Friday, May 06, 2022



University of South Carolina blasted over 'White Student Accountability' meeting

The University of South Carolina is being criticized by a conservative student organization over a "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted at the school.

An email sent to University of South Carolina College of Social Work students invited them to attend the "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted on April 26, according to the conservative student organization Turning Point USA.

According to the event description for the "White Student Accountability Group," participants would learn about their "responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives."

"The purpose of engaging in this project is three-fold:

1) To help social work students recognize both their contribution to and responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives,

2) To encourage students to use their voice, power, and privilege to enact change in their classrooms, community, and practice,

3) To support students in developing skills to host similar groups among peers or colleagues to expand the community dedicated to racial equity and justice," the reported event description states.

A University of South Carolina Spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the "White Student Accountability Group" was part of a student's project and was not officially sponsored by the College of Social Work.

"The Accountability Group was part of a student’s project and was not part of an officially sponsored College of Social Work activity. The meeting was open to everyone and was strictly voluntarily," the spokesperson said.

Several universities across America have "White Accountability Groups," such as Loyola University Maryland and the University of North Texas.

Several faculty members from the University of South Carolina College of Social Work signed a statement, posted on the school's website, "in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and the Black community who persevere through the reality of oppression on a daily basis…"

"As part of our pledge of solidarity, we recognize white privilege and silence contributes to the horrific racial inequities and we commit to fostering growth of our critical consciousness so that we cease to be complicit in the persecution of the Black community," the statement continues. "In our view, the indifference of color-blindness is ineffective in supporting anti-racism and ameliorating white supremacy. Education must stand as an institution of anti-racist action, grounded in the recognition that no one is free and equal until the violence and discrimination perpetrated on the Black community is dismantled."

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Oregon's 'Menstrual Dignity Act' requires schools to place feminine products in boys' bathrooms

Oregon public schools will be required to provide feminine products along with instructions on "how to use" those products in all K-12 bathrooms regardless of gender, in accordance with the state's "Menstrual Dignity Act" signed into law last year.

The controversial mandate, solidified by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, was set to go into full effect during the 2022-2023 school year. A 2021 statement from Portland Public Schools detailed how the act would be implemented long-term.

"Starting next year (2022-2023), products will be available in all restrooms (male, female and all-gender) in every PPS building where education occurs," the statement read.

"To ensure timely compliance, PPS ordered 500 dispensers. Dispensers have been installed in all elementary and middle school girls' restrooms, and more will be installed in all remaining bathrooms, including boys' restrooms, next year.

"Instructions on how to use tampons and pads will be posted in all bathrooms," the source added.

The statement also stressed the need for students to learn about growth and development, noted that some physical education courses are implementing lessons on "the four pillars of Menstrual Dignity" and encouraged parents to have similar discussions with their children to help reduce the "shame and stigma" surrounding menstruation.

The Oregon Department of Education also doubled down on the controversial content by issuing a "Menstrual Dignity for Students" toolkit in March, complete with instructions on how to use menstrual products, segments on faculty and staff training, classroom instruction and tips for "menstruation-positive" language for families.

The toolkit also emphasized the need for menstrual products in all bathrooms because lack of access disproportionately impacts "students of color, students experiencing disabilities, and students experiencing poverty."

"Importantly, [the Menstrual Dignity Act] affirms the right to menstrual dignity for transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and two spirit students by addressing the challenges that some students have managing menstruation while minimizing negative attention that could put them at risk of harm and navigating experiences of gender dysphoria during menstruation," a segment of the introduction read.

"Research also connects gender-affirming bathroom access to supporting student safety at school," the toolkit said.

Republicans outraged by the bill spoke out on the measure. Gubernatorial candidate Bridget Barton slammed Brown for the policy, as well as her stance on abortion, in a statement to Fox News Digital.

"Radical leftist woke policies are destroying Oregon from our streets to our businesses to our schools. But as a mom, a new grandmother, and a Republican candidate for Oregon governor, I can't believe we're even discussing this -- America's most unpopular governor, Kate Brown, is putting free tampons in the boys bathrooms of Oregon's elementary schools.

"Clearly Brown cares more about what's going on in the bathrooms than what's going on in the classrooms," she said.

Barton noted another policy flaw among the state's education system, saying that Oregon's students rank 46th in the nation in reading and math after Brown revoked allegedly "racist" academic requirements.

"We’re at the bottom of the barrel and the career politicians spend our taxpayer money on tampons for little boys," she said. "I'm respectful of all, but it's fair to let little boys be little boys, and little girls be little girls. Instead, leftist education bureaucrats are pushing this radical nonsense, spending precious class time coming between Oregon parents and their kids, creating activist factories instead of strong community schools.

"Oregon's kids deserve so much better from their schools; right now Oregon's public schools don't deserve our kids."

Barton said she is running to "put a stop" to these leftist policies and to better education in her state.

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NY Times newsletter breaks down ruinous school closures: 'Remote learning was a failure'

A New York Times newsletter broke down the negative effects of school closures Thursday and affirmed what many believed to be true during the pandemic: "Remote learning was a failure."

The New York Times' David Leonhardt outlined the learning loss experienced by students who stayed home for remote learning in 2020 and 2021. "On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window," he wrote.

He noted that keeping schools closed throughout the pandemic made "economic and racial inequality in learning" much worse.

"Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian," the newsletter said.

"Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were," Leonhardt wrote, adding that remote learning did more harm than good. "Many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020."

Unfortunately, many left-leaning officials appeared to only change course on remote learning following the omicron outbreak in winter 2021-22.

New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait wrote in January that the progressive left likely was starting to notice that school closures throughout the pandemic were a "catastrophic mistake."

