Schools nationwide are quietly removing books from their libraries

The miserable Left will do anything they can to make others miserable, and leading children into unhealthy sex lives just suits them down to the ground. So it is good to hear that resistance to that is having some effect. The rate of suicide amomg sexual deviants is high so I use the word "unhealthy" advisedly

Samantha Hull was on vacation when she got the call about the missing books.

Eight titles had melted away seemingly overnight, a panicked school aide told Hull, from the shelves of an elementary school in one of the 22 districts Hull oversees as co-chair of a group representing school librarians in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster and Lebanon counties. The books included titles such as “In My Mosque,” which instructs children about Islam; “A Place Inside of Me,” which explores a Black student’s reckoning with a police shooting; and “When Aidan Became a Brother,” whose main character is a transgender boy.
[Librarians and parents: Tell us about book challenges in your school district]

Hull, 33, couldn’t understand it: None of those books had been formally challenged by parents, even though she knew that activists across the country were targeting books featuring discussions of race, gender and LGBTQ identities for removal. The growing national furor had already arrived in Hull’s corner of Pennsylvania: Parents at a high school in Lancaster County, she said, had requested the elimination of “Gender Queer,” a memoir about being nonbinary, and “Lawn Boy,” a young-adult novel that includes a description of a sexual encounter between two boys.

Slowly — over months of meetings, investigations and secret conversations with fearful librarians across her counties — she came to understand the disturbing reality. Administrators, afraid of attracting controversy, were quietly removing books from library shelves before they could be challenged.
“There’s two battles going on at once,” Hull said, referring to parallel pushes from parents who want titles stricken and from school officials who are removing books preemptively. “And it’s been really difficult to fight both of those.”

The education culture wars

in eight states and nearly a dozen districts revealed similar stories that paint what they describe as a bleak picture of their profession, as they fret about and fight against American schoolchildren’s shrinking freedom to read.

School book bans are soaring: Although the vast majority of challenges go unreported, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 330 incidents of book censorship in just the three months from September to November 2021 — marking the highest rate since the association began tracking the issue in 1990. The questioned texts have mostly been “books about LGBTQ people and race and racism,” according to the National Coalition Against Censorship, and many removals sprang from challenges launched by White, conservative parents spurred on by pundits.

Meanwhile, state legislators are advancing bills that would restrict what children can access in school libraries — some of which also suggest penalizing librarians. A member of the Idaho House is advancing a bill that threatens librarians with a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison if they lend explicit materials to a student under 18.

In Tennessee, a bill proposes to prohibit school libraries from offering books defined as “harmful” to minors. “I don’t appreciate what’s going on in our libraries, what’s being put in front of our children. And shame on you for putting it there,” Republican state Rep. Jerry Sexton told a group of Tennessee librarians early this month. An Oklahoma lawmaker last week compared librarians to cockroaches.

And for some, professional consequences have already arrived: An assistant principal of a Mississippi elementary school was fired this month for reading the picture book “I Need a New Butt!,” which jokingly describes the adventures of a child who searches for a new posterior, to a class of second-graders.
Far less well understood, though, has been a backdoor campaign by wary administrators to remove books. The scope of that effort is impossible to estimate, given its secretive nature, but — in one example — a Nebraska librarian said three of the six book battles she’s been guiding this year have dealt with removals carried out by school officials working outside the bounds of book-challenge procedures.

All of this is having an effect: Librarians in many places are starting to self-censor. They are refraining from recommending or reading aloud certain titles to students, from displaying certain books on prominent shelves — and even from ordering certain kinds of reading material in the first place.
Although Hull has remained an outspoken advocate for keeping all kinds of books in schools — and has spent much of the past year fighting for books in meetings with various Lancaster and Lebanon school officials — even she is feeling the chill. In the current climate, she said, she would not be willing to order a copy of “Gender Queer” for any of her libraries.

Homes in Lancaster County, Pa., fly the American flag, the state flag and the Pine Tree flag, a Revolutionary War banner that has been adopted by some conservatives. (Kyle Grantham for The Washington Post)

Over the course of the 2021-2022 school year, according to Hull and several librarians who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, there have been formal challenges of six books across the 22 school districts in Lebanon and Lancaster counties. Meanwhile, at least 24 books have been pulled temporarily or permanently from the shelves by officials, without public announcement or explanation — including the children’s books “All Are Welcome,” “It Feels Good to Be Yourself” and “Families, Families, Families!”

