Monday, October 03, 2022



NYC moves away from de Blasio’s unfair high-school-admission scheme — but not far enough

Kudos to Schools Chancellor David Banks for telling kids and parents: “We do believe in high standards.” Good grades and hard work will matter again under the city’s new high school admission process. Too bad he didn’t go far enough.

The revised system puts about a fifth of students citywide into the top tier that gets “first access” to screened high schools: 8th-graders (with a GPA of 90 or above) who place in the top 15% of their middle school or the top 15% citywide. As Banks notes, this rewards “those who work hard academically and make it to the top of their middle school class.”

Last year’s top tier included 60% of 8th-graders; the resulting lottery then placed far too many kids in schools that didn’t match their abilities — condemning far too many high achievers to schools that can’t challenge them.

But one holdover from the de Blasio war on excellence remains: Schools can’t use scores on state proficiency exams as one criterion for admissions. Why not, Mr. Chancellor?

We have no problem with boosting “access to communities who have historically been locked out of screened schools,” as Banks says his system does — provided it has safeguards against wholesale grade inflation at the middle-school level.

That is, as is the new system penalizes kids whose middle schools set higher expectations. If he’s serious about excellence, Banks needs to give selective schools some way to address such issues. Otherwise, he’s still guaranteeing grim cases of mismatch.

But at least this streamlined admissions process is simple and easy to understand, with faster timelines for open houses, applications, and admission offers. It also extends the wait-lists period into mid-September to ensure that any open seats get filled by students desiring to enroll.

The plan also ends the de Blasio ban on screened middle-school admissions: It’s up to the superintendents of each of the city’s 32 school districts to work with middle-school leaders and the community to devise admission criteria for such programs. Parents can at least hope that, for example, a performing-arts middle school can screen for performing-arts aptitude.

*********************************************************

Cambridge university traduces itself

It’s perfectly legitimate for Cambridge University to seek to understand its history, warts and all. But the University’s final report of its ‘Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group’, established in 2019 to investigate the university’s historic links with slavery, is short on facts and long on opinions. It also fails to consider Cambridge’s links with the noble cause of anti-slavery.

It is hardly surprising that Cambridge should have been associated with slavery. The Atlantic slave trade and West Indian slavery were integral to the British empire between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet the report tells us that no ‘Cambridge institutions directly owned any plantations that exploited enslaved people’.

Instead, the Advisory Group focus in their report on ‘individuals closely associated with Cambridge and its colleges’. No one today would hold a university responsible for the subsequent actions and opinions of the students it educated. Yet this report proceeds on this basis, relying on ‘guilt by association’. Much of the evidence is not about Cambridge but individuals linked to it in tenuous ways.

Cambridge is held to be complicit in slavery because a number of those who established the Virginia Company in the early seventeenth century were educated there. The university is apparently shamed by ‘the parents of Cambridge students’ who invested in the Royal African Company which traded in slaves.

Individuals who did nothing to further slavery are also shamed, such as Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology and teacher of Charles Darwin. Sedgwick received a legacy, after the emancipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833, from a woman whose family had previously owned a plantation. Or take Henry Coulthurst, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, the vicar of Halifax, and a prominent abolitionist. Coulthurst’s father and brothers owned plantations in the West Indies, and the report condemns him for their sins. He might more appropriately be praised for his opposition to the slave trade.

Even Thomas Clarkson, second only to William Wilberforce in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, is fair game because of his ‘gradualism and elitism’ and his realism in accepting that slavery could only be ended by compensating slaveholders. Clarkson and other Cambridge abolitionists should be ‘interrogated’, we are told, because they followed different strategies from those advocated by the Cambridge Advisory Group two centuries later. Clarkson was the very hero of the movement. He rode through Englandfor years, stopping to convene meetings to raise awareness of the hated trade while holding aloft his famous image of the innards of a slave ship.

The report is intolerant of different views and ignorant of context. The authors are appalled that during the American Civil War many Cambridge students supported the Confederacy, the southern slaveholding states that seceded from the Union, and that Charles Kingsley, then Regius professor of history, gave lectures endorsing the Confederacy’s right to secede. The authors seem not to know that these views were commonplace in Britain, especially among the governing class. The Union’s imposition of import tariffs to pay for the war; the struggles with Britain over ‘rights of search’ on the high seas; the blockade of Southern ports, depriving Lancashire of cotton; and traditional British support for national self-determination led many Britons to favour the Confederacy. Cambridge students merely reflected a section of national opinion.

There is little sensitivity and respect for literature either, as in the case of the poet John Donne. Donne was educated in Oxford, receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge. Geographical references, images drawn from the age of exploration, and metaphors based on voyaging were frequently used by him in poems that many consider among the greatest literary works of the Renaissance. Yet in a few words Donne, who had nothing to do with slavery, is set down as a colonialist and white elitist. There is no mitigation in literary genius.

Worst of all is to write about ‘legacies of enslavement’ in Cambridge with only the most cursory treatment of the university’s many associations with antislavery.

Cambridge University was one of the communities, alongside whole cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds, which had its own list of subscribers to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787. Everyone has heard of William Wilberforce, the society’s leading spirit, and many will know the name of Clarkson: both were educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge in the early 1780s. But fewer will know of the Clapham Sect, evangelical Christian families, gathered around Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common in the 1780s and 1790s, who led the abolition campaign. And no one will be able to appreciate the links between Clapham and Cambridge from reading this report. Yet Cambridge men were prominent in the Sect. They included Wilberforce himself; Henry and John Venn, father and son, successive pastors at Holy Trinity; Charles Simeon, of King’s College, Cambridge and the minister at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge; and Isaac Milner, president of Queen’s College.

