I remember how it was -- JR
Trump Was Right: Stanford Law Says Public Schools Create Racial Hierarchy
Congrats to Stanford Law and Policy Lab. They have identified the problem but are pursuing an epic failure with their solution. It seems the top-tier school has finally figured out that tying children to failing schools by their zip codes systematically oppresses black and brown children. President Trump knew that when he called school choice the civil rights issue of our time. However, Stanford is taking the standard approach of over-educated leftists. As is typical, they detected disparate outcomes in a system they are evaluating, they blamed it on racism and their first instinct was to lower the standards.
Their practicum is The Youth Justice Lab: Imagining an Anti-Racist Public Education System. Perhaps they would like to engage in a deeper analysis:
Recently I wrote about a teen in Baltimore who only passed three classes in his entire high school career. Even more shocking, with a GPA of 0.13, his class rank was 62 out of 120 students. The mayor of Baltimore City is black, the city council is extremely diverse, and the CEO of Baltimore City Schools is also black. The school district’s average teacher salary is $62,000, and its per-student spending was the third highest in the nation in 2019.
This overall picture of well-funded schools with a minority-led city government and school leadership is common in underperforming urban school districts. These districts have financial resources, and it would be hard to imagine their leadership’s primary goal is to hold students down based on racial identity. Instead, schools and individual student school performances are a multi-factor analysis. It is not as simple as assigning a motive, as Stanford Law has.
Luckily, Stanford University has one of the most astute students on inequity in education at the Hoover Institution. Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote a data-filled book called Charter Schools and Their Enemies. He demonstrates that charter schools, free from mandates from the local school board, can operate in the same building as a public school and produce significantly better results with predominantly minority populations. He spends quite a bit of time evaluating Success Academy, a charter school system comprised of 47 schools in New York City that enroll approximately 20,000 students.
Success Academy enrolls students through a lottery in underserved neighborhoods. In the last year that students in New York took standardized tests, Success Academy students had the state’s highest scores. Of the more than 7,000 students who took the exams, 99% passed the math portion, with 86% achieving the highest score, and 90% passed the English and language arts portion, with 41% achieving the highest score. The student population that took the tests was diverse and had an average household income of less than $50,000 in one of the world’s highest cost-of-living cities.
The district significantly outperformed students from much wealthier and less diverse school districts. Their most vulnerable students, those with IEPs, English-language learners, and homeless children, outperformed New York City public schools at astounding rates. For example, 86% of Success Academy’s English-language learners passed the English and language arts exam. Only 9% of those students passed the test in New York City public schools.
To solve disparate outcomes, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his administration have employed many of the ideas the Stanford website is hinting at. They have lowered standards, eliminated achievement testing for gifted and talented programs, and use equity, the typical “anti-racist” solution, as a guiding principle.
Stanford is highlighting a similar problem set to address disparate outcomes:
Perhaps no institution has reproduced racial hierarchy in the U.S. more than our public education system. From state-sponsored racial segregation of schools to the more subtle, but no less insidious racially segregated academic placements (e.g., special education, advanced placement) to exclusionary school discipline policies to ostensibly “meritocratic” testing and grading policies and beyond, public schools have created and perpetuated racial hierarchy, despite the promise that schools should help all children achieve the American Dream.
Success Academy has taken the opposite approach. They set high standards for student achievement, student behavior in and out of school and create programs and partnerships with parents to teach them how to best support their child’s success. “Meritocratic” testing results prove the model works, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability.
The soft bigotry of low expectations is evident in Stanford’s approach and New York City public schools’ approach. Both promote the idea that we should not expect minority children to meet behavioral or academic standards to address disparate outcomes. What they are proposing is lowering the bar or reducing services to all children. The 58 students in Baltimore will not leave school with more skills if you lower the standards. New York City schools’ performance also continues to decline with an increasing number of social justice solutions.
Organizations that are genuinely interested in improving public education should spend some time understanding what CEO Eva Moskowitz, who runs Success Academies, and other programs like it are doing. They should encourage policies that promote competition and innovation by reducing the number of burdensome local, state, and federal regulations that public schools are forced to operate under. Then let parents choose the environment that will best serve their child based on results.
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Most American Schools Are Damaging Your Child
If your child wishes to study STEM or law, college remains a necessity. Otherwise, it isn't.