"Many liberals are complaining that the recent debates over short-term closings are creating a hysterical overreaction from people still angry about the 2020-21 school shutdown," Chait wrote. "Perhaps a first step to building trust that we are not planning to repeat a catastrophic mistake is to admit the mistake in the first place."

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (ATF), was criticized Wednesday for a lack of self-awareness with regard to teachers unions and their role in keeping schools shuttered throughout the pandemic.

Weingarten, who lobbied for years to delay the reopening of schools, said this week, "Our kids are in crisis … for two years of disruption, two years of looking at the screens, two years of not having a normal kind of routine and rhythm, recovery is really tough."

A 2020 New York Times op-ed admitted that former president Donald Trump was "right" about keeping schools open.

"Some things are true even though President Trump says them," Nicholas Kristof wrote at the time. "Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children."

Still, the Chicago Teachers Union defied their city's order to return to in-person instruction in early January 2022 amid an uptick in omicron cases, which prompted a lot of backlash, even from liberals.

Even Mayor Lori Lightfoot came out against the union and threatened to withhold pay from teachers.

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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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Thursday, May 05, 2022



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.

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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.”

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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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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.

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

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.

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

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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Wednesday, May 04, 2022



Children told to stop eating HAM SANDWICHES in ridiculous 'warning' note sent home to parents in school newsletters

Primary school students have been urged to 'ditch the ham sandwich' in leaflets inserted in their newsletters and send home to parents.

Leaflets from the Cancer Council telling kids to stop eating ham sandwiches have been put into public school newsletters by teachers in NSW.

'Ditch the ham sandwich' is the Cancer Council's latest anti-meat edict and follows on from a previous leaflet telling children to have a 'meat-free Monday'.

But both parents and pork producers have defended the humble ham sandwich and railed against the 'politically correct message'.

However, Channel Nine's U.S. correspondent, Amelia Adams, admitted she 'wasn't surprised'. 'It's such a nanny state back there,' she told Karl Stefanovic during a Today show cross on Tuesday morning.

A pork company owner said the Cancer Council leaflets go 'too far'.

'Ham is actually a product which has been developed over the last 5,000 years and people have eaten it through the ages without any problems,' David Bligh of Bringelly Pork and Bacon told News Corp.

'I think sometimes these politically correct messages can go a little bit too far and not be as practical as they should be.'

A Cancer Council spokeswoman said the leaflets are part of a health campaign to get children eating better food.

'Because there is strong evidence that eating processed meats and too much red meat is associated with increased risk of bowel cancer, our cancer prevention messages advise everyone to limit their processed meat consumption and cut down on red meat,' she said.

She added that schools sent the messages to include with material sent home with pupils, were not under any obligation to do so.

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The dangerous rise of academic diversity quotas

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.

Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).

For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.

The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated. Once rare, diversity statements have become ubiquitous in the announcements for new positions. The demand is worded in various ways, but this job announcement for a cosmologist at Cornell University represents the diversity statement’s typical form:

Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicants [sic] efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.

If an applicant is puzzled by this circular logic, a university may supply guidance, couched in New Age neologisms and platitudes. UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offers this gem:

“Mindful Transparent Judgment” (MTJ) embraces the simultaneous messiness and virtue of our discretion. Uncabined discretion coupled with the presumption that we are already objective and fair leave us [sic] susceptible to implicit biases and structural norms that undermine equity, diversity, and inclusion. But mechanical adherence to pre-defined rules and processes set us up for a different sort of failure. In lieu of either extreme, MTJ challenges us to thoughtfully cabin and transparently employ discretion.

Don’t worry, this says to the applicant, we have no idea what we mean either; we just want to let a hundred flowers bloom. Soothing phrases, like “celebrate,” “vibrant communities,” “inclusive excellence,” and “lively interest,” are sprinkled about like beautiful flowers. The more discerning applicant will see the evasive lawyer-speak that is masking the actual message: your application will be judged by conformity to our de facto hiring quota. Universities naturally deny any such thing, of course. They have no choice: racial and gender quotas are illegal. But the quotas are there, well hidden within the details of the faculty search process.

Paranoid much? Canadian universities, which operate under different standards of law, are quite open about their diversity quotas: white men literally need not apply for a position as one of Canada’s 2,000 prestigious Research Chairs. Exclusion, not inclusion, is revealed as the agenda of the academy’s new overlords. Give Canada credit at least for honesty. In the US, stealthy subversion will be the instrument for depriving the sciences of mastery of their professions. Their target is the faculty search.

A faculty search has traditionally been a complex minuet between a university administration and its faculty. Both parties are obliged to participate in the dance. Faculty have possession of the precious jewels without which administrations cannot exist: no student applies, nor does any academic strive, to join a university for the prestige of its administrators. In their turn, administrations covet the jewels and want to control them. The traditional faculty search is intended to balance these disparate interests, and for decades it worked pretty well, with both faculty and administrators left to tend their own gardens in peace. No more. The new managerial class (let us call them diversicrats) has become the instrument whereby the faculty can finally be dispossessed of those coveted jewels.

Here is how the takeover works: a job search starts with an ad hoc search committee that seeks qualified applicants. The search committee reviews applications, winnows the field down to a few individuals to be brought in for interviews, then crafts a recommendation to the administration for making a formal job offer.

A search committee traditionally comprises faculty capable of judging a candidate’s qualifications and suitability. For a position in cosmology, for example, the search committee will empanel a number of physicists whose professional opinion should carry great weight. A representative from the university’s human resources office also usually has a seat, to ensure compliance to employment law, and to guard against members of the search committee asking stupid or illegal questions during interviews.

In the new regime, a “diversity officer,” appointed by the university’s diversity administrator (usually someone with vice-presidential rank), now sits on the search committee. The diversity officer conveys to the committee the diversity vice-president’s wishes, and reports back how closely the committee is conforming to those demands. The diversity vice-president can then veto or reconstruct the short list of candidates invited for interviews, or even dissolve or repopulate the search committee to produce a conformed outcome.

