Virginia mandates slavery lessons for kindergarteners

Virginia kindergarten students will learn about institutional racism alongside the alphabet, according to new curriculum recommendations created for the upcoming school year.

Loudoun County is adding "social justice" to the mission of teaching elementary school students reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Washington, D.C., suburb—the richest county in the country—has teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) education arm Teaching Tolerance to develop its new curriculum. The proposed lesson plan recommends restructuring history and social studies classes to emphasize slavery as fundamental to American society for students from kindergarten to the fifth grade.

"Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history," the documents say. "Long before we teach algebra, we teach its component parts. We should structure history instruction the same way."

Following parent complaints, a district spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon on Monday that the changes are optional.*

"The Teaching Tolerance resources are optional," spokesman Rob Doolittle said. "Parents who have queried LCPS about those resources have been informed that they are optional.

Not every Loudoun County educator is on board with the administration's direction. A longtime elementary school teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said that the school system had always taught students about the reality of slavery—lessons that typically begin in the fourth grade. She said the administrative focus to push racial politics on students who do not yet know how to read is motivated by politics, rather than education.

"I teach lower grades in elementary school.… [Never before] did I have to teach about slavery," the teacher said. "Our standards were always [to] teach about famous Americans, George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., people like that. But, it was all very general and the bigger picture, we highlighted their accomplishments."

The new Teaching Tolerance kindergarten curriculum urges teachers to explain social justice theories to five-year-olds. The Loudoun County elementary school teacher believes this curriculum will prove divisive for children who lack the maturity to deal with the subject.

"What they're really trying to do is divide people as early as they can, starting now with kindergarteners. They're really going to be inciting hate," the teacher said. "They're pointing out that there's ‘whiteness' and ‘blackness' and that's crazy. We never taught about that in school…. We learn about how to get along with one another and be kind and respect others. But now, with this new curriculum that they're adding, it's going to do the total opposite."

The curriculum was first introduced by the Virginia Department of Education's superintendent. When asked how the SPLC guidelines were funded and whether the guidelines were mandatory across the state, the state's education department deflected.

"The state Board of Education approves content standards and curriculum frameworks for history and social studies," a state education department spokesman said. "Local school boards are responsible for developing or adopting curriculum aligned with the state standards and framework." Loudoun County's school board did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The guide encourages educators to create opportunities for kindergarten, first, and second grade students to learn about "activism and action civics."

"Students should study examples of role models from the past and present, and ask themselves, ‘how can I make a difference?'" the guide says. "These conversations [about slavery] should lead into discussions about current injustices—particularly those that continue to disenfranchise and oppress the descendants of enslaved people—and possibilities for activism and reform."

Max Eden, an education policy expert at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, said the curriculum's focus on political activism and the horrors of slavery is not suitable for kindergarten students. He said the movement to inject politics into elementary school classrooms has gained momentum since the New York Times launched its controversial 1619 Project.

"Students aren't prepared when they're five years old to develop a nuanced sense of history and political processes, and pros and cons of different side effects, and unintended consequences," Eden said. "What the real goal of this is, by introducing [slavery] this young, is to try to get the left-wing, Nikole Hannah-Jones, [SPLC] meta-political narrative into kids' heads as soon as possible, which is basically trying to compel them to believe that because slavery happened, therefore, America is evil and you must follow the leftist idea of … how we need to overturn power in society."

Parents are also upset that social justice would explicitly be taught in a public elementary school. A Loudoun County parent of two—who also spoke on the condition of anonymity—told the Free Beacon he was disappointed in the school district.

"SPLC is pushing Marxist ideology more or less. They're really pushing those concepts of ‘revolution' and ‘dismantling the system' that we have," the father said. "So rather than everyone coming together and building something great together, it's about destroying what's been built."

The school board is asking parents concerned about the "social justice" curriculum to fill out a survey requesting the board reconsider instructional materials.

SPLC did not respond to a request for comment.

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NC Teachers’ Union Demands Universal Health Care, Welfare for Illegal Immigrants to Reopen Schools

A North Carolina teachers' union is calling for the implementation of universal health care and welfare benefits for illegal immigrants in order to reopen schools in the fall.

Just days after the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) issued a statement railing against the school district's reopening plan, Durham Public Schools voted unanimously to hold all classes virtually for at least the first nine weeks of the school year. Included in the DAE statement was a call to adopt a variety of far-left policy goals before holding in-person classes, including Medicare for All and "direct income support regardless of immigration status."

"There are concrete policies that have permitted other countries to flatten the curve and return to public life: moratoriums on rent and mortgage, universal health care, direct income support regardless of immigration status," the statement reads. "We must fight together, collectively, for changes that will permit our communities to thrive during this pandemic and beyond."

The union's statement also calls for a full shutdown of the state, saying "until that is done, remote learning should remain the default."

The district did not respond to a request for comment.

The 2020-2021 school year has become a hot-button issue in recent weeks amid an aggressive push from President Donald Trump to reopen campuses. On July 8, he threatened to cut federal funding for schools that fail to reopen in the fall, sparking pushback from teachers' unions at the local, state, and national levels.

Some health experts have emphasized the need for students to attend in-person classes moving forward. The American Academy of Pediatrics released a set of reopening guidelines in June that warned parents and policymakers of the "considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality" associated with "lengthy time away from school." In addition, a JAMA Pediatrics review of 18 studies found that most children who contract coronavirus "generally required supportive care only, and typically had a good prognosis and recovered within one to two weeks."

In its statement, the DAE acknowledged that "all children are suffering without school—some without enough food to eat, others without sufficiently supportive adult and peer relationships, many without internet access, and others with too much mindless screen time." The union, however, claimed that the Trump administration's reopening push was aimed at "protecting wealth and big business."

North Carolina GOP spokesman Tim Wigginton criticized the union's stance. He noted that the state's top public health official, Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mandy Cohen, said that she plans to send her daughters back to school for in-person instruction.

"Once again, teachers' unions are distorting the facts to accomplish their agenda that puts special interests first and kids last," Wigginton said at a July 16 briefing. "We need to do what's best for our children, and according to the pediatricians, that's letting them return to school."

The DAE is a direct affiliate of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), and former DAE president Bryan Proffitt was elected NCAE vice president in April. Proffitt has decried the school-choice and charter-school movements, as well as online education.

"The privatizers are hungry right now. They're going to push online education, they're going to push charters, they're going to push [the narrative] we didn't need teachers in the first place," Proffitt said in April. "Our side has to be willing to fight back just as hard."

Neither DAE nor NCAE responded to requests for comment.

Durham Public Schools planned to hold in-person classes for elementary, middle, and "exceptional" high school students before the union spoke out. It cited "the need for childcare for our youngest and most vulnerable students" as "one of the reasons for choosing this approach." The district reversed course on Thursday, however, opting for remote classes only. The decision will last for a minimum of nine weeks, meaning district leaders may permit in-person classes starting just weeks before the November election.

The DAE is not the first local union to tie school reopenings to far-left policies. A Los Angeles teachers' union included a call to defund police in its list of school reopening requirements.

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Dismantling Student Loan Program Best Path to Fight ‘Leftist Indoctrination’ on Campus

Americans should demand better from their universities. Recent riots and vandalism taking place across the country have caused many to scrutinize what students are being taught in colleges. That scrutiny has even reached the White House.

Last week, President Donald Trump tweeted out a possible answer to the growing tensions and illiberal civic education in the ivory tower:

Removing the tax-exempt status of American colleges and universities is an idea that has been suggested by some segments of the policy sphere. One sympathizes: A 2020 study by The Harvard Crimson found substantial political homogeneity among the professoriate.

Nationally, liberal professors outweigh conservative professors 6 to 1. As troubling as that ratio may seem, it pales in comparison to the one-sidedness found among college administrators, who have an outsized influence on campus culture and student life.

Having recently surveyed the political leanings of college administrators, Samuel H. Abrams, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, found that liberals outweigh conservatives 12 to 1.