I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her values.
But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun’s six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, 5 of the 6 chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any university in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speaking world), the odds are that your child’s decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently.
The worse news is that sending your child to almost any elementary school or high school — public or private — is fast becoming equally toxic. More and more schools are being taken over by left-wing ideologues and by nonideologues who lack the courage to confront the ideologues.
Once infected with leftism, these schools teach children to hate reason, tradition, America, Christianity, whites, excellence, freedom and masculinity. To cite one example, thanks to a million-dollar grant from Bill Gates through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Oregon Education Department has announced that teaching there is “one right answer” in math — yes, in math — is an expression of white supremacy. Why, then, would an Oregon parent who cares about his or her child’s mind, send that child to an Oregon school?
In addition to perverting education, teachers and their unions have exhibited a contempt for children that has taken even conservatives by surprise. Teachers’ unwillingness to show up in class for more than a year is as unscientific as it is unprecedented. On Feb. 3, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing that teachers do not need to get vaccinated against COVID-19 before schools can safely reopen: “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated. Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools.”
Nevertheless, in the country’s major cities, these cowards and hypochondriacs — people who claim to care more than anything else about their students — have refused to return to school (while demanding to be paid). They have refused to teach, despite the facts that child-to-teacher transmission of the COVID-19 virus is extremely rare and a teacher being hospitalized, let alone dying, as a result of interaction with students is rarer than a teacher dying in a traffic accident on the way to school. Why, then, would you send your child to be “taught” by people for whom you have — or should have — so little respect?
Why would you send your young child to a school that sponsors a “Drag Queen Story Hour” or that dwells on “nonbinary” gender identity? Do you think such things do not damage your child’s innocence? Do you want your child to be challenged about his or her sexual identity?
Why would you send your child to any school that teaches The New York Times’ “1619 Project”? This project holds that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, with the arrival of the first black slaves in North America, and that the Revolutionary War was fought not to gain independence from Britain but to preserve slavery. Virtually every leading historian specializing in American history — most of whom are liberals and Democrats, and some of whom were anti-Trump activists — have labeled “The 1619 Project” a lie.
Whenever I meet adults who hold traditional American values, I ask them three questions:
The first is, “Do you have children?”
If they do, my second question is, “How many of them share your values?” It is not common to meet people all of whose children share their parents’ traditional values.
If they respond that any of their children do not share their values, my third question is, “What happened?”
In every instance, these parents attribute the alienation of their child(ren) from their (the parents’) values to the college and, increasingly, the high school their child attended.
Moreover, not only are these children alienated from their parents’ values, but they are often also alienated from the parent(s). One thing you learn when you become left-wing is to have contempt for those who hold other beliefs.
Had these parents known how their children would turn out, they would never have sent them to college — or even to the high school they attended. It appears, however, that no matter how many people lose their children’s hearts and minds to left-wing indoctrination, and no matter how much information accumulates about the perversion of education in American schools, parents continue to take risks with their children they would never take in any other sphere.
I am well aware of the enormous obstacles. If your child wishes to study STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) or law, college remains a necessity. Otherwise, it isn’t.
As for elementary and high school, parents must either find a school that teaches reading, writing and arithmetic rather than America-hatred, or they should home-school their child. This, understandably, sounds terribly daunting. However, it is becoming considerably easier to do so as home-school groups and quality home-school curricula proliferate around the country.
Whatever your decision, never say you weren’t warned.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/78266
*************************************Suspended for Dissent
SUNY, university, PC, political correctness
Don’t state the “wrong” opinion while studying at SUNY-Geneseo. That is, if you want smoothly to sail through your academic career.
Owen Stevens violated the school’s “inclusivity” creed, according to which “a diverse campus community [is] marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”
Would-be future teachers like Stevens, the university contends, must respect “all forms” of gender identity. But he has argued publicly that there are only two sexes or genders (male, female).
“A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one un-inclusive Instagram video. “The biology is clear.”
So, faster than we have time to remember that “academic freedom” was once a hallowed standard of university conduct, he was suspended from the field teaching programs that are a requirement for all education students at the school. Stevens has refused to cooperate with the school’s plan to rehabilitate him.
