I remember how it was -- JR
US Universities Are Watering Down Standards In The Name Of ‘Diversity’
Higher education institutions have implemented diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to vet students and faculty rather than evaluating them on their merits.
Universities have included different DEI initiatives including axing standardized test requirements, mandating DEI statements in applications and curriculum requirements. The initiatives aim to raise diversity and social justice awareness, considering mainly the promotion of understanding and consciousness of DEI. (RELATED: ‘Easy As 1,2,3’: Biden Admin Outlines How To Claim Student Loan Handout)
“It should be obvious that as universities become increasingly obsessed with diversity, inclusion and equity efforts, and devote more attention and resources to those efforts, they have reduced their attention, resources and focus on merit-based outcomes, traditional educational goals and academic competencies, and the equal treatment of all students and faculty regardless of their sex and race,” University of Michigan-Flint professor Mark Perry told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Universities can prioritize true academic excellence and true equality or they can prioritize diversity, inclusion and equity efforts, but they can’t prioritize both goals simultaneously, because to focus on diversity, inclusion and equity is to necessarily compromise academic quality and sacrifice the equal treatment of all individuals.”
Several universities require some sort of DEI statement outlining applicants’ competencies of diversity; applicants to the University of Tennessee are required to submit a diversity statement, which they are judged on, telling how they will help contribute to diversity and inclusion at the school.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a DEI rubric was created to grade how candidates have contributed to furthering DEI, according to the school website. It also allows candidates to be judged on their “knowledge and understanding” of DEI.
Indiana University School of Medicine updated its standards in May 2022 in order for professors to be promoted and tenured, requiring them to “show effort toward advancing DEI.” A “short narrative DEI summary” is one way the university suggested applicants could demonstrate their DEI competency.
Proposed regulations in June 2022 to the California Community Colleges Board of Governors would require community colleges in California to judge applicants and faculty applying for tenure on DEI “competencies.” Faculty and applicants will be judged on their understanding of “anti-racist principles.”
The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office directed the DCNF to their press release regarding the initiatives when asked for comment.
“These actions mark a seminal moment in an intentional process to strengthen campus and classroom climates across our institutions and aid in student retention and persistence,” Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said in the press release. “And they deliver on a promise we made in our Call to Action, issued during the racial reckoning in the spring of 2020.”
DEI has also been implemented through guidelines in curriculums; the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released DEI guidelines on July 14 for medical schools advising them to teach students to take their “identity, power and privilege” into account when treating a patient. The guidelines tell medical professionals to “address social determinants of health affecting patients and communities.”
“We have evidence that supports that race is a social construct, and there is a growing body of evidence about what race is and isn’t, and its impact on health,” John Burotti, president and CEO of AAMC, told the DCNF. “These new insights are improving medical practice and allow us to shift our thinking in medical education to better prepare tomorrow’s doctors.”
Since November 2021, applicants for several departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are required to submit a “Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” detailing their past and future contributions to DEI. The school stated that the “initial screening of applicants will be based exclusively on the Research Statement and the Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
The University of Tennessee mandated that all schools and departments create a “Diversity Action Plan” in the name of DEI in 2020. Each plan differed, but the College of Social Work assesses students on their “critical consciousness related to anti-racism and social justice,” requiring at least 90% of students to get a four out of five on the DEI test.
The University of San Diego School of Medicine began using critical race theory in 2020 to educate its students and aims its curriculum at “dismantling racism.” To do this, the school created an “antiracism lab” and hired only diverse faculty for its “Family Medicine Diversity and Anti-Racism Committee” to promote “empathy” and “anti-racism.”
Vice President Joe Biden (L) meets with (C-R) Dr. Bruce Levine, Dr. Carl June, and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann while touring the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania January 15, 2016. During the State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama tasked Biden to spearhead an initiative to cure cancer. REUTERS/Mark Makela
Vice President Joe Biden (L) meets with (C-R) Dr. Bruce Levine, Dr. Carl June, and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann while touring the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania January 15, 2016. REUTERS/Mark Makela.
Universities also have stressed DEI in their admission process, including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which have race-conscious admission policies. The schools claim that even with the race-based policies, they still face problems with representation of minority students on campus.
In May 2022, the University of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine exempted students from five historically black colleges and universities applying to their school from taking the Medical College Admissions Test, used to gauge a student’s readiness for medical school, if the student is accepted into an eight-week study program. While in the program, students receive housing and a stipend to conduct research, participate in community service and career seminars.
The NCAA proposed that Division I and Division II athletic teams drop the standardized test requirement for athletes as a part of their “eight-point plan to advance racial equity,” according to a February 2022 press release. Standardized tests for college admissions, such as the SAT and ACT, are used to determine a student’s rate of success at a higher institution.
Princeton University created a “diversity” tool in 2021 so faculty can hire vendors and suppliers on their physical attributions as opposed to their qualifications. Vendors are filtered by race, gender and sexual orientation through the tool, with a separate entity available for faculty to pick vendors just based off their ethnicity.