These are not, however, recent developments. As Arthur Milikh of the Claremont Institute recently wrote in National Affairs:

America’s universities have been progressivism’s most important asset, its crown jewel. For over half a century, they have served as the left’s research and development headquarters and the intellectual origin or dissemination point for the political and moral transformation of the nation, especially through the sexual revolution and the identity-politics revolution. Universities have trained the new elites who have taken society’s helm and now set its tone through the other institutions thoroughly dominated by the left: the mainstream press, mass entertainment, Fortune 500s, and tech companies.

That college professors lean left is nothing new. But it is the striking environment of illiberalism, such as hostility toward freedom of speech, that is now largely driving calls to reexamine taxpayer support of these institutions.

Indeed, while our institutions of higher education were once more focused on open academic inquiry and freedom of expression, today they are defined more by their restrictions on free speech than their commitment to it.

Take for example the petition signed by Princeton University faculty members demanding an investigation into fellow faculty members engaging in “wrongthink.”

As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education stated, “The threat of discipline for speech, research, and publication that is subjectively deemed ‘racist’ by a committee of ideologically motivated Princeton faculty is an anti-intellectual, frontal assault on free speech and academic freedom at Princeton that would shut down entire avenues of inquiry, research, and discussion.”

Or consider how many speakers are shouted down or banned from campus after leftist protestors make free speech and honest debate impossible.

Conservative author Heather Mac Donald faced raucous protests when she visited my alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross, for correctly telling students that they were not oppressed, but rather, privileged recipients of an elite higher education.

However, reducing the financial power universities have to engage in “indoctrination, not education,” as the president said, must start with the federal student loan program.

The federal student loan program created under President Lyndon Johnson has underwritten the proliferation of women’s studies, grievance studies of various stripes, degrees steeped in critical theory, and a network of colleges that export leftist ideology into the K-12 classroom. 

In addition to funding an increasingly politically and philosophically homogenous system of higher education, massive federal subsidies also support administrative bloat. Every university now has countless administrators whose jobs have nothing to do with academics. Moreover, it is difficult to discern what these administrators actually do.

As reporter Caroline Simon pointed out in Forbes, “Administrative titles at schools, especially large research institutions, can be confusingly vague: Health Promotion Specialist, Student Success Manager and Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com.”

These administrators often make up university departments of diversity and inclusion, whose primary purpose is to rid universities of any opinions that challenge progressive orthodoxy. The cultural affect this has on college campuses cannot be overstated.

With left-leaning authority figures setting the rules of discourse in and out of the classroom, higher education is unwelcoming, even hostile, to those who avoid groupthink. American taxpayers should question whether or not their investment in the federal student loan program—which props up the vast majority of schools across the country—is a worthy one.

At the same time, federal student loans have fueled rampant tuition inflation, making students dependent on taxpayer-funded loans in order to pay for what was once affordable. Schools can then get away with charging ridiculously high tuition without fear of losing students.

Cutting off the open flow of federal aid would reduce costs and hold universities accountable for what happens on campus. It would go much further than simply removing their tax-exempt status.

Winding down the federal student loan program to make space for private lending to reemerge would better serve students while also protecting taxpayers. And, at the end of the day, the purpose of higher education is not to recruit students to fight a culture war, but to help them pursue truth and achieve the American dream.

The president’s sentiment is absolutely correct: American colleges and universities have become recruiting grounds for political and cultural upheaval, not workforce development or intellectual growth. This was not the deal Americans signed up for.

However, rather than reexamining their tax-exempt status, a better and more effective approach is to dismantle the federal student loan program that fuels higher education’s deepest problems. 

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Coronavirus: how likely are international university students to choose Australia over the UK, US and Canada?

Unmentioned below is that Australia is in roughly the same time zone as China.  Hence no jetlag when travelling from one to the other -- a big plus

Australian universities are suffering revenue and job losses due to the current and projected loss of international students. A Mitchell Institute report has estimated the sector may lose up to A$19 billion in the next three years, while modelling from Universities Australia shows more than 20,000 jobs are at risk over six months, and more after that.

On April 3, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said international students in Australia could return home if they could not support themselves. Commentators feared such a flippant attitude would cause Australia to lose its world class reputation if it didn’t come to the aid of international students.

