Alarmed parents go to desperate lengths to combat ‘woke’ school ‘ideologies’

For the past decade, Paul Rossi has worked in education, but in the past year, the 53-year-old Queens resident has been getting some niche requests. Well-off private school parents are coming to him for advice on how to navigate the city’s increasingly woke schools.

Families pay him $150/hour for help finding private schools with what he calls “traditional, individualistic values.”

A dad moving to Illinois sought out Rossi’s services earlier this year when searching for a school for his two kids where the emphasis would be on critical thinking, not blindly adhering to supposedly liberal ideas about diversity and identity. Rossi analyzed mission statements for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, examined health and sex ed courses, looked up teachers’ backgrounds and examined school websites.

“Are they talking about implicit bias — about how students have implicit bias — and are they expected to examine the bias?” Rossi said of his methods. “That’s a red flag.”

As private schools become increasingly focused on identity politics, some skeptical parents are paying thousands of dollars to hire private consultants to find institutions that are more in line with their values, or to help them communicate effectively with administrators about thorny issues and divisive topics.

“Kids are feeling like they can’t speak openly about their views and parents are noticing the toll it’s taking,” another education consultant and admissions coach, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “They don’t agree with the ideologies being forced down their children’s throat,” said the consultant, who works with families in Manhattan and the tri-state area and charges up to $3,000 for a project fee.

“They’re teaching their kids certain values at home and they’re taught a different set of rules at school,” the consultant said, adding that clients have found them on a word-of-mouth basis.

It’s not just conservative white families who are seeking out these professionals. A parent of a black child enrolled in an elite private Manhattan school recently hired Rossi. The parent needed help navigating a conversation with administrators about not using their child for what Rossi said the parent called “woke tokenism.”

“The parent was concerned that their child’s blackness or black identity was going to be formed by the school in such a way that their child was going to develop an oppressed identity that was going to be part of their character,” Rossi said, noting the client was able to address these concerns with the school, and the child remains there.

One Manhattan mom of three said she hasn’t sought out consulting services, but can understand the need. She’s been unhappy with her third grader’s private school curriculum, which, she said, is riddled with books that promote ideas about “systematic oppressions.” While visiting high schools for her older son, she was uncomfortable about how introductions were handled.

“Every kid has to say their name and their pronouns. They talk incessantly about DEI and they don’t even talk that much about critical thinking,” said the mom, who asked for anonymity. “It’s frustrating.”

Rossi comes to his work with a personal tie to it. For nine years, he taught at the independent Grace Church School in the East Village. Last year, he was suspended and his contract was not renewed after, he said, he spoke out about about the school “indoctrinating” students. (Grace Church School did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.)

While Rossi sees his consulting work as needed, he readily admits that “these are upmarket problems.”

And, he said, parents don’t always want to hear what he has to say. “I’ll be frank with them,” he said. “I’ll say I know their child is going to be better off and healthier at a smaller religious school where they’re not going to have to deal with this, than some prestigious brand where they’re going to get these luxury beliefs.”

“Kids are feeling like they can’t speak openly about their views and parents are noticing the toll it’s taking,” another education consultant and admissions coach, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/alarmed-parents-hire-consultants-to-combat-woke-school-agendas/

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Supreme Court cases expose ugly truth of elite colleges’ inhumane racial admissions

Lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are exposing the crude and dehumanizing racial sorting that goes on in elite universities’ admissions offices.

UNC’s application form asks young people to check a box identifying themselves as (1) Asian, (2) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, (3) Hispanic, (4) White, (5) African American or (6) Native American. White Hispanics with ancestors from Spain are lumped in with Central American immigrants. The black child of a Harvard-trained doctor or diplomat checks the same box as a black applicant living in a homeless shelter. The Asian category absurdly covers 60% of the world’s population, from China to Japan to India.

Applicants who mark Hispanic or African American win acceptance with test scores and grades far below what whites and Asians, on average, need to get in, per data presented to the Supreme Court.

Such so-broad-as-to-be-meaningless categories are no way to recognize the humanity and individual merit of college applicants.