To add an air of objectivity, search committees may be provided a rubric for carrying out the new diversity litmus test. From San Jose State University’s rubric, for example, high marks accrue for attention to “ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and cultural differences” (my emphasis). Low marks are given for speaking of “diversity in vague terms” (what kind of diversity?) or not understanding the “personal challenges that underrepresented individuals face in academia” (how is one supposed to do that?). A candidate with too independent an opinion, or who declines to genuflect to the diversity agenda, can kiss his prospects goodbye.

The diversity rubric has an interesting pedigree. The San Jose State University rubric borrows considerably from UC Berkeley’s rubric, which was adopted for the entire University of California system. Cornell University, Emory University, Brandeis University, University of Michigan, and many others have adopted identical, or very similar, discriminatory tests for candidates. The irony is hard to miss. Diversity rubrics bear an eerie similarity to the supposedly objective literacy tests of Jim Crow (e.g., Louisiana’s). The intent is the same: only the target differs.

The common language of these proliferating rubrics prompts the question: do they have a common ancestor? Grinnell College (probably inadvertently) points to the answer. Grinnell belongs to the Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance (LACRELA), a consortium of fifty-one member colleges that coordinate and establish diversity and equity policies. The LACRELA, in turn, is part of the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center (USCREC), which, for a healthy fee, will advise colleges and universities (as well as schools and businesses) on their diversity shortcomings, including formulating rubrics for evaluating diversity statements. Which prompts an additional question: who funds the USCREC? The answer can be found on the USCREC’s homepage: a who’s-who list of wealthy donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies…and the US Department of Education.

So, scientists? Do you still think you’re in control of your profession? Or do you see that the faculty search been reduced to a Potemkin façade, behind which your profession is being stolen from you? When will you decide to take control back?

I have another question. If discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexual proclivity is illegal, what is one to make of the vast ball of collusion of wealthy donors, government agencies, and university administrations that has built up to promote illegal discrimination? Isn’t this the definition of conspiracy?

I will give the last word to Grinnell College. The self-celebratory webpage of Grinnell’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion states that their students

bring varied geographic, ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic experiences to Grinnell — but their common traits far outweigh their differences.

Thus, my final question. If “common traits far outweigh their differences,” why should hiring new faculty be geared so strongly to amplifying those differences? Just asking.

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Pa.: Once Exemplary College Muzzles Speech

It’s hardly news today when a college prioritizes wokeness and political correctness over genuine intellectual inquiry and a steadfast commitment to the free exchange of ideas. It is news, however, when a college takes aim at one of the few remaining parts of academia that is truly outstanding and emphatically worth preserving. Such is the case at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Arnold Palmer and Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers fame).

On April 7 through 9, St. Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, impressively built and shepherded over the past 22 years through the diligent efforts of Professor Brad Watson, hosted what was without exaggeration one of the finest academic conferences that one could hope to find anywhere in America.

The Center—whose advisory board includes (among others) Robbie George, Wilfred McClay, and Charles Kesler—invited nine speakers to its annual Culture and Policy Conference, which this year was entitled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis.” Due to Covid restrictions, it was the first time that the usually annual Culture and Policy Conference had been hosted since 2019–and also the first time since Father Paul Taylor became St. Vincent College’s president. Taylor would quickly prove the aptness of the word “panic” in the conference’s title.

The conference featured one compelling presentation after another, all of which are now posted online. It was a rich opportunity for students to hear viewpoints outside of the academic mainstream so dominated by the groupthink Left. Scott Atlas, Jeffrey Tucker, Wilfred Reilly, and I all gave presentations on the ill-advised response to Covid, during which scientific knowledge and centuries of Western norms were often abandoned in favor of costly and coercive lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements. Allison Stanger talked about Big Tech and the threat it poses to our republic. David Azerrad discussed the tension between racial preferences and colorblind justice. Keith Whitaker gave an interesting and nuanced account of the history of financial panics and what they tell us about human nature. Johnny Burtka offered students helpful advice gleaned from great books. And Jacob Howland capped things off by talking about how our “crisis of logos”—our decreasing willingness, or ability, to engage in meaningful discussions about the great questions of our day, or any day—requires our full attention and commitment to reverse.

As if on cue, St. Vincent’s administration promptly confirmed this crisis of logos. After a few of the many students who had attended Azerrad’s talk complained about it, President Taylor and his administration initially censored the publication not only of the video of Azerrad’s presentation but also of the videos of the other eight conference presentations as well, as Howland recounted for City Journal. After being pressured by national organizations that fight for freedom of speech, the administration subsequently relented on posting the videos. But then it promptly took aim at the Center that Watson has built, giving every indication that the administration is determined to make this the final such free-flowing Culture and Policy Conference that St. Vincent College will ever allow.

President Taylor released a letter on April 19 saying that in order to “protect the diversity of opinion critical to our students’ educational growth,” only “responsible opinion” will henceforth be allowed to be expressed at St. Vincent. The judges of “responsible opinion” will not be serious scholars like Watson but rather the college president and his administrative cabinet. Taylor writes, “The President and Cabinet members will now approve all sponsored speakers.”

What’s more, the Center that Watson built and Taylor merely inherited was forced to undergo immediate “structural changes” so that it now “reports directly” to Jeff Mallory, the school’s Chief Operating Officer. Until he was hired by Taylor, Mallory was working as the Assistant Vice President for Diversity, Inclusion, and Student Advancement at Duquesne. This is how one kills an academic center without formally removing its scholarly head.

