UPenn president Liz Magill RESIGNS after disastrous anti-Semitism hearing where she refused to condemn campus protests calling for Jewish genocide

She just had no moral anchors: No instinct of horror at the truly horrible. She is an ethical vacuum

The president of the University of Pennsylvania has resigned from her post following fierce backlash to her controversial congressional testimony over antisemitism on campus.

Liz Magill, alongside the president's of Harvard and MIT, was summoned before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday by lawmakers concerned by reports of a rise in antisemitism at leading universities.

They faced heated questioning from committee chair Congresswoman Elise Stefanik but failed to assert that calls for genocide against Jews on campus would definitively constitute harassment.

Following international outcry, including more than 70 lawmakers calling for her resignation, Magill stood down on Saturday.

Pressure is now growing for the president's of Harvard and MIT whose testimony largely mirrored Magill's, with congresswoman Stefanik writing 'One down. Two to go' on X.

'This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most 'prestigious' higher education institutions in America' Stefanik wrote on Saturday evening.

Adding: 'Harvard and MIT, do the right thing. The world is watching.'

Just minutes after Magill's statement the chair of the Upenn's board of trustees, Scott Bok, also resigned.

Bok's Vice Chair, Julie Beren Platt, has been named interim chair of the board.

In a statement issued Saturday evening Magill wrote: 'It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution.

'It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn's vital missions.'

In his own resignation statement Bok defended Magill as a 'good person' who is 'not the slightest bit anti-Semitic' but had made a 'misstep' after 'months of relentless external attacks.'

'Today, following the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania's President and related Board of Trustee meetings, I submitted my resignation as Chair of the University's Board of Trustees, effective immediately,' he said in a statement.

'While I was asked to remain in that role for the remainder of my term in order to help with the presidential transition, I concluded that, for me, now was the right time to depart.'

The hearing also saw widely criticized testimony from MIT president Sally Kornbluth

He acknowledged that Magill had made an error during her disastrous Congressional testimony and described it as a 'dreadful 30-second sound bite'.

Bok added: 'Former President Liz Magill last week made a very unfortunate misstep—consistent with that of two peer university leaders sitting alongside her—after five hours of aggressive questioning before a Congressional committee.

'Following that, it became clear that her position was no longer tenable, and she and I concurrently decided that it was time for her to exit.'

He wished Magill 'well in her future endeavors' and praised her as a 'good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team'.

He continued: 'She is not the slightest bit anti-Semitic. Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life.

'Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. 'Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong.'

Magill was slammed for her testimony, in which she said that reprimanding students who call for a Jewish genocide was not paramount - but 'context' specific.

She was asked a 'yes or no' question on whether calls for the genocide of Jews counted as hate speech, and repeatedly said it depended on the context.

On Wednesday she attempted to clarify her comments, but the damage was done: a wealthy alumnus withdrew a $100 million donation, and her remarks were roundly condemned by the ADL, the White House and politicians across the board.

Magill issued a groveling video statement attempting to explain her failure to condemn calls for the genocide of Jewish people on campuses.

She said she was not 'focused' on the issue, and said she wanted to 'be clear' that calls for genocide were 'evil, plain and simple' - although she said the blame lay with her university's policies and the constitution, rather than with her.

Magill said: 'There was a moment during yesterday's Congressional hearing on antisemitism when I was asked if a call for the genocide of Jewish people on our campus would violate our policies.

'In that moment, I was focused on our university's long-standing policies - aligned with the U.S. Constitution - which say that speech alone is not punishable.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12845821/UPenn-president-Liz-Magill-RESIGNS.html

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Charter Schools Must Avoid the DEI Blunder

A key reason many parents are fleeing the traditional public system is the concern that schools are indoctrinating students in radical “woke” ideology.

Public school enrollment has dropped by more than 1 million students nationwide since the COVID-19 pandemic. District school leaders expected students to return after the pandemic abated, but enrollment has continued to decline as trust in public schools has hit an all-time low . Policymakers and leaders in the charter school sector must avoid making the same mistakes that led to the district school disaster.

