I remember how it was -- JR
FSU Settles Discrimination Suit With Student Senate President Ousted for Criticizing BLM
Florida State University settled a case with its former student Senate president who alleged he had been discriminated against because he is Catholic.
Jack Denton settled with Florida State University on Tuesday, nearly one year after he was ousted from his student government leadership position for criticizing progressive groups like Black Lives Matter, his lawyers told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Florida State University agreed to pay Denton $10,000 in damages and $1,050 in back pay, which he would’ve earned if he hadn’t been removed, according to the settlement agreement shared with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“If you stand against cancel culture, you can win,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Tyson Langhofer told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Cancel culture is scary and it’s very active, but Jack shows that if you stand, you can win.”
“I hope that’s the message students across the country see when they hear about Jack’s case,” he said.
Denton, who has since graduated, said he felt blessed to have been able to defend truth and justice alongside Alliance Defending Freedom. The settlement brought him great relief, he added.
“I hope that my case will embolden other students to not be afraid to speak their mind and to share their religious convictions with others,” Denton told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “When we engage in free speech, we make society better.”
Last June, in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, Denton advised friends in a private Catholic Student Union group text message against donating money to Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Reclaim the Block. He argued the groups promote causes like transgenderism and abortion that violate Catholic teaching.
Denton, who had been the Florida State University student Senate president, was then voted out of his leadership position after the texts were leaked to other student senators. Denton was accused of “dehumanizing” others and being “explicitly racist” because he privately told friends not to support progressive organizations.
“I don’t feel safe with you as president,” a Florida State University student, Valentina Brown, said during a June 5 Senate debate over Denton’s removal. “You are condemning our identities, an integral part of ourselves and our nature.”
Alliance Defending Freedom eventually filed a federal lawsuit against university administrators in August, alleging that his removal was “unconstitutional retaliation” in violation of his First Amendment rights. Denton only sued after attempting to resolve the case via internal school procedures, Langhofer said.
“The policies were clear,” Langhofer told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “[The lawsuit] could have been avoided if the university had the courage to stand up and say this was not right.”
After Judge Allen Winsor of the Northern District Court of Florida and the Florida State University Student Supreme Court both ruled in favor of Denton in October, Alliance Defending Freedom entered negotiations with the school over a settlement, Langhofer added.
Florida State University must soon issue a statement affirming that it is committed to protecting the rights of all students “no matter their religion” under the settlement. The university must also correct its webpage listing former student government leaders and mention that Denton was reinstated per court order.
“The First Amendment is universal and extends to people of all beliefs,” Denton said. “This victory is a victory for all religious students.”
The settlement affirmed that religious students cannot be punished for their religious beliefs, Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Logan Spena said in a statement.
“We are pleased that Florida State has finally affirmed its commitment to students’ First Amendment rights on campus,” Spena said. “All students should be able to peacefully share their personal convictions without fear of retaliation.”
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California Public School Gives Third Graders Assignment About ‘Place on Gender Spectrum’
After his 9-year-old brought home a school assignment referring to “experimenting with gender presentation” and the “gender spectrum,” Matthew Simmons is concerned that his son is being harmed by what he is taught.
“It makes me sad that he is getting exposed to this and having his childhood whittled away,” Simmons told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Simmons, 45, lives in Southern California. His third-grade son and sixth-grade daughter attend public school in the Los Alamitos Unified School District, 25 miles south of Los Angeles.
In mid-May, a teacher gave Simmons’ son a homework assignment to write an essay arguing for or against school uniforms. The teacher provided students with examples of pro and con arguments.
“Con 3” said school uniforms “may be sexist” and discussed how uniforms might affect a student “who is unsure of their place on the gender spectrum”:
Some uniforms may strike students and parents as sexist. For example, if a uniform requires girls to wear a skirt and pants are not allowed, some students and parents may object, leading to conflict with the administration. Not all girls want to wear skirts and some may resent being told to wear traditionally ‘feminine’ garments. Also, if a student is unsure of their place on the gender spectrum or is experimenting with different forms of gender presentation, school uniforms can present a real challenge.
Simmons says he began helping his son with the assignment before he realized that his 9-year-old didn’t even know what “sexist” meant.
Disturbed by the language used in the assignment, Simmons got in touch with the teacher to find out why the school was presenting concepts such as sexism and a “gender spectrum” to third graders.
Simmons says the teacher was apologetic, telling him that she felt terrible and did not mean for him to have a conversation about sexism with his 9-year-old son.
Simmons explained that the Los Alamitos superintendent of schools, Andrew Pulver, has said in meetings open to the public that he encourages teachers to give assignments that reflect students in class. Because a transgender student was in the teacher’s previous year’s class, the teacher told Simmons, she selected the assignment then and simply gave the same homework this year.