On Monday, the Supreme Court justices grilled Harvard and UNC attorneys. The questions indicate the court is likely to outlaw using race to determine who is accepted.

Universities could still consider the achievements of applicants who convey in their personal essays or interviews that they have overcome hardships related to their race. Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the lawsuits, explained, “What we object to is a consideration of race and race by itself.”

Harvard lawyer Seth Waxman objected that while race is sometimes the determining factor in who gets into Harvard, other times being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra needs an oboe player” will tip a student in. Chief Justice John Roberts instantly shot back, “We did not fight a civil war about oboe players.”

The left protests that outlawing racial preferences will be yet another departure from precedent. Not true. The precedent is Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 ruling that upheld the use of race at the University of Michigan Law School. But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the Grutter opinion, anticipated that racial preferences would be temporary and unneeded in 25 years.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the Harvard and UNC lawyers repeatedly, “When is your sunset?” They had no answer. The schools have no intention of ending racial preferences voluntarily.

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, cautioned that overturning racial preferences would send “shock waves” through every sector of society. That’s actually good news, especially for employees in the corporate world who are frequently being told, “We already have too many white guys.”

Some 80 major companies, including Apple and Google, signed onto a brief supporting Harvard and UNC. A trade group representing human-resource departments in 600 firms also filed a brief backing racial preferences, quoting a McKinsey & Company report that said, “The business case for diversity, equity, and inclusion is stronger than ever.”

Not one company indicated support for color-blind admissions. The gap between the business world and the American public is staggering. Corporate America’s HR departments are pushing DEI, but most Americans want people judged on their individual merits. A Pew Research poll found 74% believe race and ethnicity shouldn’t be factors in admissions decisions.

Justice Elena Kagan asked about preferential hiring to create a diverse police department or a diverse set of law clerks. She challenged the notion that “it just doesn’t matter if our institutions look like America.”

An attorney for SFFA replied that “merit and your worth as a person” are “not correlated with your skin color.” Amen.

Expect the court to look askance at DEI programs in businesses that push aside white males to meet numerical goals for the advancement of underrepresented minorities. Several big companies, including AT&T, are already getting sued for allegedly doing that.

Another SFFA lawyer summed up the issue: Racial classifications “cause resentment by treating people differently based on something they can’t change.”

President Joe Biden promised to unite the nation, but his racial favoritism has done the opposite. A court ruling striking down racial preferences will help bring the nation together.

The ugly facts revealed about admissions at UNC and Harvard confirm what Chief Justice Roberts said long ago: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/supreme-court-cases-expose-ugly-truth-of-elite-colleges-inhumane-racial-admissions/

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Colleges: Go Back to Basics

Colleges perform two vital functions: They disseminate to the people (especially their own students) the knowledge and wisdom acquired through time in ways that enhance the common good, and they also expand that core of knowledge through research.

The typical university today, however, tries to do many other things peripheral to these main tasks, often diverting themselves from successfully accomplishing their two major functions.

They feed and house people, own hospitals and clinics, and run sometimes financially substantial entertainment venues (often featuring ball-throwing and kicking contests of various kinds). All the while, they claim they are also contributing to saving the planet from climate-driven catastrophe; alleviating racial, ethnic, or gender injustice by using their allegedly superior intellectual and moral values to improve the quality if not the quantity of human and other forms of life; and encouraging non-academics (especially what Leona Helmsley once called “the little people”) to do the same.

Few large universities spend more than a third of their funds paying the people who do the actual teaching. Financially, we can evaluate these assertions by examining university expenditures.

To be sure, spending varies enormously by type of institution, from modest community colleges to massive research universities. But few large universities spend more than one-third of their funds paying the people who do the actual teaching and direct the research—the faculty. Many of those schools do a bad job performing all sorts of tasks that are often better performed by specialists in the private sector—running campus transportation systems, housing, or cafeterias, for example.

Inside Higher Ed recently reported that Eastern Michigan University, in desperation and despite faculty opposition, is turning to a private company to build new dormitories for many of its students. Why? Enrollment has declined sharply, partly, many feel, because university-provided housing is old and dingy, with only one dorm even having central air-conditioning.

