I remember how it was -- JR
Education Department confirms it's still investigating Princeton for systemic racism
Depending on who you ask, the U.S. Department of Education’s investigation into Princeton University for admitting systemic racial discrimination on campus is either an epic bureaucratic troll or an “Orwellian” abuse of government power.
Nonetheless, the Education Department forges ahead, confirming to The College Fix on Wednesday that the investigation is “ongoing.”
It is undetermined whether the investigation will continue past January 20, when President-Elect Joe Biden’s administration is expected to take over. Biden has not, as of yet, announced his choice for Education Secretary.
A Princeton spokesperson declined to comment on whether the school is cooperating with the active investigation.
The facts are well-known: In early September, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber issued a statement in which he bemoaned “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton,” and proclaimed that “Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”
Such statements are common for leaders of heavily progressive universities – especially in the wake of the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of police over the summer, after which presidents took to their keyboards en masse to show solidarity with minority groups on campus.
But Eisgruber’s statement caught the eyes of staffers at the Education Department, who began to consider the ramifications if what the Princeton president was saying is actually true. The department decided to take Eisgruber’s statements literally, which would mean the school would be in violation of federal law and thus have to forfeit much of its $75 million in federal aid.
Saying Eisgruber “admitted Princeton’s educational program is and for decades has been racist,” the department sent the school a letter on September 16 that suggested the institution may be in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says, “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“Based on its admitted racism,” wrote department Assistant Secretary Robert King, “Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false.”
King further says Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos* “may consider measures against Princeton for false Program Participation Agreement nondiscrimination assurances, including an action to recover funds.”
Many in academia expressed outrage at the unprecedented example of an executive arm of government calling a progressive organization’s bluff. A week later, over 80 university presidents signed a letter in solidarity with Princeton, calling it “outrageous” that the department “is using our country’s resources to investigate an institution that is committed to becoming more inclusive by reckoning with the impact in the present of our shared legacies of racism.”
In a later statement, Princeton stood by its original claims, saying it is “unfortunate that the Department appears to believe that grappling honestly with the nation’s history and the current effects of systemic racism runs afoul of existing law.”
But given its dedication to continuing the investigation, the Education Department remains unmoved.
The Woke Managerial Revolution Goes to School
College campus safe spaces, speech codes, and woke witch hunts may be coming to a high school near you.
Charles Fain Lehman chronicled in The Washington Free Beacon how school districts and private schools around the country are adopting woke, “anti-racist” policies based on critical theory ideologies once ensconced in the ivory tower.
Schools are adding the Pulitzer Prize-winning but factually challenged 1619 Project, to their curriculum. The 1619 Project was aimed at reframing American history as being rooted in slavery rather than the ideas of liberty from 1776.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Los Angeles’ elite Harvard-Westlake School recently announced that it will start teaching 11th-grade history from a “critical race theory perspective.”
Virginia’s Fairfax County public school district paid Ibram X. Kendi, the leading proponent of “anti-racism,” which seems a lot like racism in the name of social justice, $22,000 to deliver an hourlong lecture to teachers and staff.
Lehman continues:
Meanwhile, the tony Connecticut boarding school Loomis-Chaffee has introduced mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training for students and now requires faculty members to read Kendi’s ‘Stamped from the Beginning’ and [Robin] DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ for ‘professional development.’
San Diego’s public schools have overhauled grading for fear of racist impact, and New York City wants to follow. The KIPP Schools, long a model for charter school excellence, have dumped their ‘Work hard. Be nice’ slogan, claiming that ‘working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism.’
I’ve written about some of these cases, too.
Loudoun County, Virginia, not only adopted a program to enhance the “low level of racial consciousness and racial literacy” of its public school teachers and faculty, but it added punishments for teachers who questioned the policy in the public or private capacity.
The punishments were removed after the policy drew media attention and public outcry, but the woke agenda remained.
That critical race theory and various “woke” policies are proliferating at public and elite private schools around the country is disturbing enough. But Lehman highlighted a critical element as to how and why this is happening now, and on a vast scale.
These ideas have emerged alongside the surge of administrative bloat occurring in K-12 schools in the last several decades.
It seems this seemingly exponential growth in school administration has created two serious crises.
The first, of course, is the rising cost of public education, where a much larger share of the budget is devoted to administrators rather than teachers and students. This has often come at the expense of teachers’ salaries, which have generally not increased in line with upticks in school spending.
My colleague, Lindsey Burke, also director of education policy at The Heritage Foundation, and education researcher Benjamin Scafidi, an economics professor at Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University, explained this process in 2016.
Since 1950, public schools have dramatically increased their staff compared to the number of students.
Burke and Scafidi used District of Columbia schools as an example.
“According to data that the District of Columbia Public Schools submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, the District’s public schools experienced a 3.1% decline in its student population between the 1993-94 and 2013-14 school years,” Burke and Scafidi wrote. “Despite this decline in students, D.C. Public Schools increased its staffing by 7.7% (all increases are in full-time equivalents).”