A spokeswoman for Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13, the educational agency that oversees and provides services to the 22 districts, said, “we are unable to offer any details about this topic” because “we are not involved in [districts’] selection of local curricular resources including local library collections.”

Hull said she has recently been having trouble sleeping, consumed by thoughts about what she views as a war on books. She worries most about the consequences for the next generation of Americans. If book banning continues, she warned, “there will be absolutely no progress for our society.”

“When these students — who weren’t exposed to other realities, to people who are different, who have different life experiences than them — when they have children,” Hull said, “we will be right back where we were, fighting the same fight.”

‘Angry, hurt and frustrated’

Stacy Langton believes parents should control when and how their children learn about sex, and she is adamant that “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” should not be on the shelves in the Fairfax County Public Schools, where two of her six children are enrolled. She has spent the past six months trying to remove the texts, which she believes threaten children’s morals because they describe sex scenes in graphic detail — including, in “Gender Queer,” an encounter between an apparent teenager and an older, bearded man.

“There’s an age-appropriateness to all things, and that includes sex education — you’re inherently going to be destroying a child’s innocence and their purity until they’re old enough to be able to understand,” said Langton, 52.
School officials decided after months of review that both books have literary value and neither depicts pedophilia.
Psychologists, academics and librarians reached by The Washington Post said they see value in introducing children to books that contain challenging material, including of the sexual kind, provided it is done with appropriate context, care and tact.

Research shows there is an association between children reading certain kinds of explicit texts — those that depict sexual violence, degrade women or do not discuss boundaries or consent — and engaging in risky sexual behaviors, as well as sex at an early age, according to Amy Egbert, a research fellow in Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.

But, Egbert said, she doesn’t believe that those types of books are available in school libraries. The books being challenged, she said, are often those that deal with difficult topics, featuring a main character struggling to understand their sexuality or experiencing some kind of racial tensions or racism. Removing those books is an obstacle to children’s development, she said, pointing to research — including on abstinence-only sex education — that shows that not talking about subjects with children does not change their behavior.
“Those books help kids to start thinking about topics — topics they are probably thinking about already and a lot of times would find information on,” she said. “The information is presented in a way that is more manageable in books. … The books that are being banned, if handled right, can allow kids to explore the human condition in a safe way.”

https://archive.ph/vOXER

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California’s Math Curriculum Framework: Still Woke

The California State Department of Education has released a new draft of its curriculum framework for K-12 mathematics. While it is notably improved regarding opportunities for advanced work, the document is still woefully laden with dogma about politics and about how to teach math.

The framework promotes only the progressive-education approach to teaching math, calling it “student-led” instruction, “active learning,” “active inquiry,” and “collaborative” instruction. But evidence from the 1950s through recent times shows that this way of teaching math is ineffective. That evidence comes from scrutinizing carefully designed studies featuring randomized control and what are called quasi-experiments, which come close to the effect of randomized assignment. Quasi-experiments look at cases, for example, where two adjoining districts with similar populations or two adjoining similar schools adopt different policies. Both sorts of studies are much stronger evidence than the case studies that progressive educators rely on.

In the spring 2012 issue of American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, top educational psychologists Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller summarized “decades of research” that “clearly demonstrates” that for almost all students, “direct, explicit instruction” is “more effective” than progressive education in math.

Clark, Kirschner, and Sweller conclude that after “a half century” of progressive educators advocating inquiry-based teaching of math, “no body of sound research” can be found that supports using that approach with “anyone other than the most expert students.” Evidence from the best studies, they emphasize, “almost uniformly” supports “full and explicit” instruction rather than an inquiry-based approach. Yet when explicit, direct instruction is discussed in the proposed math curriculum (chaps. 3 and 6), it is deprecated.

Moreover, in 2016 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported on its 2012 round of tests, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The data clearly showed that “teacher-directed” instruction was more effective than “student-oriented” instruction.