Months of tension with China (the biggest source of Australian university international students, at a third of the total) threatened to further jeopardise our international standing.

On Monday, the Australian government announced it will restart granting international student visas and allow current students to count online study while overseas in a push to restart international education.

Australia imposed a ban on travel from China on February 1, stranding an estimated 87,000 students abroad who were due to start their academic year in Australia in March.

By that time it was the middle of the second, or winter, semester for Australia’s big English language competitors in the northern hemisphere: the USA, UK and Canada. Most of these countries’ international students stayed to complete their semester, so universities did not suffer an immediate fall in revenue.

But universities in these countries did incur substantial additional costs as many completed the semester by transferring teaching online at short notice.

While online education meets similar standards to campus-based education, students prefer face-to-face learning. This is particularly true for international students, who see immersion in a different culture as one of the main benefits of studying overseas.

In May, many US and UK universities announced bullish plans to teach their first semester in autumn, starting in September, face-to-face (or mask-to-mask). There were various provisions for plexiglass, physical distancing, masks and regular testing.

But even partial campus reopening plans were never credible in the US when they were announced. Still, many universities in the competitor countries sought to maximise international enrolments by maintaining at least a substantial part of their campuses would be open by September.

The US

US universities no longer seem to be nearly as strong competitors for international students. While the number of new COVID-19 cases has bumpily fallen in Australia, Canada and the UK, they have been increasing in the US.

When it became clear US universities could not responsibly open their campuses, they started reversing their announcements of opening fully in September.

By July 20 some 53% of 1,215 US universities surveyed still planned to teach in person in September, 11% planned online education, 32% planned a mix of online and in person education, and 4% were considering a range of scenarios or had not yet decided their education mode.

US President Donald Trump sought to pressure universities to open fully by making studying at least partly on campus a condition of international students’ visas. He soon reversed that order, but may issue an alternative seeking the same effect.

US attractiveness as an international study destination is likely to be further reduced by the instability in universities’ plans, the uncertainty of federal immigration conditions, and continuing restrictions on entry from China and elsewhere.

The United Kingdom

Australian universities are in a much more similar position to UK universities, which are long time and powerful rivals for international students. They are expecting to lose substantially from COVID-19’s suppression of international enrolments.

Unlike Australia, the UK government has granted universities access to government-backed support such as a job retention scheme which includes short-term contracts, and business loan support.

The UK government has also brought forward teaching payments and block research grants, and increased funds for students in financial difficulty.

Unlike Australia, the UK does not impose international travel restrictions but requires entrants from most countries including China and India to self-isolate for a fortnight after entry. It will therefore remain a more attractive destination for new students until Australia lifts or at least relaxes its travel restrictions.

Canada

Canadian universities and colleges have some distinct advantages over their competitors for international students. They enjoy considerable financial and other support from their national and provincial governments.

While Canada’s average proportion of new COVID-19 cases is similar to Australia’s and the UK’s, these are concentrated in the biggest cities of Toronto, Montreal and their environs. The Atlantic provinces have Tasmanian levels of COVID-19 cases, and some of their universities attract very high proportions of international students.

Canada’s biggest competitive disadvantage is that while it will admit returning international students, it currently is not admitting new students for the foreseeable future.

The Canadian government will grant permits to international students who study online from abroad, and like Australia this will count towards their eligibility for a post-graduation work permit. The government has also introduced a temporary two-stage approval process for international students to expedite their approval to enter to study on campus when this is permitted.

But Canada is not likely to be a desirable destination for new international students until the government and then institutions can give a firm timetable and clear plans for studying on campus.

So, what should Australia do?

To remain competitive compared to the UK, Australian universities should keep prospective students updated on the issues that affect their study decisions such as entry requirements, start dates, and study and accommodation conditions. This communication should be targeted towards education agents and their clients, and be specific to individual students.

Few students and their parents are convinced about the value and quality of online education. And they fear much of the benefit of immersion in an English speaking university environment would be lost if spatial distancing required social distancing.

Australian universities will have to be as clear as they can about the benefits of the study and living conditions students are likely to experience here.

SOURCE