Recently, I traveled to Michigan to visit Tom Monaghan, who made a large fortune starting Domino’s Pizza near the Eastern Michigan campus, partly because kids craved his tasty pizzas over university-provided food. So he extended that concept, putting Domino’s near campuses nationwide.

Why don’t we allow pizza specialists like Monaghan and other food impresarios to take over feeding students, concentrating collegiate attention on educating them and doing research leading to new lifesaving drugs or other useful things? Why don’t we do the same with housing, student healthcare, and other functions that are best done through market competition?

To a limited extent, some universities do. And some things universities do have dual functions, both a traditional academic purpose and broader applications. I think here especially of hospitals and clinics associated with university medical centers. A small portion of their activity involves students working with faculty to examine patients, or running patient trials of new potential drugs discovered at the university.

But administrators at university medical centers seem determined today to grab the biggest market share providing healthcare services in the area, a distinctly different function than the educational purpose of teaching and research. I know of at least one huge research university (Ohio State) at which the budget of medical center–related activities equals that of the entire remaining institution.

An even bigger problem is the vast increase in resources used to achieve nonacademic goals. An even bigger problem is the vast increase in resources now used to achieve nonacademic goals. College officials use funds that come from exorbitant tuition revenues, arising as a byproduct of the federal student-loan program (the availability of generous student-loan money has incentivized colleges to aggressively raise their fees). They then spend on programs and activities with little or no educational value.

For instance, when I began teaching college in the mid-1960s, there were no affirmative action personnel at my school or most others. Today, however, schools like the University of Michigan have an expensive bureaucracy measuring in the triple digits, who, in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” run roughshod over academic quality, reduce freedom of campus expression that is the heart of the intellectually examined life, and, through campus judicial proceedings, make a mockery of the rule of law and due process ideas going back to Magna Carta.

All of that spending has an opportunity cost—programs and projects that would help students learn more and become better prepared for life after they graduate.

Then there are intercollegiate athletics, which are non-existent in almost all other countries of the world. While ball-throwing, batting, and kicking contests are wildly popular throughout the planet, in over 90 percent of it they are conducted outside of the domain of universities.

As college sport has become hugely commercialized in America, honest accounting suggests it is carried out typically at an enormous financial loss. Eastern Michigan University, for example, typically loses well over $20 million annually on its college sports competitions. This is more than $1,000 a year per student, on a campus about six miles away from the more athletically successful University of Michigan.

Eastern Michigan is a university at which, the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard tells us, 46 percent of students are low-income enough to obtain federal Pell Grants. Why increase the cost of their degrees with athletics programs that most don’t care about?

Another cost-driver is administrative bloat.

Once, I did a historical perspective of staffing at my typical, mid-quality state university, Ohio University. In the 1970s, there were roughly two faculty members for every non-teaching/research person we can call “administrators.” Few of those positions have anything to do with actual education. Today, the number of administrators is larger than the number of faculty. Tuition costs have more than tripled for in-state students, adjusting for inflation.

Today, the number of administrators is larger than the number of faculty.These students are paying to finance an army of apparatchiks who neither teach nor expand the frontiers of knowledge. Indeed, many of them are anti-academic individuals whose work lowers the quality of the examined life on my campus. The same story can be told across the land.

Lastly, while research can be a useful function of colleges, much of it is pointless, an exercise in filling up pages in journals that no one reads. Professor Mark Bauerlein makes that point clearly in his Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “The Research Bust.”

Colleges give many professors very light teaching loads so that they will have time to do research in their fields. The problem is that many of them have nothing valuable to say. Therefore, the commitment to research adds to costs with negligible resulting value.

A more sensible system would be to expect all faculty members to carry a full teaching load but to reduce it if outside parties want their research badly enough to buy their time. That would eliminate the “research for the sake of doing research” cost and probably improve teaching at the same time.

We should rethink how we finance colleges and incentivize them to return to basics—emphasizing job one, teaching, and job two, doing worthwhile academic research.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14324&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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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