He doesn’t fault his son’s teacher for the gender ideology assignment, Simmon says, but sees her as a victim of a school board that is pushing its own agenda. He declined to reveal the teacher’s name.
“These teachers are inundated with stuff that is just not appropriate for kids,” he said Monday in the interview with The Daily Signal. “She had the best intentions at heart.”
The five-member Los Alamitos Board of Education approves the curriculum teachers use, providing a “menu” of assignment options for educators to choose from.
But Simmons contends that many of the options are “nonkosher” to parents such as himself who don’t want their children indoctrinated with gender ideology, critical race theory, and other liberal concepts.
“This is bigger than just conservatives and liberals,” Simmons said, adding: “This is something that, with the internet and YouTube and all this stuff, it’s a tough battle parents have anyways, but knowing the school is creating its own pathway to our children where we cannot even protect them, it’s really difficult.”
The Los Alamitos school district enrolls about 10,000 students in grades TK-12 in nine schools, all nine of which “have been honored as California Distinguished Schools and Gold Ribbon Schools,” according to the district’s website.
Other parents have complained to school district leaders about some assignments given to children, Simmons said, but “from the principals to the superintendent to the school board, we are not getting a very positive response at all.”
“They are resentful that we even bring it up,” he said.
The Los Alamitos school district did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Asked if he would consider pulling his children out of their school, Simmons said he wants them to receive a public education.
“I really like public school,” he said. “I went to [school in] this district and it was great.”
Taking his kids out of the school district won’t solve the problem, because his son’s “friends and neighbors are going to be inundated with this too,” Simmons said.
“So, I want to fight against that. I want to put a stop to this and I want to help out other children, including my own, to put a stop to this.”
It is not enough to simply teach your children right and wrong at home when they’re being indoctrinated all day long at school, he told The Daily Signal.
In an effort to push back against the leftist agenda promoted in the school, Simmons said, he plans to start a Facebook page called Los Alamitos Parents for Equality, “because that is something these people don’t believe in.”
“The woke people are all about equity, not equality,” he said.
Simmons says he believes that individuals should have equal opportunity, but can’t be guaranteed equality of outcomes. Schools in California, he said, are choosing to pursue “equal results instead of equal opportunity.”
The only ones who can fix the Los Alamitos school district’s problems are parents, he said:
The school board is completely indoctrinated. Many teachers are completely indoctrinated. … You cannot change their mind. The only thing you can do is vote them off [the school board] and let them know there are consequences to teaching children inappropriate things for their ages.
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Should able students be given a route to bypass university?
By RICHARD K. VEDDER
There are three relatively novel ideas to increase efficiency and reduce costs in college that I have promoted, largely to no avail, in recent years. First, I have called for colleges to have “skin in the game,” that is have to share the losses to taxpayers from defaulted student loans. That would incentivize colleges to be careful in matching student desires with capabilities and reality. Second, I have called for Income Share Agreements, a new way to finance college attendance reducing financial risks to students, one that has gained some limited acceptance and may yet be important in the future.
But I have been all but completely ignored in my call for a “National College Equivalence Test (NCET), where students performing well on a broad based fairly rigorous test could be granted a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. (See this space for July 2, 2018). A student from my early teaching days, Clarence Page, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, citing me, recently spoke favorably of a college GED, a way students with brains and ambition but limited formal education and resources could demonstrate that “I have the same capabilities of a typical college graduate and passed the NCET with a score of X.”
Following up on Clarence’s Tribune column, Steve Bertrand of Chicago radio station WGN interviewed me about the Collegiate GED. One listener then wrote me, “ I have no college education and am frustrated at 58 because I’m intimidated by the idea of walking into a university with all the scientific work I have done.” I would speculate the listener had gained a good deal of skill in the sciences from either the work he had performed and/or knowledge he gained through reading and other non-school ways of learning. If the body of knowledge accumulated equaled that of typical college degree holders, why shouldn’t he be eligible for a bachelor’s degree?
Universities live off of testing. Admission to college is large based on high school grades and tests like the SAT or ACT. High school grades, in turn, are largely determined by test results. Professors give grades to students in colleges largely based on testing, and admission to graduate and professional schools is largely exam-determined (the LSAT, GMAT, etc.) To become a lawyer, CPA, Foreign Service Officer, senior police or fire official, Certificated Financial Analyst or a whole variety of other occupations, you must pass one or more state or nationally administered tests.
Like most important examinations, the college GED test would have to be pretty long, say at least three hours. It would include a general education component, asking questions that most college educated persons should be able to answer, in many fields—history, political science, literature, science, mathematics, etc. It might test for critical thinking skills and writing ability by incorporating into the exam a test like the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Finally perhaps 25 percent of the test should be based on more intensive knowledge of a specific field (such as what a college major usually provides), where the test taker picks the field on which to be questioned.