The toleration and respect promoted by SUNY-Geneseo apparently does not include tolerating and respecting the right of others to express opinions about politics, society, and biology with which a university censor might disagree.
Of course, what constitutes “official” acceptable doctrine keeps changing. One can never know which once obviously untenable claims — about biology or anything else — will suddenly be upgraded to sacred dogma by persons with the power to penalize disagreement.
Regardless of one’s views of transgender contentions, though, Americans should judge a policy of forcing people to salute certain government- (or administrator-) approved conclusions intolerable.
It’s the school administrators responsible for suspending Stevens who should be suspended — or fired — for their conduct.
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2021/03/09/suspended-for-dissent/
*************************************California to vote on school curriculum that 'decolonizes' America, praises Aztec gods and builds a 'post-racist' society
The California Department of Education will vote next week on a new ethnic studies curriculum that calls for the 'decolonization' of America.
It's the latest in a trend of schools adjusting their curriculum in wake of the protests that gripped the nation after George Floyd's murder.
California's new curriculum will focus on 'social consciousnesses' and cultures often ignored or skimmed over in traditional educational textbooks, such as 'African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies,' according to resources available on the CDE website.
'By affirming the identities and contributions of marginalized groups in our society, ethnic studies helps students see themselves and each other as part of the narrative of the United States,' the overview reads.
The goal of the curriculum appears to be to 'decolonize' American society and start a 'counter-hegemony' in its place.
The curriculum, which will be presented for a vote on March 17, has resources for it to be taught anywhere from kindergarten to 12th grade.
More controversial than the study of marginalized groups, however, is the religious component of the curriculum.
Within the lesson resources are affirmations and chants designed to 'bring the class together, build unity around ethnic studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class' after a difficult lesson.
One chant goes: 'Tezkatlipoka, Tezkatlipoka, x2 smoking mirror, self-reflection Tezkatlipoka.' Tezkatlipoka was an Aztec god sometimes honored with human sacrifice.
That chant will likely be scrutinized during review, as the separation between church and state is muddied.
The curriculum says of the chant: 'In Lak Ech translates as you are my other me and relates to our habit of mind, empathy, and also compassion, interdependence, ecology, love, and mutual respect.'
The model curriculum also comes with a number of goals that students and teachers can achieve together.
Together, classes can 'critique empire-building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.'
They can also 'challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs and practices on multiple levels' and 'connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice and an equitable and democratic society' as students look to 'build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.'
The outcomes hoped for with this curriculum include the pursuit of justice, greater inclusivity, better self-understanding, more empathy for others, and recognizing intersectionality, which is the merging point of people's various identities.
The curriculum also aims for more civil engagement through self-empowerment, more focus on the community, and better interpersonal communication.
A final draft and public comments on the curriculum are set to be presented to the State Board of Education beginning March 17.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that some of the pushback to the curriculum was a lack of representation for several ethnic groups, including Sikhs and Jews.
This led to one of the drafts switching from clear outlines and lesson plans to more thematic and general ideas to avoid ostracizing others.
Reaction to the curriculum proposal on Twitter has been strong.
One person tweeted, 'Check the old testament regarding sacrifices. Unfortunately, that stuff is taught every day in U.S. schools. What's the difference?'
Another: 'Have students always been required to be so aware of social issues? I don't remember this from high school.'
Chad Ikerd seemingly criticized the praise of an Aztec god, saying 'Do these people really believe that only white people went to war and colonized? The Aztecs literally sacrificed members of other tribes they were at war with. They were an empire as well that also partook in taking over foreign lands.'
One even joked that this was a poor year to make a change to praising Aztec gods, considering all of the bad things happening in the world.
According to City Journal, the California public school system consists of 10,000 schools and around six million students.
California's ethnic studies model curriculum follows proposed changes across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and the protests that followed.
Last month, a public school system in Buffalo revealed a new curriculum that would teach 'all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.'
City Journal reports the curriculum if followed would teach children as young as kindergarten about police brutality while showing victims of black children killed by the police.
According to Education Week, Republican lawmakers in three states are seeking to ban The New York Times' 1619 Project, which reframes educational materials in regards to slavery and Black contributions to society.
Arkansas, Iowa, and Mississippi are the states leading the charge in fighting off the potential curriculum.
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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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