Yet the proposed math framework promotes only progressive education’s inquiry-based approach. This is ideology, not science. It will not help those who struggle in math. It can only bring down student achievement.

If the framework writers had wanted solid evidence, they would have relied on the final report and subgroup reports of the 2008 federal National Mathematics Advisory Panel. They would have made even more use of the practice guides of the federal Institute of Education Sciences, which are designed for teachers and curriculum writers. Instead, the framework’s writers pretend this high-quality evidence doesn’t even exist.

In terms of putting students of similar preparedness together the new draft improves over its predecessor. The previous draft would have outlawed any classes that were grouped according to math achievement in K–10. The current draft still speaks of the “negative aspects” of tracking systems in middle school (chap. 9) and disparages “blunt methods” of tracking (chap. 9). But on the whole it has a salutary emphasis on accessible options and opportunities for students to “catch up with content as well as accelerate” their learning.

The previous draft was also notable for its heavily politicized content. Over 1200 figures in California’s community of scientific and math professionals (most of whom are college and university professors) denounced this importing of political content into math instruction. In some ways the new draft is an improvement. It has removed claims that math is not a neutral, objective discipline, and some highly political vignettes have been toned down.

Nonetheless, “trauma-induced pedagogy” is still highlighted (chap. 2). This is the idea that students are disabled emotionally by a racist, sexist, violent society ruled by a capitalist class and that therefore teaching should be therapeutic. Such teacher-therapists often conclude that their teaching should encourage resistance to society’s institutions. This is an ideological distraction.

So the proposed math curriculum is still highly politicized. A teacher is considered exemplary for promoting “sociopolitical consciousness” (chap. 2). Teachers are told that they should take a “justice-oriented perspective” at any grade level, K–12, in order to empower their students politically (chap. 2). For example, teachers are told to have students do practice exercises and data analysis in the context of “environmental or social justice” (chaps. 1 and 7).

Math should be neutral and nonpolitical. A math that caters to the 12 percent of Californians who are “strongly liberal”is a math that will upset the millions of parents who are not that liberal. Why should they pay their tax dollars to have their children indoctrinated?

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14086&omhide=true&trk=rm

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The Very Model of a Modern University President

While American higher education often is rightly condemned for being inefficient, non-innovative, and resistant to change, there are exceptions, and there are some collegiate entrepreneurs whose success is worthy of commendation and emulation. To me, the top award for American higher education innovation must go to Mitch Daniels, who is just beginning his tenth year as the president of Purdue University.

I had a nice chat with President Daniels the other day. At the beginning, I reminded him how we first met: I visited him in his office as Governor of Indiana in late 2012, shortly before beginning his tenure as Purdue’s president.

Daniels wanted to talk about the compensation package for Purdue’s president, and rather than wanting me to provide clever arguments why his salary should far exceed that of his predecessor, he said he was willing and even eager to take a reduction in the presidential salary—as long as he could earn performance bonuses for doing a good job running the Boilermakers. I said to my sidekick with me at the interview (Anthony Hennen, formerly with the James Martin Center), “he will be an unusual college president.” For once, an economist (me) forecasted correctly!

The measurement of academic outcomes is seldom straightforward, so Daniels and I talked about the problems with using such indicators as attrition (dropout) rates (a statistic that can be superficially improved simply by lowering academic standards), magazine rankings, financial reserves, enrollments (which likewise can be temporarily increased by lowering standards, likely harmful in the long run), outside research grants received, student outcomes on standardized tests, etc.

Daniels is not only competent but kind and considerate: I once ate breakfast with Mitch at the tony Four Seasons Hotel in Washington when he suddenly got up and started helping understaffed employees bus tables!

Nine years later, Mitch Daniels lives up to his billing. At a time of stagnant national enrollments, Purdue’s are booming, at record highs. Student quality is rising. A remarkable tuition freeze has lowered the inflation-adjusted cost of Purdue by over 20 percent, making it the bargain school in the Big Ten.