The test could be scored from 0 to 100, with some selected passing value, say 70, which if achieved would lead to the award of a bachelor’s degree. But the student scoring 95 could brag about that. Indeed, it would be nice if ALL students wishing a bachelor’s degree, including those attending college, take the test (colleges could still award degrees independent of the test results if they so chose.) The test scores would provide all sorts of useful information. A bright non-college educated student could brag “my score on the College GED was higher than the average of Princeton graduates.” Accrediting agencies could evaluate schools partly on the basis of their average College GED test scores.
As I envision it, individuals of any age could take the test, and, theoretically at least, a few very bright 18 year old individuals could completely forego college and perhaps enter the workforce early. We need cheaper, less wasteful ways of certifying competence to enter the workforce than requiring students to spend $100,000 or more on a piece of paper—a college diploma.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13578&omhide=true
******************************How Equity Breeds Mediocrity and Stifles Achievement
By disincentivizing academic success the pursuit of equity rewards failure
There has been a growing push for “equity” in nearly all aspects of American life, in a stark shift away from the term “equality.” The push for equity is especially intense in the education system, where there is growing pressure to increase the educational attainment of African-Americans and other minorities. School districts and university systems are busy making so-called equity changes.
In a settlement with civil rights organizations, the University of California system, which oversees 10 universities, has decided to end the use of ACT and SAT standardized test scores for admissions and scholarships. The university system will not even consider the test scores on an optional basis. This format of standardized testing has never been perfect, it is true. But it would be unfair to assert that the ACT and SAT have offered no credible evidence to the admissions system for the students who use them, or that they inherently disadvantage particular demographics. This change eliminates a reasonable tool for California educators. Is it also an example of the pursuit of equity instead fostering mediocrity?
The University of California is not the only educational system trying to increase equity. The Sacramento City Unified School District has decided to change its grading system by making 50% the minimum grade a student can receive. The goal, according to the district, is to create a more equitable grading system.
In 2019, a New York City school diversity panel recommended ending all gifted classes in city schools because they had mostly white and Asian students in them. In April of this year Virginia considered eliminating advanced math courses prior to 11th grade until it was forced to backtrack. Even more recently, the Wall Street Journal has reported on the effort by California education officials to water down math instruction, abandoning gifted education for the sake of social justice, and deriding the notion of “right answers” and “objectivity” in math as expressions of white supremacy.
How is equity different from equality? Equality, which was championed by the original Civil Rights Movement, focuses on equal opportunity and eliminating discrimination. Equity explicitly rejects equal opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. A tweet sent out by Vice President Kamala Harris in November 2020 explains the differences between the two words, according to equity proponents.
Equal outcomes are a foolish thing for a society to pursue. In order to achieve and mandate equal outcomes, the state will have to engage in a never-ending cycle of discrimination. It will be an authoritarian state that is in constant search for victims to compensate and oppressors to punish.
Institutionalized equity is therefore also an attack on individualism. It reduces everyone to group members based on their race, gender, sexuality, or whatever characteristic the government and those who are promoting equity currently seek to promote or punish. It does not take into account the individual talents and limitations of each individual person. A person of one demographic might be best suited to being a firefighter, and a person of another demographic best suited to scholarship. But if their individual talents and aptitudes don’t advance equity for their demographic groups, then freely achieving their personal best outcomes would not be considered a success.
The pursuit of equity is that it does not encourage excellence. Instead, equity rewards failure and mediocrity. It effectively removes the ability to fail because failing classes or scoring poorly on standardized tests is the result of racism or whatever “ism” the equity chasers are trying to eradicate. It makes the passing of classes worthless because no one is allowed to fail.
It certainly does not help students learn. The purpose of grading school work and giving tests is to see what students are actually learning.
If individual students are struggling or failing to learn what is being taught, there are opportunities to address those gaps through extra help from the teacher. Instead, by treating academic failure as a systemic—rather than an individual—failure, equity purists shift the focus of educational improvement away from teaching the subject matter.
The pursuit of equity is creating is a world not far from the one described by Kurt Vonnegut’s famous short story Harrison Bergeron. Vonnegut describes a dystopian future United States where individual excellence is stamped out in a society where equality of outcomes is enforced by the state. Those who are better looking, more intelligent, and stronger than everyone else, among other traits, are forcibly “handicapped” by the federal government. Whereas in the story the government resorts to various physical devices to handicap its citizens, equity proponents resort to eliminating anything that allows students to excel over their classmates or to fail.
Equitable outcomes will harm the students it is intended to help and will reinforce the achievement gap between classes. Wealthier families will always be able to hire the private tutors, afford the high cost of participating in extracurricular activities, and put their children in private schools where excellence is encouraged. It will be the poorer families who are deprived of yet another means to advance.
If you really want to help disadvantaged students, support popular policies such as school choice which empower individual families and students. Most of all, stop punishing success in the name of equity.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/05/25/equity-breeds-mediocrity/
***********************************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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