And where did those staff increases occur? The number of teachers declined overall, but the number administrators and all other staff grew by an incredible 19.3%.
Growth in administrative staff appears to be hitting elite private schools, too. And what are these administrative additions doing exactly? Clearly, many are foisting critical race theory and other ideologies on the student body and staff.
Lehman laid out the source of the second problem caused by the staffing surge:
Positions like ‘director of diversity’ emerged in the early 2000s, Exeter [diversity, equity, and inclusion] chief Stephanie Bramlett told the prestigious school’s alumni magazine. As far back as 2007, the journal Educational Leadership was emphasizing the need for administrators to confront ‘issues of social dominance and social justice.’
Portland Public Schools created its ‘office of equity’ in 2011. Holy Name High School in tiny Parma Heights, Ohio, added a director of diversity and inclusion in 2018. Justice High School already had diversity advisers on the payroll, and Harvard-Westlake’s new commitments add to a five-woman diversity team and a diversity conference held annually since 2018.
This revolution comes through the work of high-priced consultants and consulting firms, as in the case of Fairfax and other school districts. Meanwhile, the number of administrators continues to grow to meet the demand of the woke crusade.
“[I]f you look at these schools, their roster of [diversity, equity, and inclusion] people [has] only grown over the past five to 10 years,” Lehman said in an interview with The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen.
They might’ve started with one diversity chief, and then because of that person finding issues, they hire another person, and then another person, and then you have a seven-person group who’s responsible for diversity.
And it is telling to me that as these organizations add administrators, the number of acquisitions of racism only increases, the number of identified instances of racism only increases. Maybe they’re measuring better, but they may also typically be measuring more.
That many of our colleges and universities are radical should be no surprise to anyone. After all, William F. Buckley wrote “God and Man at Yale” in 1951 to explain the left-wing drift of his school and many others. In the last half-century, the situation has become much worse.
But now we are seeing the same process transform America’s K-12 education, where college-educated administrators and diversity officers—the well-paid apparatchiks of social justice—increasingly foist critical theory onto teachers and students, often at taxpayer expense.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/10/the-woke-managerial-revolution-goes-to-school
The Chicago Teachers Union’s misplaced prioritiesThe Chicago Teachers Union declared Sunday that “reopening schools is rooted in sexism, misogyny, and racism” in a tweet that has since been deleted.
Not surprisingly, the union faced instant criticism for the misguided message, which has no scientific basis.
In a follow-up tweet, CTU wrote, “Fair enough. Complex issue. Requires nuance. And much more discussion. More important, the people the decision affects deserve more. So we’ll continue give them that. Appreciate the feedback of those truly in the struggle.”
Yes, CTU, the more than 350,000 students who are affected by the decision to keep Chicago’s public schools closed for months definitely deserve more.
And a significant portion of Chicago public school students are struggling due to CTU’s insistence on not returning to the classroom.
According to CPS data, “From May 11 through May 16 … 23% of students failed to log onto an online classroom platform supported by CPS even once.”
Even worse, CPS attendance has declined substantially since the pandemic began.
As of mid-October, more than 15,000 students are no longer attending CPS schools since the end of the past school year and the beginning of the current school year. That does not include the number of students who have dropped out since the beginning of the school year.
CPS CEO Janice Jackson recently said, “This is the largest drop in enrollment that Chicago Public Schools has experienced in the past two decades.”
CPS Chief Education Officer LaTanya McDade reiterated the point: “While we’re seeing similar trends across the country, the stunning decline among Black children enrolled in pre-K casts a somber light on how the pandemic and remote learning negatively impact our youngest learners.”
McDade added, “It’s our responsibility to educate our children, and we are prepared to safely offer in-person learning, beginning with our youngest and most vulnerable students, to ensure they stay on a positive academic trajectory.”
While CTU disingenuously claims — at least for a moment — that reopening schools is “racist,” McDade emphasizes that CPS shutdowns overwhelmingly harm minority students, who make up the majority of CPS students.
Moreover, McDade highlights that remote learning is not working, especially for minority students.
Throughout the nation, data show that virtual education is inferior to traditional in-person learning. No wonder parents, including many with children in CPS, are frustrated with teachers unions’ reluctance to have their members return to the classroom.
CTU’s adamant opposition to in-person schooling during the pandemic is even more questionable because we now know so much more about how the coronavirus spreads and does not spread.
To date, data show that children are generally not likely to transmit COVID-19.
According to Dr. Daniel Johnson, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Chicago Medical Center, “It’s safe to keep schools open.”
However, despite the evidence that schools are safe and students desperately need in-person learning, CTU continues to fight to keep Chicago public schools closed.
On Dec. 7, CTU filed a request for “an injunction against Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s arbitrary school reopening date.”
Sadly, CTU seems unconcerned with the havoc that remote learning is wreaking. CTU’s unyielding hostility to reopening schools has nothing to do with racism, sexism or misogyny. It has everything to do with the fact that the union’s priorities are more than misplaced.
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http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
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