Leading figures in the Anti-Slavery Society, which campaigned for emancipation after 1823, included two men educated in Cambridge, George Stephen and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the famous historian, who spoke brilliantly at the Society’s first mass meeting. Both were sons of leaders of the Clapham Sect. A portrait by Reynolds of the Anti-Slavery Society’s president, Prince William Frederick, second duke of Gloucester, hangs to this day in the Hall in Trinity College, Cambridge. The second earl Grey, prime minister when slavery was abolished, was educated at Trinity.

The name of Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene College, deserves more than just a single passing reference in the report. In a sermon in 1784, he denounced the slave trade as a ‘sin against the light of nature, and the accumulated evidence of divine Revelation’. The following year, as Vice-Chancellor, Peckard set the question: ‘Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?’ for the annual Latin essay prize. It was won by Clarkson for an essay on the Atlantic slave trade which was declaimed in the university’s Senate House. Three years later, Peckard published his famous pamphlet Am I not a Man and a Brother?, a criticism of concepts of African inferiority. Its title became the slogan of the antislavery movement. Peckard was also a supporter of Olaudah Equiano, the African-born abolitionist.

There is no statue of Peter Peckard in Cambridge and it is unlikely one will be erected on the evidence of this report, which does all it can to ignore him, and others like him. In any case, Cambridge is more concerned to pull statues down than to commemorate its true heroes.

******************************************************

Christian nurse sues controversial Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for 'forcing racist ideology' on students in lecture entitled, 'whiteness - a problem of our time'

A Christian nurse, who is suing an NHS Trust for discrimination, has claimed that the healthcare service forces a 'racist ideology' onto its students.

Amy Gallagher, 33, is taking legal action against the Portman Clinic in North London, part of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.

The nurse, who is in her final stages of a two-year course in forensic psychology at the trust, claims she has been discriminated against on the basis of race, religion and philosophical belief.

The mental health nurse took issue with the trust when she was allegedly forced to take part in a lecture titled 'whiteness - a problem of our time' in October 2020.

The online presentation then said, 'the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness' and encouraged attendees to confront 'the reality of whiteness'.

At a meeting with her course leader Ms Gallagher explained she did not consider herself racist and that she took a 'colour-blind' approach, meaning she did not judge people by their skin colour.

Ms Gallagher claims she was told that such a colour-blind approach is now 'outdated'.

Ms Gallagher then filed a formal complaint to the Tavistock Trust in January last year.

In March the legal case was escalated after an external speaker complained to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, claiming that Ms Gallagher had 'inflicted race-based harm' and as a result could not work with 'diverse populations', The Telegraph reports.

Ms Gallagher said she believes it will be the first legal case for 'lack of belief' that argues that a white Christian woman cannot believe in Critical Race Theory.

The theory says racism is institutional and rejects the colour-blind approach.

She told The Telegraph: 'They are forcing Critical Race Theory onto people - you're not allowed to disagree with it, or they will bully you for two years.

'I'm bringing this legal case to protect my career but it's also the in the courts. 'The NHS is forcing someone to adopt a racist ideology and it needs to be stopped.'

The nurse who will be represented by Andrew Storch Solicitors, filed court documents in the Central London County in March.

Shakespeare Martineau law firm, representing the trust, plans to file its defence this week.

Ms Gallagher, who has worked for seven years, enrolled on the Portman Clinic's D59F Forensic Psychodynamic Psychotherapy course in September 2020 to finish her clinical training. She had already completed the Tavistock's foundation psychotherapy course.

She said she initially enjoyed the two-year, part-time course, which will qualify her to set up her own private psychotherapy practice.

But became concerned when, in November, students were given a compulsory lecture on race and racism by forensic psychoanalyst Dr Anne Aiyegbusi.

Ms Gallagher claimed that the lecturer 'spoke negatively about Christianity while no other religions were mentioned'.

In August 2021, the nurse set up a Go Fund Me page titled '#StandUpToWoke Tavistock discrimination Lawsuit'.

On the site, she said the money would help fund the initial lawsuit, class action lawsuit and an application for a Judicial Review.

It has raised £27,518 in the last year.

The nurse previously said that the Trust had threatened to suspend her from her final year of the course to become a psychotherapist, which cost more than £20,000.

She previously told MailOnline in January: 'On the basis of my experience there, what they describe as anti-racism is racism. What they describe as tolerance is an intolerance of anyone who thinks differently to them.

'Left unchallenged, such institutional bullying will only be emboldened.

'I feel passionate about this. I hope my case will prove that teaching these discriminatory ideas – as though they are factual and true – within the NHS or within academia is wrong.'

A spokesman for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said: 'We cannot comment on an ongoing legal case. 'As a trust, we have made a public commitment to work to become an anti-racist organisation.'

In July, the NHS Trust's controversial child transgender clinic was forced to shut down after a report found that it was 'not safe' for children.

The gender identity service will instead be replaced by regional centres at existing children's hospitals, which will provide more holistic care with 'strong links to mental health services'.

***********************************

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)

*******************************

No comments: