I remember how it was -- JR
Megyn Kelly says she's leaving New York City and taking her kids out of their 'woke' $56k-a-year school after letter circulated saying 'white kids are being indoctrinated in black death' and will grow up to be 'killer cops'
Journalist Megyn Kelly has made the decision to quit New York City and take her children out of their 'far-left' schools as they 'gave gone off the deep end' following the death of George Floyd.
Kelly revealed she snapped after a letter was sent around to faculty in her sons' school that claimed 'white school districts across the country [are] full of future killer cops'.
It added that 'white kids are being indoctrinated in black death' and are 'left unchecked and unbothered in their schools'.
Her sons Edward, 11, and Thatcher Bray, 7, attended the Collegiate School on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
The piece, written by Orleans Public Education Network Executive Director Nahliah Webber, was circulated among a parents' 'diversity group' at her son's school, which included Kelly, following the police-involved shooting of Floyd.
On Monday, Kelly told her podcast 'The Megyn Kelly Show' that she had already pulled her two sons from the $55,900-a-year private school as she accused the city of allowing 'woke' leftism to take over.
The former Fox and NBC host, who turned 50 this week, claimed she also planned to move her nine-year-old daughter, Yardley Evans, from her city school as the family looks to relocate away from the hyper-liberal Big Apple.
'After years of resisting it, we're going to leave the city. We pulled our boys from their school, and our daughter is going to be leaving hers soon, too,' Kelly said of her and her husband Doug Brunt's decision.
It is unclear where Kelly and her family plans to move to once they leave New York City.
Collegiate School is ranked as one of the best private schools in the country and also claims to be the oldest.
It counts JFK Jr., his nephew Jack Schlossberg, and Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff among its alumni.
Roman Abramovich and CNBC broadcaster Andrew Ross Sorkin are among those who sent their children there.
'The schools have always been far-left, which doesn't align with my own ideology, but I didn't really care, most of my friends are liberals, it's fine. I come from a Democrat family, I'm not offended at all by the ideology, and I lean center-left on some things, Kelly admitted.
'But they've gone around the bend,' she continued. 'I mean, they have gone off the deep end.'
Schumer Calls on Biden to Forgive Tens of Billions in Student Loans -- Which Is a Payoff to Wealthy Democrats
Being president is pretty much the same as being a magician. You’ve seen magicians who wave a magic wand and can make an elephant disappear? Well, presidents can wave a magic pen and make tens of billions of dollars in cash disappear.
The only difference is presidents don’t usually wear a pointy hat.
In the last decade or so, presidents have become experts at the disappearing money trick. They’ve also gotten very good at making money magically appear. Maybe instead of an election, we should hold auditions for the best magician in the country.
As most of us were taught when we were young, to err is human, to forgive is divine. Millions of Americans erred in taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. If they were planning to be tech entrepreneurs or Wall Street lawyers, it was reasonable to assume they could eventually pay those loans back.
But many ended up with jobs where it would take them decades to repay. Student loan debt has now reached $1.7 trillion, so Joe Biden wants to take the divine way out of this mess and forgive tens of billions of dollars in student loans.
Fox Business:
Schumer, D-N.Y., said Biden should enact a plan that he laid out earlier this year alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., under which the president could use executive authority to immediately cancel up to $50,000 of student debt per borrower. Biden has called for forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt as part of a broader coronavirus relief package.
“Getting rid of student debt,” Schumer said during an interview with The Ink. “I have a proposal with Elizabeth Warren that the first $50,000 of debt be vanquished, and we believe that Joe Biden can do that with the pen as opposed to legislation.”
What you are not going to hear much about over the next few months that this proposal is examined is how we got into this mess. The image we have of the hard-working middle or lower-class kid, striving for a better life by taking out loans to go to college is not exactly true. In fact, many borrowers are upper-middle-class students and parents taking out loans for graduate school. Fully one-quarter of loans fall into this category, according to the CBO.
Student loan debt increased from $187 billion in 1995 to $1.4 trillion in 2017. It obviously got easier and easier to get money for college — not a bad thing — but harder and harder to pay it back — a very bad thing. All sorts of gimmicks have been tried to get young adults out from under their student debt load to no avail.
So is simply waving the magic pen the answer? Consider that the American taxpayer is going to be asked to pay back these loans. Just because they’re “forgiven” doesn’t mean the debt itself disappears. Someone, somewhere, somehow has to pay that money back. And taxpayers are going to be stuck with the bill.
Is that fair?
Federalist:
Student loan forgiveness is a quintessential example of regressive policy. As Cooper points out, “the top fifth of households holds $3 in student loans for every $1 held by the bottom fifth.” At the same time, those with the higher levels of debt (exceeding $50,000) “almost exclusively have bachelor’s degrees.”
Moreover, as Cooper explains, 210 million adult Americans do not have federal student loan debt, compared to the 45 million who do. Student loan forgiveness demands that those 210 million Americans take on the debt of those 45 million borrowers.
What makes it doubly unfair is that millions of American kids chose a different path — one without taking on unpayable debt.
For those individuals who avoided debt—either by working their way through college, going to community college for two years before attending a four-year college to reduce costs, living at home, serving in the armed forces to later benefit from the GI Bill, working hard in high school to receive merit-based aid, or by eschewing college altogether—blanket student loan forgiveness is simply unfair.
It’s particularly unfair to demand of the nearly three-quarters of Americans who do not hold bachelor’s degrees to pay off someone else’s debt. Such proposals mean those Americans without bachelor’s degrees are being forced to foot the bill for individuals who, statistically, are likely to out-earn them in the future.
Student loan forgiveness is all about rewarding important political constituencies — and not about “fairness.”
For Teacher Training, Drop Critical Theory and Add Character
With the pandemic, more parents are discovering what their children are being taught in public schools—from explicit how-tos in sex-ed class to narratives of power that divide everyone into oppressors and oppressed.
Yearning for a richer emphasis on cultural literacy, character, and civil discourse, parents are turning to alternative curricula, such as Core Knowledge and classical education, as well as learning environments such as homeschooling, pods, micro-schools, and public charters.
The opportunity for reform is there, but we must first understand how much needs to change. The content in many schools is a problem, but a deeper one remains: Too few teachers and leaders focus on the importance of character formation.
Jay Schalin has reported extensively on the prevalence of a specific form of critical theory in schools of education across the country. This theory rejects both tradition and universal truth in favor of subjective narratives, undercutting the value of cultural literacy and character. Cultural literacy becomes a “dead” tradition. Questions of character, such as what it means to treat another person justly, lose meaning when there is only “your” justice and “my” justice, but no universal principles of justice that we can discuss to frame and negotiate conflicts.
For example, Gary Houchens, a former member of the Kentucky Board of Education, has revealed how state-sponsored teacher resources in what should be inquiry-based learning not only insist upon a critical theory foundation but also offer loaded questions whose answers are telegraphed by the lessons and the questions themselves. Max Eden has recently highlighted how Buffalo Public Schools’ Black Lives Matter curriculum asks students to question the nuclear family with the explicit purpose of “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The attack on the family is not a core feature of the Civil Rights Movement, but of Karl Marx’s program for social transformation. No doubt, for some, Marx’s influence is laudable, but, if this is so, let it be considered and debated honestly and transparently.
As it stands, these approaches do not offer inquiry, but indoctrination.
This follows from critical theory’s denial of universal truth. Without universal truth, all we can discover by inquiry is your belief or my belief. If our beliefs disagree, there are no impartial standards of excellence in evidence, analysis, and inquiry by which to judge whose argument is better or worse. The only question is who succeeds in pressuring whom to submit. Reason becomes nothing but belief and liberty nothing but a forum for conflicting wills.
Similar problems emerge with the Common Core, making its teaching approach also incompatible with character education.
Justin P. McBrayer notes that the Common Core relegates moral analyses to the realm of mere opinions as opposed to facts. He argues that, on this foundation, we cannot tell children that cheating is wrong—only that it is so in the opinion of some and not others (his article inspired a rebuttal and a robust defense).
Character education cannot begin, much less advance, in an environment in which a principle so basic as “cheating is wrong” is without authority. Indeed, how can any robust notion of justice, such as human beings are endowed with equal rights, survive in this environment?
As the shortcomings of public approaches to alleged inquiry suggest, genuine inquiry, especially when it comes to social and moral questions, is difficult to cultivate and requires proper teacher formation.