The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says that Taylor’s new policy “could be the most extreme example of guest speaker censorship that FIRE has seen in its more-than-20-year history.” FIRE calls the policy “a brazen violation of Saint Vincent’s binding commitments to free expression and academic freedom.” Those “principles,” as the group wrote in a letter to Taylor on April 22, “bar administrators like yourself from usurping student and faculty rights to decide which views are welcome on campus.” FIRE asserts that St. Vincent’s new policy “could also jeopardize its accreditation.”

A college spokesman claimed in the wake of Taylor’s letter that the administration “will not institute prior censorship of a speaker’s remarks.” Note that the remarks could still be reviewed, however, and even if the remarks were not censored, the speaker could still be disapproved—thereby providing censorship via other means. It’s hard to see how Taylor and company could otherwise have kept someone like Azerrad from speaking—their clear goal—given that his status as an assistant professor at Hillsdale College surely clears the bar for scholarly credibility.

So, what was so objectionable about Professor Azerrad’s presentation that it could be said to justify effectively torpedoing a decades-old center that has been an academic jewel? In his letter, Taylor claims that Azerrad’s remarks were “inconsistent with the fundamental mission of the College,” which “centers around the inherent belief that only when we lift up human dignity can we move the world forward.” Since Azerrad apparently failed this fuzzy test, Taylor says, “I . . . denounce this lecture and am sorry that this happened at Saint Vincent.” Taylor adds that students and faculty should “be inspired to search for truth,” but only if that search will “lift up human dignity.” If the latter condition is not met, then the search for truth apparently must yield. A college that genuinely understands its mission would be embarrassed to suggest that a significant tension exists between the search for truth and the fostering of dignity.

More insight into the administration’s specific objections to Azerrad’s remarks shows up in a statement edited by Mallory and released on April 13 above the signature of Dean Gary Quinlivan. That statement says that the college opposes “any point of view which may be interpreted as a form of invidious discrimination which inherently degrades the sanctity of human life.” This doesn’t remotely characterize Azerrad’s actual remarks, and it is hard to imagine how anyone who listened to them could claim otherwise. (Azerrad’s remarks, as well as the rest of the presentations, are available online.)

The Quinlivan statement also speaks of “systemic bigotry” and implicitly accuses Azerrad of such, even though Azerrad lamented in his remarks that “we were de facto [a society] of white supremacy for most of our history”—a claim he said would be “silly” and “foolish” to deny. And the Quinlivan statement specifically objects to Azerrad’s having “downplayed and minimized the role of several highly accomplished African Americans,” such as George Washington Carver and Kamala Harris, whom Azerrad said “would not be vice president of the United States of America today” had her father not been black.

I agree with Quinlivan that Azerrad was too hard on Carver. Saying, “If he were not black, no one in America today would know who George Washington Carver is,” as Azerrad did, misses the point that a key aspect of what distinguished Carver—who was winning prominent awards before World War II, in an era that was hardly woke—was his rise from slavery to college and then to scientific prominence, despite having been denied a relationship with either of his parents and having faced undeniable prejudice. Nevertheless, Azerrad’s statement is hardly a capital offense. Indeed, if this was the most objectionable comment across some seven hours of presentations by nine speakers, why is President Taylor so intent on wresting control of the Center, or at least of its flagship conference, away from Professor Watson?

As for Vice President Harris, President Biden made it crystal clear that he was limiting his search to a woman, and Representative James Clyburn, to whom Biden effectively owed his nomination, made it almost equally clear that he was pushing Biden to pick a black woman. Most people would presumably agree with Azerrad that Harris, whose presidential campaign did not even survive until—let alone beyond—Iowa, would not have been picked had she not fit the “correct” demographic profile. In any event, Azerrad’s expressed opinion hardly “degrades the sanctity of human life,” the crime of which he apparently stands accused.

Taylor, who also released a message condemning “racism” in the wake of Azerrad’s talk, further opined that Azerrad’s remarks “did a disservice to Fred Rogers, for whom the building in which the speech was given was named.” This may seem an odd statement, but it makes more sense in the context that most of us delivered our presentations within a stone’s throw of the room in which Rogers’s actual sweaters, shoes, and puppets are on display. As a childhood fan of Rogers’s endearing show, I’ll go along with Taylor’s line of thought and take a shot at what Rogers might actually have thought. I suspect that the kindly Rogers, who seemed to value every last person as an individual child of God, would have applauded Azerrad’s courage in presenting heterodox views to a somewhat hostile crowd, likely would have admired the crispness and analytical rigor of his arguments, might have wished he had employed a bit more pathos and a bit less provocation, and likely would have appreciated the compelling words with which Azerrad concluded his remarks:

“The choice before the country, it seems to me, is clear. We either develop the stomach for colorblindness, treating everyone equally under the law, not discriminating, being polite to one another in the private sector—all are equal in America, come what may of the outcomes—or we decide to tear down our civilization in this mad quest to achieve equal racial outcomes by granting unfair privileges to some.”

Azerrad’s presentation was pretty much an embrace of treating members of every race equally and a rejection of affirmative action, broadly construed, which he argued is counterproductive for everyday Americans of any race—no matter how much establishment elites may love it. This is a view that many, perhaps even most, Americans share. The fact that St. Vincent’s administration would find this so intolerable says a lot about the university’s level of toleration.

Even more so, the notion that St. Vincent’s administration would view this extraordinary conference, when taken as a whole, as having detracted more than it added to the college and to its students’ experience, is incredible. It shows evidence of a college in serious trouble and perhaps beyond repair. The sad thing is that, until what seems like yesterday, St. Vincent College had been one of the few places left in all of American academia that had featured anything genuinely worth celebrating and preserving.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans enjoy extraordinary freedom of speech as a matter of law but often limit their speech as a matter of practice, due to the power of public opinion in a democratic society. But the modern-day Left is on a mission to shrink the range of acceptable opinion (“responsible opinion”) to a degree that even the prescient Tocqueville could only have imagined. What’s different from Tocqueville’s day is that the Left’s suppression of speech isn’t majoritarian but authoritarian. It doesn’t represent tyranny of the majority but rather tyranny of the minority. It actually defies the majority in two ways: by insisting that people shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think, even if they hold views shared by a majority of their fellow citizens; and by rejecting the majority’s view that free speech is not only valuable but essential.

