities as capable math learners and fosters a positive self-concept,” reads a slide about the principles. “Students’ cultural and linguistic assets are valued in ways that contribute to a sense of belonging to a community of learners.”
The slides say social-emotional learning in math classes should focus on “mindset, perseverance, risk-taking, relationships, and attitude.”
While claiming to equip children with the ability to manage emotions, feel empathy for others, and maintain positive relationships, social-emotional learning integrates controversial critical race theory throughout the education system.
Math classes should shoot for an “equity goal” as well as a pedagogical one, according to the education department. Math teachers must “surface the importance of changing the way we teach to reach diverse students by giving access.”
Oregon has a history of lowering its education standards. On Oct. 19, the Oregon Board of Education voted unanimously to remove requirements for students to be proficient in reading and writing in order to graduate.
According to the Oregon modules, math teachers should encourage students to consider the “equity/justice implications of how people and things have been grouped, categorized, or measured” when teaching lessons on data and statistics. An example of such a math problem asks students to “determine whether the income gap between white and Black people is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same.”
According to the Math Project, teachers should evaluate how their expectations of their students’ math performance is “shaped by biases and perspectives on learning.”
One module covers teaching practices that sustain so-called ambitious math teaching, including “selecting and sequencing students’ ideas to advance mathematical and equity-oriented goals.”
Discussion questions on the slides encourage teachers to consider how their “potential bias” might “inadvertently reinforce inequities.”
“Addressing biases in instructional practices is a team sport; we need one another to help identify biases, hold one another accountable, and transform the teaching and learning of mathematics to a place focused on building from students’ strengths,” a quote from a University of Florida professor on one of the slides reads.
Parents’ rights activist Gallagher said that though the beauty of math is that each problem only has one correct answer, Oregon public schools swindle taxpayers by inserting opinion into math.
“Oregon families have been shortchanged,” Gallagher said. “Their kids will not be able to hold a job without basic math and reading skills. Parents should demand local school boards raise the standards, even if the ODE [Oregon Department of Education] won’t.”
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Chaplain’s BDSM Workshop Faces Blowback at Christian College
There are a lot of queer clergy
From Memphis comes word that Rhodes College alumni were whipped into a frenzy over a BDSM lecture that was set to be hosted by the school's chaplain.
Rhodes is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA and many alumni are wondering just what sort of kinky stuff is going on in the pews at their highfalutin college?
Beatrix Weil, the chaplain at Memphis-based school, had posted a message inviting students to attend a seminar titled, "BDSM 101." And, no, that's not an acronym for "Best Darned Spiritual Mentor."
"Chaplain Beatrix will host a local dominatrix to share wisdom on how to safely, sanely, and consensually learn about bondage, discipline/domination, sadism/submission, and masochism," the announcement read.
And now many parents and donors are wondering what in the name of John Calvin is going on at Rhodes College? The answer to that question can be found in my book, "Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation."
There's no question that Rhodes has taken a hard left turn in recent years and has earned a reputation as being the Berkley of the Mid-South. Maybe even just a smidge to the left of Berkley.
But even nominal Presbyterians draw the line at whips and leather chaps. "We canceled the proposed event Friday as soon as it came to our attention," a college spokesperson told me. "It was not a college-sanctioned event."
I'm not quite sure that's going to smooth things over with the donors, parents and alumni.
"There is no justifiable excuse for a chaplain hosting / teaching BDSM," one irate parent said. "What adults do in their bedrooms is their own business. They don’t need a religious leader giving them a safe space. If I were a Rhodes alum, I’d be contacting the president, expressing my disgust, withholding donations, and asking for Chaplain Beatrix to step down."
I spoke to one alum who graduated in the 1980s and she said the school has gone under a radical transformation.
"I had to start throwing the alumni magazine away," she said. "What in the world is going on there? It's not the same school I attended. A chaplain teaching bondage and domination does not compute."
There are already rumblings that some high-profile donors may withhold donations, a move that has taken hold at a number of Ivy League schools in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Israel.
Many public and private universities shed their moral compass years ago, so the only way to appeal to their good nature is by threatening to empty their bank accounts.
As for the chaplain, it's really no surprise that she's a Presbyterian perv. Her social media pages are a treasure trove of liberal lunacy, as one observer noted.