The “diversity” tool is an aspect of the university’s multi-year diversity plan to give a “fresh commitment and energy in the pursuit of racial equity and inclusivity.”
“Almost every university in the country has adopted some sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan,” John Sailer, fellow at the National Association of Scholars, told the DCNF. “If these plans aren’t adopted at the university level, individual schools and departments adopt them. These plans almost inevitably rewrite standards. Virtually every diversity, equity and inclusion task force recommends moving toward holistic admissions practices, or simply dropping standardized tests.”
“Often, these plans push new forms of pedagogy that downplay the role of well-established standards,” Sailer told the DCNF.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/05/universities-diversity-vet-students-faculty
***************************************************I was smeared as a 'grandma killer' for refusing to subject my kids to Covid lockdowns, but they've thrived - while math scores for millions have plummeted
In May of 2020, I was just one of the millions of parents – on the political right, left and center – who begged policymakers to weigh the potential benefits of our draconian pandemic mitigation measures against the potential harms.
I was canceled and smeared as a 'Grandma Killer' on Twitter for refusing to sacrifice the quality of my children's lives to protect vulnerable adults.
But I resisted.
I would not lock my kids down inside our home for irrational fear of Covid, and I was proven right. Today my kids are thriving; something few parents in liberal regions of the country can say.
My local elementary school, which my children would have attended if they weren't homeschooled, has seen the math scores for 3rd graders drop from 38.7% proficient in 2019, to 5.6% in 2021.
The reading scores or ELA (English Language Arts) scores dropped from an already dismal 26.7% in 2019 to 7.5% in 2021.
Nationally, the test results are also bleak, according to the 'Nation's Report Card,' conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The survey is the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of school lockdown policies and it's gut-wrenching.
Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds, the children who were half through their first-grade year when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, fell off a cliff during the first two years of the pandemic.
Kids testing in the top 90th percentile dropped three points in math. Students in the bottom 10th percentile showed a 12-point decline.
The average reading score was down five points – the largest decrease in 30 years.
As a homeschooler, my children were always better positioned to learn during a crisis. But there was a trickle-down effect for them as well as public school policies were adopted by many of their extra-curricular activites.
This approach failed everyone.
It's sickening and it didn't have to happen.
Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told the New York Times that she was, 'taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline.'
You want to know who wasn't surprised?
Former President Donald Trump.
Trump was explicit about the cost of school closures in the summer of 2020, as he fought to reopen the schools, faced with the opposition of the progressive establishment in government and media, in addition to the teachers' unions.
'According to McKinsey and Company, learning loss will probably be greatest among low-income Black and Hispanic students,' he explained during a news conference. 'They're the ones that are hit the hardest. We don't want that happening.'
Lo and behold – Trump was right.
While math scores for white students fell 5 points, the scores for black students dropped by 13 points and for hispanic students by 8 points.
So, what may be the consequence of erasing years of our children's educational growth?
At the end of 2021, a non-profit education news site, founded by a former CNN host and a former New York City education official, put a price tag on the cost of learning loss.
Their analysis found that, 'a 9 to 11 percentile point decline in math achievement (if allowed to become permanent) would represent a $43,800 loss in expected lifetime earnings.'
'Spread across the 50 million public school students currently enrolled in grades K to 12, that would be over $2 trillion — about 10 times more than the $200 billion Congress set aside last year to help schools respond to the pandemic.'
Sadly, this is no longer a hypothetical.
We have the proof that Covid lockdown policies hurt our kids.
And undoubtably, the most disgusting claim from the Covid scolds and lockdown fanatics was that our children were going to be fine.
They're resilient, we were told – again and again.
It was a lie! America's youth won't be okay without a genuine reckoning in the face of what we can now no longer deny was a catastrophic crime committed against them.
In a grim coincidence, the announcement of these national test scores came as the White House held a webinar last week alongside the United Federation of Teachers and National Education Association on getting back to school safely.
In attendance, UFT's Randi Weingarten and the CDC's Rochelle Walensky.
The panelists were a who's who of those responsible for keeping the schools shuttered and children in hybrid and/or remote learning for far too long.
Maybe it felt like a reunion of sorts, given how closely the Biden administration and CDC worked in tandem with the teacher's unions to keep schools shuttered throughout the 2020-2021 school year.
But by 2020, we knew that school lockdowns were harmful.
The American Academy of Pediatrics advised in June of 2020 that students be 'physically present in schools' as much as possible.
But the AAP changed their tune once President Trump advocated for opening schools; and liberals decided that opposition to Trump was more important than our kids' well-being.
As a result, some schools – especially those in urban and overwhelming liberal parts of the country – stayed closed.
As late as the winter of 2022 in Chicago, where 90% of the public-school population is minority, the teachers' union held a 5-day strike – shutting out 350,000 students from any instruction at all.
The unions didn't want their teachers to have to go back to work, and they vocally opposed any effort to help reopen these inner-city schools.
The United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz even claimed California Governor Gavin Newsom's plan to re-open schools would worsen 'structural racism.'