St. Vincent College’s actions are the latest example of this larger phenomenon. Whether the college gets away with it—and the battle is not yet over—will say a lot about the state of free speech and academic freedom in America today.

https://www.city-journal.org/st-vincent-college-takes-aim-at-academic-freedom ?

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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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Tuesday, May 03, 2022



I’m a Full-Time Working Mom. Here’s Why I Love Homeschooling My Daughter

Any working mom can attest that work never quite turns off. We don’t necessarily get to sleep in on the weekends or kick back and sip wine when we get home from our jobs.

Most likely, we’re cooking dinner, giving baths, refereeing fights, negotiating on bedtime or television, reading stories, and trying to accomplish the million things on our to-do lists once we get home.

So, why add one more responsibility to the list—especially one as important as educating our kids?

That wasn’t the plan for me, but when my husband and I viewed the education landscape in 2021—when schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland, were in remote-only mode and the state pushes a radical gender curriculum that starts in pre-K—we saw homeschooling as the best option.

That meant a team effort where we both would be teaching kindergarten to our daughter, Rosemary. Luckily, my husband does shift work as a firefighter and could be the primary teacher. But he needed help, so I filled in by working remotely to give him a breather and help teach our daughter.

It’s a side hustle I have come to love, more so than any other I’ve done in the past—and I had the good fortune of writing a contributing column in the Capital Gazette newspaper for a time.

When we started kindergarten at home, it wasn’t all show-and-tell and playtime. Rosemary could write some letters well, but she struggled with others. Some of her numbers would be backward. Some days, she would be easily discouraged and want to give up before we even got started.

But my husband and I would coax her back and work on building up her foundation in a particular subject.

Over time, we saw the results get better. She was able to trace words and then write them independently with more clarity. She is memorizing more of her addition and subtraction problems.

A few weeks ago, my husband taught Rosemary how to ride her bike without training wheels.

Each accomplishment has bolstered her self-esteem with authentic confidence and empowerment. She understands more what her place is in our family and society, and my husband and I have an upfront view of those wins and challenges.

Being responsible for Rosemary’s education compelled me to try new roles that I might not have otherwise considered. We participated in a weekly homeschooling co-op this school year, where my husband and I shared teaching responsibilities for a few subjects.

We also joined American Heritage Girls, an alternative to the Girl Scouts, and helped as troop leaders. These opportunities have been great for Rosemary, but they’ve also pushed me outside my comfort zone.

Each co-op lesson or troop activity was sometimes foreign and nerve-wracking. But seeing kids glean some new information or smile after doing a group craft made the buildup and effort worthwhile.

More Input, Control Over Her Education
Figuring out the education you want for your child can be overwhelming at first, but once you get your bearings, it’s amazing how much freedom you have to determine what your child learns.

We followed the Code of Maryland Regulations for homeschooling to make sure Rosemary received regular and frequent lessons on English, math, science, art, music, health, physical education, and social studies. We added religion to fulfill requirements to be in a homeschooling umbrella group.

But we had a lot of freedom to try several options. We used several workbooks, followed a full-scale curriculum in Saxon Math, watched educational videos, made homemade worksheets, and took impromptu nature walks and field trips.

This allowed my husband and me to figure out what methods were most effective, and it gave Rosemary some variety in her learning.

And we’ve allowed Rosemary to provide some input in her curriculum. After we had several science lessons on the solar system, Rosemary declared we should be done with outer space and focus instead on animals. I was happy to comply.

Most importantly, we aren’t exposing Rosemary to books and concepts that would undermine her education and her view of others around her.

I read several “woke” children’s books for The Heritage Foundation a few months ago. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Suffice it to say, those books are not part of our revolving library at home. Instead, we get to focus on the topics and goals to help Rosemary to grow up to be a critical thinker—not to be indoctrinated by toxic ideologies like critical race theory.

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Jeff Jacoby: Canceling student debt will make things worse

FOR WELL over a year, President Biden has been under pressure from leading Democrats to issue an executive order cancelling $50,000 of debt for every American with an outstanding student loan. For most of that time he has stuck to the position he took as a candidate: He was open to $10,000 per borrower in debt relief but $50,000 was too much, and he wanted the legal authority for such a policy to come from Congress. In the meantime, Biden continued to extend the federal freeze on student loan repayments first put in place during the Trump administration. The latest extension, announced this month, lasts until Aug. 31.

But on Monday came hints that Biden has set aside his skepticism about the legality and wisdom of absolving tens of millions of borrowers' debts. CBS News reported that the president told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that he is considering various options to forgive a substantial swath of student loans. "I'm looking to do something on that, and I think you're going to like what I do," he said, according one lawmaker who attended the meeting. Later that day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden "would make a decision about any cancellation of student debt" before the end of August.

The decision he should make is that he was right the first time.

For an unpopular Democratic president heading into a difficult midterm election, unilaterally canceling college debt may be good politics. It manifestly is not good policy. It represents moral hazard taken to an extreme, a recklessly expensive giveaway to a politically influential bloc of voters that will encourage more bad decisions in the future and exacerbate problems already at the crisis stage.

How would canceling student debt make life in America worse? Let us count the ways.

1. It would be inflationary.

Large-scale student debt forgiveness will worsen inflation. That would be a problem at any time, but with the inflation rate now at a 40-year high and the economy teetering on the brink of recession, it should be unthinkable.