There's a photo of Chaplain Beatrix reading "Heather has two Mommies" during a "Banned Books" event. She was also spotted wearing a "black girls lives matter" t-shirt (which could be construed as either cultural appropriation or white savior complex -- unless of course she identifies as a chaplain of color.)
And then there was the LGBTQIA+ affirmation party hosted by Chaplain Beatrix and other religious leaders who "support and affirm people of all gender identities and all sexual orientations." "Glitter provided," the announcement noted.
There’s no doubt Rhodes College is Presbyterian in name only, but by golly they sure did nail the doctrine of total depravity.
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College History Textbooks Spread Misinformation about the Great Depression
The Great Depression was the most significant macroeconomic event of the past century, but don’t expect to find an accurate portrayal of its causes in your college history classroom. The most commonly assigned college-level US history textbooks contain obsolete and economically erroneous explanations of the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath.
In a new study I co-authored with Jeremy Horpedahl and Marcus Witcher, we examined nine widely used US history textbooks and evaluated their accounts of the Great Depression. We then compared those narratives to assessments of the same event by economists and economic historians. The results show that historians are largely unaware of the leading economic explanations for the Depression.
Most economists attribute the crash to a decade-long quagmire to a series of bad economic policy decisions in the 1920s and ’30s. As former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke conceded, the Fed is now widely recognized as having botched its response to the unfolding events of 1929-1933. Through a string of erroneous policy decisions and inaction, the Fed created the conditions for a monetary contraction and directly exacerbated a collapse of the banking system. Other policy blunders, such as the steeply protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, added fuel to the fire by triggering a global collapse in international trade. And in 1932, President Herbert Hoover signed a massive hike in federal income tax rates in a misguided attempt to close the budget deficit. Contractionary fiscal policy during a Depression is seldom a good idea.
Other “consensus” economic explanations of the Depression do borrow elements of Keynesian theory, suggesting that the 1929 crash and aftermath illustrated a contraction in aggregate demand. This proposition has been heavily contested since Keynes first advanced it in the 1930s, but it remains a part of mainstream economic theory. To illustrate the range of economic explanations for the Great Depression, we summarized ten of the most commonly used college-level economics textbooks below.
Turning to the nine most-common US history textbooks, we found a very different story. Monetary explanations of the Great Depression were seldom mentioned at all. Only two of the nine texts mentioned the role of Federal Reserve policies. The protectionist policies of Smoot-Hawley were largely omitted. US history textbooks even neglected doctrinaire Keynesian explanations rooted in an aggregate demand contraction.
Instead, all nine history textbooks attributed the Great Depression to a class of explanations known as “underconsumption” theory. Briefly summarized, underconsumption holds that economic production outpaced what most consumers could purchase given their low pay, triggering a contractionary event in the form of the Depression. This argument attained popularity in the early 1930s, and was used to justify many of the economic planning and regulatory programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Economists today overwhelmingly reject “underconsumption” theory. Even Keynes expressed skepticism of the notion, and attempted to prod the Roosevelt administration over to an aggregate-demand-based theory of the unfolding events. For the past 80 years, few if any economists have seriously entertained “underconsumption” as a viable explanation of the Great Depression.
As our study shows, US history textbook authors remain badly out-of-touch with the economic literature about the Depression. They also augment their obsolete “underconsumption” explanation with other political appeals.
Eight out of nine US history textbooks attributed the Great Depression to rising income inequality. Only one economics textbook made a similar argument, the explicitly heterodox CORE open access e-book. Tellingly, none of the history textbooks offered a coherent causal mechanism by which inequality supposedly caused or triggered the Great Depression. They simply asserted it to be the case.
The table below shows the range of causes listed in the nine US history textbooks. Note that it contains barely any overlap with the depiction of the same events by economists.
So what are we to make of this odd situation? The comparison of the two charts shows that US history instruction, including at the college level, is badly out of sync with the scholarly literature on the Great Depression. History textbooks show little cognizance of the leading economic explanations for this famous event, and display almost no awareness of how this literature has developed over the past 80 years.
The resulting treatment of the Great Depression in US history textbooks does little to educate students about the actual causes of the Great Depression. It does, however, privilege obsolete political arguments from the early 1930s that were used to justify the New Deal.
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https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14730&omhide=true&trk=rm
******************************************************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)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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