I remember how it was -- JR
University of California Suicide Watch
It seems determined to end the university’s preeminence.
Californians have long prided themselves on having one of the world’s premier public universities, in addition to great private schools like Stanford and Cal Tech. Forbes ranks the University of California at Berkeley as the best college in America and places three other UC schools (UCLA, San Diego, and Davis) among the top 20. U.S. News & World Report ranks the UC schools a bit lower, but both UCLA and Berkeley are in its top 25—ahead of the State University of New York (SUNY), the University of Texas, and all other state universities.
UC and state officials now seem determined to end the university’s preeminence by declaring war on academic excellence. Great universities like Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford have one overriding goal: to maximize the quantity and quality of the knowledge they create and disseminate. Great schools strive for the best, brightest, and most diligent students and faculty, allowing them to achieve superior outcomes.
For several years, however, the UC system—whose 10 campuses enrolled nearly 295,000 students this past fall—has been backing away from its commitment to excellence. In 2020, for example, the UC Board of Regents voted to drop the required SAT or ACT admissions test, despite a faculty committee’s recommendation to continue requiring it for undergraduate admission because it provides valuable information that enables UC to select highly qualified students. While many schools dropped the college readiness tests during the COVID pandemic, top schools, such as MIT and Georgia Tech—seeking to attract future science and technology leaders—have started reinstating them. As MIT’s admissions dean explained, “our ability to accurately predict student academic success ... is significantly improved by considering standardized testing.” Because of grade inflation and the abysmal quality of some high schools, grades alone are often a woefully inadequate predictor of collegiate success.
An even greater threat to UC’s academic integrity comes from the current attempt to require freshman applicants to complete an “ethnic studies” course in high school—though many high schools don’t offer such courses. Proposed guidelines for the ethnic studies classes suggested they “should create and honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels.” They argue students should learn about “systems of power and oppression,” such as “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” In short, if you want to attend the University of California you must be indoctrinated in a racialist ideology that many—I dare say most—Americans believe is fundamentally wrong. As a letter signed by more than 100 UC faculty put it, “The university should never be in the position of forcing a particular political agenda upon its own students—let alone UC applicants across the state and the nation.”
A larger group of nearly 2,000 UC faculty, students, and community members also condemned the proposal, saying it would “incite bigotry and hatred in California classrooms, particularly against Jewish ... students,” pointing to the anti-Israel and anti-Zionism comments of some of the proposal’s advocates.
Perhaps more outrageous in a democracy is the fact that a small group of individuals associated with the University of California is trying to force its ideology on high schools, whose curriculum is normally, and properly, set by state and local school boards.
It is arguably appropriate for governmental authorities to mandate that graduates of publicly supported high schools study, for example, algebra; geometry; English, American, and world history; and some science before receiving their diplomas. Such requirements can help ensure that high school graduates are at least minimally knowledgeable about important things all adults should know. But imposing an ideology that deliberately denigrates Americans of European descent, and the extraordinary accomplishments of our nation, is not only wrong but despicable.
As someone who for years ranked colleges for a major magazine, I confidently predict that if the University of California continues its denigration of academic standards and its mandatory woke indoctrination of students, it will soon fall from its academic perch, and California high schoolers who can’t get into, or afford, one of the Golden State’s leading private schools will look to attend college at out-of-state institutions where traditional standards still apply.
The net result will be an acceleration of the already worrisome out-migration from California.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14161
***************************************************An "anti-racism" book being handed out to students as young as 4 years old in Washington, DC, shows how far indoctrination is going in public schools
Parents, do you want your toddlers being taught that “White people are a part of a society that benefits them in almost every instance,” and that “It’s as if white people walk around with an invisible force field because they hold all of the power in America”? Because that’s what 4-year-olds are being taught in a Washington, DC, public school.
Funny how this thing that we are being told is not happening … keeps happening. “How dare you accuse us of indoctrinating your kids in racist attitudes? Now shut up while we browbeat little ones with the ‘Anti-Racism Fight Club Fistbook for Kids,’ which says, ‘If you are a white person, white privilege is something you were born with,’ so you must be ‘loud, uncomfortable, confrontational and visible to ensure change is made.’”
Putting a noxious twist on the old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, kids, you’ve got to be carefully taught … that you’re a racist.