Prices soar when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. As the federal government massively boosted the money supply over the past two years, the purchasing power of the dollar dwindled. Freeing borrowers from their obligation to repay loans would amount to another gusher of funds. As it is, the current freeze on loan repayment — no one has had to pay a nickel toward their student debt since March 2020 — has been fueling the inflationary fires by about $5 billion each month. That's a trivial effect compared with the impact of erasing borrowers' liability altogether. As Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution has noted, "Forgiving all student debt would be a transfer larger than the amounts the nation has spent over the past 20 years on unemployment insurance, larger than the amount it has spent on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and larger than the amount it has spent on food stamps." The result would be even more upward pressure on inflation.

2. It would worsen inequity.

Student debt is disproportionately an upper-middle-class phenomenon, and wiping college loans off the books would enrich the relatively well-off at the expense of the less fortunate. Only a minority of Americans have earned a college degree, and only a minority of them have gone on to graduate school. That minority-within-a-minority — which includes doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists — owes half of all outstanding student debt. It is logical for graduate students to take out more loans, since their advanced degrees generally lead to much higher earnings over the course of their careers. Liquidating that debt leaves them even more affluent and compels the majority of Americans who never got to go to college to help pay the tab for many of those who did.

And as if canceling student loans isn't regressive enough, it is made even more unfair by the fact that the borrowers are more likely to have jobs. The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent. For Americans with only a high school education, unemployment now stands at more than 5 percent. Why should the debts of the well-educated and well-employed be treated more indulgently than the financial burdens of those whose path in life hasn't been so favored?

3. It would deepen cynicism.

Unearned debt forgiveness disseminates a corrosive message. It signals to Americans that they should regard their liabilities as someone else's problem. It promotes the mindset that defaulting on debts is not shameful but understandable — and that government exists to bail out defaulters. It mocks those who behaved responsibly — the ones who saved more and worked second jobs to pay for college or who deferred higher education until they could afford it. And it's a slap in the face to college graduates who faithfully repaid their loans.

"I have over $17,000 in student-loan debt, and I didn't go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass," lamented Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a December speech. "This is unacceptable."

But her decision was the right one: If you can't afford another degree — or a bigger house, or another car — you shouldn't get one. What's "unacceptable" is the lesson Ocasio-Cortez has apparently internalized: that she shouldn't be expected to pay back the loan that got her through college and put her on the path to success (and a $174,000 congressional salary). No good can come from the entrenchment of such cynical thinking.

4. It would drive up the cost of college.

The more the government does to make higher education affordable, the more unaffordable it becomes. Since 1980, the cost of going to college has increased 1,200 percent — more than five times the overall inflation of 236 percent. Much of that is the unintended consequence of steadily rising federal student aid. As a tidal wave of public dollars has been channeled into grants and guaranteed loans, colleges have happily raised their prices to soak those dollars up. Federal aid gives schools every incentive to keep tuition costly. Why would they reduce their sticker price to a level that more families could afford, when doing so would mean kissing millions of government dollars goodbye?

For Washington to now cancel hundreds of billions in unpaid student debt — while continuing to issue and guarantee even more college loans — would be to double down on this predatory cycle. Far from reforming the out-of-control loan program that has had such a catastrophic effect on college costs and student borrowing, it would turbocharge it.

If Biden is indeed gearing up to deliver radical student-debt relief, he is making a mistake. It may win votes for his party. But it will hurt more Americans than it helps and leave long-term economic and social harm in its wake.

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Australia: Jewish leaders condemn antisemitic Melbourne student union

A group of prominent Jewish leaders have condemned a ­motion passed by the University of Melbourne’s student union after it pledged support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, sparking fears it could have a flow-on effect across university campuses.

The student union passed a wide-ranging motion on Friday condemning Zionism as a “racist colonial ideology” and pledging its support for the BDS movement, urging the university leadership to endorse an academic boycott that would cut ties with ­Israeli institutions, researchers, and academics that support the “Israeli ­oppression of Palestinians”.

The Australian understands the union is the first student representative body to pass a ­motion formally supporting the BDS movement in the country.

The motion, which was passed 10-8 by the student council on Friday, stated the union’s endorsement of the BDS movement had been “long overdue” and would encourage other ­student bodies to adopt similar resolutions in solidarity with Palestinians.

“Students in Palestine and around the world have been key participants in the fight against the illegal occupation of Palestine, protesting, organising, and creating a discussion on respective campuses … it’s long overdue for a clear and firm stance by UMSU on these crimes,” the ­motion read.

Jewish leaders blasted the union for creating a “fictitious” and “one-sided narrative” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the resolution as “perverse” and “blatantly anti-­Semitic”.

Jewish Affairs Council director Colin Rubinstein said on Sunday that the language of the motion was something that could have been expected from “Hamas or Hezbollah … not from the student union of an esteemed centre of learning here in Australia”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry chief executive Peter Wertheim said it was possible other university student councils “would follow suit” and adopt a similar “anti-Semitic” motion, but added that it would be a mistake to conclude there was a “broad student consensus ­behind these views”.

Adelaide University’s student representative council is considering a similar motion to UMSU, while the University of Western Australia’s student guild last year altered its support of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, suspending its clause condemning calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.

In February, Sydney University’s student body passed a ­motion supporting the boycott of the Sydney Festival but has not passed a formal motion supporting the BDS movement.

Mr Wertheim said the ability of a handful of student activists to pass through “propagandistic and racist resolutions” highlighted the urgent need for universities to adopt and apply the remembrance alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism.

The Australian sought comment from the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide student unions, who were unavailable to reply.

The Anti-Defamation Commission says acts of anti-Semitism in Australia have reached “pitch fever” following reports vandals had defaced the Lilydale Eagles Soccer Club in Melbourne, drawing Nazi swastikas on the club’s oval.