A key reason many parents are fleeing the traditional public system is the concern that schools are indoctrinating students in radical “woke” ideology. Parents are watching as the left-wing ideologies clothed in the mantra of diversity, equity, and inclusion spread like wildfire across America's schools. Unfortunately, one prominent organization is working overtime to ensure that public charter schools embrace the very same ideologies from which parents seek to escape.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers is a publicly subsidized kingmaker in the charter school world. NACSA consults with and produces best practices for charter school authorizers, the entities charged with determining when charter schools should be opened, expanded, or closed.

NACSA believes that it is the true “expert” in determining what’s best for children, so it favors a regulatory approach that prioritizes its own judgment over parents' in deciding when charters should be opened, expanded, or closed.

Enforcement of DEI principles in charter authorizing is an integral part of NACSA’s technocratic agenda. This commitment is touted through its social media channels , which repeatedly refer to “closing the DEI gap” in authorizing. A lengthy toolkit published by NACSA on the same topic makes vague, ideologically charged suggestions such as “building cultural competence” through “confronting bias and developing awareness of our own privilege and prejudices.”

More specific guidance endorses authorizer partnership with DEI “experts” and exclusively highlights one authorizer’s contract with Pacific Educational Group, a consulting firm that, as the parental rights group Parents Defending Education discovered , encourages schools to adopt the use of critical race theory and racial affinity groups.

Unsurprisingly, the political principles that charter authorizers are pressured to avow manifest in charter school practices and culture. A Heritage Foundation report found that charter schools in states with the more technocratic charter ecosystems that NACSA favors signal stronger adherence to liberal politics. The phenomenon remains true even after statistically controlling for political partisanship (as measured by voting outcomes) across states.

Compelling schools of choice to adopt DEI principles is a bad policy on its merits. Parents, rather than “experts,” should be entrusted to determine what is best for their children. But it’s even worse when considering that DEI orthodoxy (e.g., racial fixation and racial separatism) consistently operates at odds with the things that DEI purports to foster. In K-12 schools, pandemic-era racial achievement gaps were larger in districts that employed chief diversity officers . Most recently, DEI officials at universities across the country have been silent or complicit while students and faculty celebrate violence against Jews.

NACSA’s pursuit of DEI does not even achieve its supposed aims. Peer-reviewed studies have found that NACSA’s policy recommendations disproportionately prevent black aspiring school leaders from receiving authorization to operate charter schools. The recommendations also disproportionately result in the closure of charter schools that serve a higher proportion of black students.

While NACSA’s influence and insistence on DEI ought to be a source of alarm, champions of educational freedom need not despair. Arizona has mostly eschewed NACSA’s recommendations and has been rewarded with an innovative charter sector that paces the nation in student academic growth, including among low-income and racial minority students. Leaders in states such as Florida and Texas , which embrace educational freedom and eschew woke indoctrination, should follow in Arizona’s footsteps.

NACSA’s attempt to compel charter schools to adopt liberal politics is also a stark reminder that not all models of school choice are created equal. Education savings accounts allow public funds to be used for a host of expenses, including private school tuition, books, online instruction, tutoring, and more. ESAs are comparatively permission-less and do not mediate the relationship between parents and education providers beyond processing payments or reimbursement claims.

ESAs allow all parents, no matter their worldview, to choose the learning environments that align with their values. That means liberal parents can select schools that emphasize DEI while other parents can avoid it. In a system of education freedom, the choices of some parents do not limit or infringe upon the legitimate desires of others.

A NACSA director once tweeted , “School choice for school choice’s sake is completely misguided … social justice and equity are the GOAL not some political tactic.” NACSA’s insistence on technocracy and DEI demonstrate why choice for choice’s sake must, in fact, be the goal.

https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/charter-schools-must-avoid-the-dei-blunder

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Education destroyed by self-serving educrats

Such is the parlous and substandard state of Australia’s education system, if those in charge managed a major corporation like Qantas, Optus, or Woolworths they would either be investigated by the ACCC, be removed from the board, or have their salaries and bonuses docked.