The book — which, according to a Nov. 30 letter from Janney Elementary School principal Danielle Singh, was given to students in pre-K through third grade as part of an “Anti-Racism Fight Club” — asks, “Where do you see racism in yourself? This requires true soul-searching. Be real with yourself, don’t feel guilt/shame and own it. It’s the first step in becoming an anti-racist.”
This is mind poison. Parents are absolutely right to be alarmed about this kind of teaching, and need to take a more active role in preventing it from becoming more widespread.
The left has been dismissing these concerns, and waving away the radical new ideology, by pretending critical race theory is not being inflicted on our kids. Stopping public schools from teaching this corrosive ideology constitutes an “effort to weaponize CRT” (the Guardian), “a phony ‘issue’ … to get people as enraged as possible” (Paul Waldman of the Washington Post) and a “moral panic” (New York magazine and many others).
And yet here is the “Fistbook” (it’s not a “handbook,” by the way, because a hand that isn’t clenched into a fist isn’t threatening enough): “Imagine a white person raced against a Black person. The white person would be able to run at his normal speed while the Black person would have a 100-pound weight attached to his leg. Chances are the white person would win the race almost every time.”
Yeah, that’s not what I see when I watch Olympic sprinting. But in addition to citing a laughably inapt example, this line of indoctrination is morally wrong.
White kids shouldn’t be bathed in racial guilt, and it’s just as important that black kids should not be steeped in racial grievance and resentment. Kids should be taught to treat everyone equally and advance us toward the colorblind society: This was the dream in the “I have a dream” speech. Instead, children are being taught to be obsessed with race.
What possible good can it do to a black child to be told that the whole system is stacked against him? Why turn innocent kids who are still learning their ABCs into a generation afflicted by emotionally destructive feelings?
For the sake of shorthand, it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to call this critical race theory and to order their school boards to stop it. CRT, whatever its academic meaning a decade ago, is now simply a broadly used term for any racial-essentialist nonsense such as that “whiteness” is inherently suspect or that to be black is to be automatically a victim of “structural racism.”
https://nypost.com/2022/05/04/anti-racism-for-4-year-olds-shows-how-destructive-the-ideology-is/
********************************************Australia: Struggling school students to be blocked from teaching degrees
As 15,000 angry NSW teachers marched in the streets demanding pay rises of up to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, the federal government announced $40m in extra funding to recruit hundreds more engineers, lawyers, tech experts and tradies into classrooms.
Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said 700 more mid-career professionals would be retrained through the Teach for Australia program, to enter classrooms next year and in 2024 if the Coalition were re-elected.
He said he was concerned that at least a quarter of maths teachers in Australia were not qualified to teach the subject, and that one in 10 university graduates in education courses were failing the literacy and numeracy test that was required to graduate.
Mr Robert said his 12-year-old son had been able to answer some of the maths questions that 10 per cent of university graduates got wrong. “I was reading out example questions to our sons at the weekend and my boys were answering them,’’ he said.
“The test is designed for the top 30 per cent of (school leavers) and we can’t have the people looking to teach our students failing it.’’
Sample questions include: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’
Many of the literacy questions are multiple choice, to check comprehension and identify spelling errors.
Mr Robert said a re-elected Morrison government would seek consensus from the states and territories to mandate that students pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) as a condition of starting their university degree.
Under existing arrangements, undergraduate teachers can sit the test at any time during their degree, but cannot graduate until they pass. But Mr Robert said university education faculties should only enrol students who had already passed the test.
“Ten per cent of our teaching graduates are failing on basic literacy and numeracy,’’ he said. “Ten per cent (of those) are failing it not once, not twice, but three times.’’
Mr Robert also announced $13.4m to change teacher accreditation standards, to halve the time it takes mid-career professionals with a university degree to retrain as school teachers.
The federal government would need state and territory approval to change the graduate diploma of education from two years to one.
Mr Robert said two years of retraining was a barrier for workers wanting to switch careers into teaching.
“One year to learn the pedagogy of teaching at university is enough,’’ he said. “You could get a whole bunch of older tradies who aren’t on the tools anymore to do a one-year graduate diploma and teach industrial art (in schools).’’
A re-elected Morrison government would also fund 60 workers to retrain as teachers through La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which combines a Master of Teaching with part-time work as “paraprofessional teachers’’ in hard-to-staff schools in Victoria.
And $10.8m would be spent to develop new micro-credentials to upskill existing teachers in teaching reading through phonics, explicit teaching methods, and managing disruptive students.
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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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