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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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Monday, May 02, 2022


Many of the new working class are college-educated -- and they don't like their situation

In the days when America used to make things, people used to think of the working class as workers on a factory assembly line. Many jobs in new industries such as Amazon and Starbucks are however just as routine, with the wrinkle that such jobs are usually more poorly paid than the old factory jobs. So worker dissatisfaction in such new workplaces has become widespread and that has generated the same old pressures towards unionization.

The NYT of course implies below that unionization will be helpful, even though unionization is more likely to lead to more automation and unemployment, as companies hit back. The reality is that such jobs will still exist and still be poorly paid regardless.

So is there a better solution to the problem available? Probably not. Such jobs will always be unattractive and poorly paid for many of those who work in them. They always have been and always will.

Only a big societal change in likely to change the situation. Only a reversal of credentialism is likely to help. The unending pressure on people to get higher and higher educational credentials is a large part of the problem. Only a change in those pressures is likely to change things in the workplace.

Much of the dissatsifaction driving the move to unionization originates in people being made the false promise that more education will lead to better jobs. For many it will not. For them it would have been better NOT to undertake ever higher levels of education. They are right to be angered by the false promises that have been made to them. Disillusionment with college education seems now to be catching on. One can only hope that it continues


Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.

Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”

In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.

And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.

“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”

These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.

Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.

And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.

Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”

While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”

That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.

More here:

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Amazon Targets Conservative Children’s Book About Gender Identity

Once again, Amazon has shown it’s on the side of leftist activists, not free speech.

Matt Walsh, a popular conservative podcast host and writer at The Daily Wire, just released a children’s book titled “Johnny the Walrus.” The book, according to the description on Amazon, tells the tale of Johnny, who likes to pretend to be a dinosaur or a knight.

But one day “when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind,” states the description.

Amazon is clearly trying to squash Walsh’s book.

According to Walsh, his picture book has been removed from the category of children’s books and moved to political books. Ads for the book on Amazon also have been rejected by the tech giant as not being “appropriate for all audiences”—an umbrella term for standards that ban advertising for books promoting incest and pedophilia, among other things.

Amazon did not response to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.

Despite all this, Walsh’s book is soaring on Amazon, becoming No. 1 in books Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has targeted conservative books. Last year, Amazon blocked ads for the new book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, which attempted to purchase the ads.)

After The Daily Signal reported on its actions against the Gonzalez book, Amazon reversed its decision and claimed the ads initially were blocked due to “inaccurately enforced” policies.

Last year, Amazon also banned Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”

In response to a letter from four U.S. senators inquiring as to why Amazon had stopped selling Anderson’s book, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, responded, “We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson, however, notes that his book doesn’t characterize LGBTQ+ identities as a mental illness.

Meanwhile, while Anderson’s book is too dangerous, Amazon continues to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

And just like every other Big Tech company, Amazon never seems to censor or block leftists. Nor does it treat leftist books as too political to be classified as children’s books.

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‘Underhanded’: School Invites Students to Observe LGBTQ Day Without Parents’ Knowledge

Whether you know it or not, your child’s school may have observed a “Day of Silence” on behalf of the LGBTQ movement.

The advocacy group GLSEN invited schools across the country to hold a demonstration Friday to show support for LGBTQ students and their allies.

GLSEN encouraged participants to “take a vow of silence to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ people in schools,” according to the group’s website.

The Day of Silence would end, the group said, with participants holding “Breaking the Silence” rallies and events “to share their experiences during the protest and bring attention to ways their schools and communities can become more inclusive.”

One parent, whose son attends a private high school in Connecticut that has no religious affiliation, told The Daily Signal that her “suspicion” is that “a lot of schools, especially private schools, were participating in this.”

The mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son received an email from school administrators inviting students to wear rainbow colors last Friday and participate in a “Day of Action” to “support our LGBTQ+ community.”

The private school in Connecticut sent the email to students and faculty, but not to parents, the mother told The Daily Signal.

The email to students referenced “over 220 laws” that the school said targeted LGBTQ Americans this year, and included a link to a slideshow discussing some of the laws and the significance of the Day of Silence.

One slide tells students that “many states are trying to pass, or have passed, laws that prevent transgender youth from receiving gender affirming health care.” The slide adds that “gender affirming health care” includes “reversable puberty blockers and other hormone treatments” that “are shown to reduce transgender rates of suicide by 30%.”

Jay Richards, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says he believes that the only thing blocking the agenda of radical gender identity activists is “wide-awake parents.”

“Gender ideology is about dissolving the biological reality of male and female and replacing it with an entirely subjective notion of ‘gender identity’—which has no clear meaning or limiting principle,” Richards said in an email to The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.

“This isn’t just an abstract philosophical idea,” he said. “Gender ideology threatens the minds and bodies of students.”

The slides sent to students by the Connecticut school also address Florida’s new parental rights law, which opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. One slide states that critics argue that the law puts LGBTQ+ students at risk because it:

Affects the books students can read in elementary school, possibly prevents students with same-sex parents from talking about their families, creates the potential for teachers to be penalized or sued for classroom discussion, thereby stifling important conversations, [and] potentially prevents discussions of gender and sexuality beyond third grade.

The mother who spoke with The Daily SIgnal said she found it strange that her son’s school was putting such an emphasis on passage of a bill in Florida, because “these types of things are not being proposed in Connecticut.”

Emailing students an invitation to participate in a pro-LGBTQ rally, and sending them a slideshow with a political message without parents’ knowledge “seems underhanded to me,” the mother said, “especially if they’re going to ask kids to basically participate in … political engagement.”

She wonders whether administrators at her son’s school “would be equally willing to support student activism to protect girls sports for biological females,” the mother said.

“In Connecticut, our female student athletes are having to compete against boys. But I haven’t heard of any local schools engaging their student bodies to defend girls sports,” she said.

Parents are “waking up to a gender ideology that has been working its way into our schools and student curricula for years,” Heritage’s Richards said. “Those who thought the issue just involved accommodating a few kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes have had a rude awakening.”