Not so for those career educational bureaucrats, academics, subject experts, and carpetbaggers who have played a central role in the nation’s dismal collapse in educational standards over the last 30 to 40 years.

Whether we look at international tests like PISA – where today’s 15-year-old students are a year behind their year 2000 counterparts – university courses being dumbed down due to first year students being unable to cope, or employers complaining about illiteracy and innumeracy, Australian education is going down the gurgler.

Despite the additional billions of dollars invested as a result of the Gonski funding review, multiple national reform agreements over the last 30 years, and countless government-sponsored curriculum and assessment inquiries and reviews, generations of students have been, and still are, destined to failure.

There’s nothing new in the latest 2022 PISA results highlighting Australia’s descent into mediocrity. In 2004 I wrote about why our schools are failing and cited evidence from tests and surveys carried out in 1975, 1995, and 1996 concluding that nearly 30 per cent of primary students failed basic literacy tests.

When detailing why Australia under-performs and why standards have declined so dramatically, the usual suspects include ineffective classroom practice, a superficial, substandard curriculum, lack of discipline, failure to set high expectations, and parents abrogating their responsibilities.

Rarely identified is the major systemic problem infecting Australia’s education system. A problem centred on the fact those responsible over the last 30 to 40 years have failed dismally in their responsibility to provide students with a challenging, enriching, and worthwhile education.

Beginning in the early 1970s, those tasked with training teachers jettisoned the more traditional approach based on teacher authority and teacher-directed lessons, rote learning, and memorisation in favour of a range of progressive, new-age innovations and fads.

Open classrooms, community schools, student-centred learning, the whole word ‘look and guess’ approach to reading, as well as diagnostic, descriptive reporting, and assessment based on the belief ranking and failing students was bad for their self-esteem dominated.

Professional bodies, including the Australian Council for Educational Research, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, and the Deans of Education all imbibed the educational Kool-aid committing generations of students to failure.

The Australian Education Union, not surprising given its cultural-left leaning, argues the competitive, academic curriculum must be overthrown as it reinforced capitalist hierarchies. Ignored is that forsaking meritocracy especially punishes disadvantaged but bright working class students.

In 2005 the Head of the AEU boasted such had been the success of the union’s long march through the education system ‘the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum’.

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also responsible for falling standards as measured by international tests. Drawing on the neo-Marxist-inspired concept of critical literacy, the AATE has long argued teachers should forsake teaching standard English and grammatically correct language in favour of empowering and liberating students by emphasising student agency and creativity.

Proven by the publication in 1998 of Going Public: Education policy and Public Education in Australia, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association is also responsible for Australia’s dumbed down, ineffective curriculum.

The book argues in favour of ‘social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education’ and argues fears about falling standards are ‘alarmist and negative’, spread by conservative politicians and a subservient media to undermine public education.

Against what is condemned as ‘reactionary policy development’ ACSA calls for schools and teachers to redouble their efforts to teach an emancipatory and liberating view of education calculated to indoctrinate students with its Woke ideology.

Commonwealth, state, and territory education departments and bodies like the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority cannot escape blame for turning Australia’s education system into an intellectual wasteland.

In addition to multiple national education reform agreements proving ineffective and costly, government and bureaucratic intervention has drowned school leaders and teachers in needless red-tape and mindless busy work contributing to burnout and high attrition rates.

Even more disturbing, based on the principle of promoting people to their least level of ability, those educrats responsible for destroying what was once a successful and rewarding education system are either promoted or recycled as members of yet another inquiry or review.

Like the old industrial relations club, those responsible for Australia’s educational decline are a self-serving, inward-looking coterie more concerned with power and prestige than raising educational standards.

The alternative is a market-driven system of education based on subsidiarity and parental choice represented by autonomous community schools and school vouchers.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/education-destroyed-by-self-serving-educrats/

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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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