But the problematic ideology underpinning the training, resources, and standards guiding public education is only one concern. The other is that current training programs do not promote quality teaching. For example, there is no evidence that certified teachers outperform non-certified teachers.
Lindsey Burke and Mike Gonzalez call for the repeal of state regulations requiring teacher certification, proposing instead that teachers pursue advanced learning in the subjects that they teach. This too has pitfalls. Citing studies from leading institutions in educational research, Grace Gedye explains that master’s degrees do not prepare teachers to be effective in the classroom. She calls for the wholesale repeal of regulations and incentives that waste hardworking teachers’ precious dollars and time.
But complete deregulation may not prove feasible and we need to reform teacher training now. Gedye points to another possibility: Rather than doing away with regulations and incentives, we could reframe them to promote better teacher training. But what does “better” look like in an increasingly polarized America? Even if we had broad consensus that cultural literacy, character, and civil discourse were desiderata, we would still confront the problem of critical theory: Whose culture? Whose character? Whose discourse?
These are debates. As such, let them be debated freely and openly. As a matter of policy, that requires school choice and transparency about what schools and other educational environments are teaching children.
This debate will be unbalanced and uninformed, however, so long as teacher training is overwhelmingly conducted according to one model, leaving the alternatives with little—albeit often passionate—support.
What we need are new teacher formation programs.
Independent homeschooling co-ops, schools, publishers, and other continuing education services have a role to play. But so, too, does any university with the vision and will to offer more robust teacher formation, tailored to those dedicated to classical liberal education in the true sense: Education that begins with human beings as rational and free, is committed to individual and communal flourishing, and pursues excellence in scientific discovery, artistic work, shared inquiry, and civic responsibility.
Some would argue that public education already does this. In criticizing that education, we should be careful not to over-generalize. I do not doubt that there are many excellent and dedicated public school teachers who contribute to excellent schools.
But public education can be made better by turning away from critical theory and the Common Core. We already have examples of how well the alternatives can work.
One can turn to the extensive research of E. D. Hirsch and others on the importance of cultural literacy and content-rich curricula. And as for character, one can turn to the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the recognized international leader in K–12 character education research. The Jubilee Centre is non-partisan and enjoys bi-partisan support in the U.K. It is not involved in American ideological debates. It is concerned with cultivating a robust commitment to virtues such as curiosity, teamwork, honesty, and justice, virtues that not only benefit oneself, but that also serve the common good.
Again, we may confront the question, “Whose ‘common good’—that of the oppressors or the oppressed?” The commitment to excellence in all its forms is not elitist. As Robert Maynard Hutchins famously said, “The best education for the best is the best education for all.” Classical schools perform highly in general (see Great Hearts America) and in diverse communities (see Hope Academy). But those outcomes only take into account conventional measurements like subject test scores and college admittance. Anecdotally, parents, teachers, and school leaders see more important outcomes in the psychosocial well-being, character, community service, and general flourishing of students.
Those outcomes need to be studied and assessed objectively. But doesn’t this beg the question? Critical theory denies there is any universal truth. My proposal assumes that there is such truth. Yet even critical theory presupposes that it holds for all people at all times. Therefore, it too admits universal truth. Given this, why don’t we go one step further and take seriously standards of excellence in cultural literacy, character, and civil discourse that transcend individual and group identities? Doing so is the decisive move if we truly care about others and about our civil society.
It is with a view to these goals that we at the University of Dallas offer graduate programs in K–12 teacher and school leader formation focused on character and civics, including alternative teacher certification. We offer edTPA certification and Texas has reciprocity agreements with 45 states, meaning that this certification can be recognized anywhere in the Union except Nevada. Appreciating that sustainable reform must draw from multiple sources, we also have pilot projects in K–12 curriculum and research.
We seek to serve parents, their children, and communities—online and face-to-face—with a firm commitment to liberty, virtue, and truth. We desire to work with others who share our commitment and are open to dialogue with those who do not.
As our shared tradition teaches us, character is the fruit of genuine inquiry and dialogue. It’s time that education schools recognize its importance and dwell on character formation.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/11/for-teacher-training-drop-critical-theory-and-add-character/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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