He realized higher education’s (including Purdue’s) weaknesses, getting out of activities that Purdue did not do particularly well, ones outsiders could do better and cheaper. For example, Purdue used to run a transportation service, busses to get students around the spacious campus—he ditched that, turning the job over to private providers who were transportation experts. Similarly, as he told me “We did not do online education particularly well.” So he went out and bought Kaplan, a major for-profit provider (for one dollar!) letting it morph into Purdue Global, today educating nearly as many students as attend the main campus in West Lafayette.

Although somewhat constrained by laws and finances, Daniels has started to change the way students pay for college. Mitch correctly thought it strange that relatively financially unsophisticated teenagers amass large amounts of debts to pay for college, rather than sell equity (stock) in themselves, so he has started an Income Share Agreement plan at Purdue that has attracted an increasing number of students who contract to have their tuition (or part of it) at Purdue paid for while attending school in return for giving up a percentage of their postgraduate earnings.

For all the purely economic successes Purdue has mounted (running budget surpluses every year, for example), Daniels seems to agree with something I feel: when he started at Purdue in 2013 the key problem in higher education was affordability and rising costs. Today, equally important is the threat from a breakdown in intellectual diversity—robust debates on the direction society should be moving. Purdue was a very early pioneer in adopting the Chicago Principles favoring unfettered and robust debates on campus on hot button issues. No Cancel Culture or Wokeness at Purdue.

Daniels has also emphasized expansion in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) areas. Purdue’s historic reputation was that of a good engineering school, and the nation needs more scientists, engineers, computer gurus. Purdue is pouring new resources into those areas. Although he did not say it, I suspect that he is content on having cross-state rival Indiana University excel in, for example, music composition, vocal performance, or journalism. He appropriately seems gratified that Purdue is riding a wave of high demand for scientists.

We talked about being a university president. I observed that several other Big Ten schools had actually ousted their presidents in the last decade or so—Penn State, Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State come to mind. He commented that with just nine years tenure at Purdue, he now had the greatest seniority of all Big Ten presidents.

Why don’t presidents stay around longer? Is it the pressure of the job? Without complaining, President Daniels acknowledged that the job of being a college president is not an easy one, requiring skills in a multiplicity of areas. Although he is 72, he seems to have no immediate plans to retire: the job is often challenging but always interesting and occasionally even fun.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Daniels has pushed Purdue into some new areas, including opening a new polytechnic college that caters to non-traditional post-secondary students benefiting from a more hands-on approach to learning. Mitch acknowledges the need for good quality shorter vocational certificate programs training students to, say, drive a long-distance truck, learn how to weld, or become a computer coder.

He is not a “college for all” president, and freely acknowledges that appropriate learning experiences vary considerably from individual to individual. Indeed, unlike the arch-typical president, he does not constantly badger the state government that he once headed for money, noting that inflation-adjusted appropriations from the state of Indiana have not risen during his presidency—but he is not angry about it, observing that there are many pressing needs for funds besides higher education.

Mitch Daniels, of course, is not alone in being dynamic, entrepreneurial, and generally successful in a higher education setting. For example, the granddaddy of all university presidents, Gordon Gee, has run five universities (now West Virginia University) for well over four decades with great competence and verve. Michael Crow has built Arizona State University into something of a national powerhouse, with an aggressively successful online presence.

The great master at online learning, however, may well be Paul LeBlanc, who has taken the sleepy University of Southern New Hampshire and made it a major presence in online education. And waiting in the wings to demonstrate his special qualities: Pano Kanelos, president of the new University of Austin that wishes to instill and enhance intellectual diversity at that institution, following a stint at the uber-traditional Saint John’s.

I used to believe that great University presidents had to have lots of experience doing what universities do best—teach truly “higher education” while expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Mitch Daniels shows that is not always true. Mitch went to great private schools—Princeton and Georgetown, and witnessed academic excellence, but he also honed his skills working for many years at a private company (Eli Lilly) and through government service (including being U.S. budget director as well as a governor.)

There are a lot of mediocre people and ideas contributing to American universities being excessively costly, with too little learning and vocational relevance, and a disturbing contempt for a diversity of ideas to challenge student minds. But there are also the leaders like Mitch Daniels who are striving to have America maintain and expand its higher educational exceptionalism in the decades ahead.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14078&omhide=true&trk=rm

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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