On May 4, 2021, Biden education secretary Miguel Cardona defended the teachers' unions refusing to reopen schools, explaining, 'Reopening schools in the middle of a pandemic is not as easy as some may think.'
The next day appearing on Morning Joe, Cardona refused to say it was a mistake to keep schools closed: 'It's critically important that we're listening to our health experts, because this is a health pandemic.'
These self-style children's advocates aren't just hypocrites; they're villains.
The Biden administration and teachers' unions have made crystal clear they have each other's backs, all while leaving our kid's out in the dust. And now we have the arsonists in charge of the rebuilding of our education system.
It would be criminal to do nothing with that information and a total betrayal of our children not to act on it.
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Australian Catholics’ gender warning for schools
Catholic schools have been strongly advised not to assist in efforts to affirm gender transitions in students through the use of drugs or surgical interventions and that “a human being’s sex is a physical, biological reality”.
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference will advise schools that, for the vast majority of children and adolescents, gender incongruence is a psychological condition through which they will pass safely and naturally with supportive psychological care.
The guidance, to be issued on Tuesday, urges Catholic schools to avoid assisting in the issue of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgery to limit possible infertility, “unnecessary damage” and “future possibilities for healthy human growth”.
The nation has more than 1700 Catholic schools educating about 780,000 students.
The guidance voices grave concerns over an affirmation-based approach to students experiencing gender dysphoria and instead steers educators to a “biopsychosocial model” based on research showing a high correlation between “childhood gender incongruence and family dynamics”.
“In this model, practitioners promote ongoing psychological support for the child or young person through engaging with families,” the guidance says. “By discovering the child’s and family’s stories, practitioners are able to understand the gender variance felt by the child or young person within the context of family and their domestic environment.”
Pastoral care initiatives that are “in conflict with the generosity of the Christian vision” are also to be “respectfully avoided”, including concepts that say gender is arbitrarily assigned at birth, gender is fluid and that gender is separate from biological sex.
“Research data strongly suggests that, for the vast majority of children and adolescents, gender incongruence is a psychological condition through which they will pass safely and naturally with supportive psychological care,” the guidance states. “Studies quote between 80 to 90 per cent of pre-pubescent children who do not seem to fit social gender expectations are not gender-incongruent in the long term.”
Catholic school leaders are told to recognise that society has “widely adopted the belief that each person’s innermost concept of themselves determines their gender identity”. But they are warned these recent changes were “in conflict with the Catholic understanding of creation, in which every person is created good and is loved unconditionally as they are”.
Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli, the chair of the Bishops Commission for Life, Family and Public Engagement, said the guidance document elevated the dignity of every person rather than “defining that person by any single characteristic”.
He said Catholic schools adhered to the “foundational principle that each person is created in the image and likeness of god, and is loved by god”.
“That principle guides this document, which we offer to our schools to support them in walking compassionately alongside each student we are invited to educate,” he said.
The document is aimed at providing support and care to students. It makes no recommendations that would result in students being expelled because of their gender identity.
Catholic schools are encouraged to cater to the needs of students experiencing gender incongruence, a term recommended for use by educators over the term “transgender”.
The document recommends that schools provide unisex toilets or a change room area not aligned to biological sex to increase safety and options for vulnerable students. It also proposes to offer “flexibility with uniform expectations” to cater to the diversity of the student body.
However, all school documentation is to record students’ biological sex at enrolment. The guidance notes that “it may be lawful” to exclude a student from single-sex competition if they are over the age of 12 where the “strength, stamina or physique of competitors is relevant.”
It advises educators to refer to commonwealth guidelines when developing school policies, and argues it is “paramount” for all sporting environments to be inclusive and safe.
The guidance comes amid public debate surrounding the ability of transgender students to participate in school sports, a discussion that was stoked during the election campaign after Scott Morrison’s hand-picked candidate for the seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, ran on a platform to ban transgender competitors from participating in female sports. Ms Deves said a ban would ensure the safety of female competitors, but faced a backlash for a number of tweets she wrote arguing that transgender girls had been “mutilated and sterilised”.
In the new guidance, Catholic school are encouraged to be diligent in “resisting the incursion of political lobbying, ideological postures” and various organisations which may be “at odds” with the school’s mission. It also gives licence to principals who may feel the need to decline the involvement of politically motivated organisations.
National Catholic Education Commission executive director Jacinta Collins said the guide would be discussed at the National Catholic Education Conference underway in Melbourne. “Recent comments by eminent psychologist Professor Ian Hickie highlight the increasing number of medical professionals who are challenging the gender-affirmative approach and are supporting the biopsychosocial approach, which is less invasive, holistic and more closely aligned with a Catholic world view,” she said. “It remains critical that our Catholic schools can speak about the Church’s teachings on these matters in an informed way, underpinned by the principles of respect and human dignity.”
The guidance recommended that schools review of a number of subjects in the curriculum to ensure schools were well placed to deal with “most matters that may surface if a student is undergoing psychological and/ or medical intervention”.
The federal government provided $8.24bn in funding to Catholic schools in 2020, which is close to the $8.67bn spent on government schools, while the states and territories contributed $2.2bn.
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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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