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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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Sunday, May 01, 2022


Why the Left Wants Twitter Over Tolstoy in Our Schools

If one leftist teachers group gets its way, reading literature in school will be replaced by reading internet memes and Twitter posts.

A powerful group of educators called the National Council of Teachers of English recently released a statement calling on schools to “decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”

But why? To more thoroughly push its leftist ideology, of course.

The statement goes on to support critical pedagogies, referring to Marxist ideas, a la critical race theory. It reads,

Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.

The left frequently attacks traditional educational strategies like reading classical literature as upholding white supremacy.

Founded in 1911, the National Council of Teachers of English boasts that it has 25,000 members across the country that receive its materials and recommendations. One English teacher in Massachusetts bragged about getting Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” removed from her school’s curriculum, while the journalists at NPR extoll listeners to “decolonize” their bookshelves.

The group goes full radical Marxist by saying kids should learn critical literacy and critical media literacy, dropping all pretense of neutrality. “Critical” here is a thinly veiled code for Marxist-style ideology.

For example, one recommendation reads that students should “examine the cultural, ideological, and sociolinguistic content of the curriculum and focus on the uses of literacy for social justice in marginalized and disenfranchised communities.”

Another recommendation pushes students to “examine mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies by analyzing relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.”

The rise of social media and increasing reliance the world has on technology represents an ever-evolving frontier in education. Kids today will need to be taught differently than generations that preceded them, and a focus on parsing online information should be included in a modern curriculum.

However, in their quest to eliminate any semblance of the old fact- and logic-based order, the left has decided that reading and writing must be sacrificed on the altar of memes and social media.

The council declares this in its statement when it says, “We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world. We experience this reality daily in the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds.”

But modern education shouldn’t be media literacy instead of classical literature, it should be media literacy and classical literature.

Authors from times past still offer valuable lessons and insight into the human condition, and as a society, we suffer enormously when we replace them with quick quips from Twitter.

Indeed, it’s our obsession with reducing messages to sound bites and 280-character tweets that’s part of the cause of today’s moral rot. Distilling strong values and lessons about what it means to be good people and good citizens is impossible under such conditions.

Literature takes effort and skill to unpack, but the value is immeasurable.

It’s also important to learn actual media literacy, not just the twisted social justice-oriented media literacy being pushed by the National Council of Teachers of English. Students should be able to tell when an outlet is lying or stretching the truth and be able to parse between opinion and fact.

By eliminating classical literature from our education system, the left hopes to fill the gap with dogma and propaganda. It hopes to weaponize yet another angle of scholastic life.

We’ve already seen the dire consequences of the radical left’s long march through the school system. Allowing it to destroy yet another bulwark of classical education leaves America one step closer to total leftist dominance. Literature helps to repel that invasion.

As “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

With those words in mind, it’s essential for kids to keep on reading.

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Clemson University backpedals

One of the most dangerous developments in recent years at college campuses has been universities setting up Star Chamber, Soviet-style, show trial procedures over complaints of sexual assault in which the universities deny basic and fundamental due process rights to accused students. That includes refusing to allow the students an opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, to question their accusers and cross-examine witnesses, or to be represented by a lawyer.

A South Carolina jury just awarded a Clemson University student, Andrew Pampu, $5.3 million for defamation and civil conspiracy by a female Clemson student, her boyfriend, and her father.

The university had suspended Pampu for a year after finding him guilty of sexual misconduct against Erin Wingo. To get to that finding, however, the university ignored multiple witnesses and text messages showing that Wingo had consensual sex with Pampu and manufactured a rape claim only after her boyfriend, Colin Gahagan, found out about it.

Pampu filed a lawsuit after he received a text message from Gahagan admitting that Pampu was innocent, that Gahagan had lied in the hearing, that Wingo “wanted to have sex that night,” and that Gahagan had deleted texts “from that night that prove she was f—— crazy.”

Clemson acted almost immediately to remove the disciplinary finding against Pampu and agreed to pay him $100,000, likely saving Clemson from an even bigger judgment against the university. Of course, if it had not ignored the exculpatory evidence in the first place and assumed Pampu was guilty, it would not have had to pay anything.

Unfortunately, the trend toward madness at the secondary education level is sure to increase if the Biden administration has its way with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

The Office for Management and Budget is reviewing a new rule on the 50-year-old statute that would expand Title IX’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination to “gender identity” discrimination, thereby upending women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in schools across the country.

In addition, the new Title IX rule would roll back the Trump administration’s Department of Education rule on campus sexual assault, which requires due process protections such as representation by counsel and the right to present exculpatory evidence and cross-examine witnesses, including the accuser.

This new rule once again would implement a “guilty until proven innocent” assumption, leading to more cases such as what happened to Pampu at Clemson.

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Georgia Governor Signs Bills to Banish Wokeness From Schools

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed seven education bills into law Thursday taking aim at wokeness in schools, including legislation that limits discussions about race in classrooms and transgender students’ ability to compete in women’s sports.

The bills included Georgia’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, or HB 1178, which “provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their student is being taught in school and protects the fundamental right of moms and dads across this state to direct the education of their child,” according to a press release.

Another bill, the Protect Students First Act, or HB 1084, prohibits “divisive concepts” such as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another race, the U.S. is fundamentally racist country, or that an individual, “by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or oppressive toward individuals of other races.”

The law also allows the state athletic association to pass a law prohibiting “students whose gender is male from participating in athletic events that are designated for students whose gender is female.”

“As the parents of three daughters, Marty and I want every young girl in this state to have every opportunity to succeed in the sport they love,” Kemp said in a statement. “That should not be controversial.”

Other signed bills will require the removal of obscene materials from school libraries, ensure transparency at school board meetings, double on the current donation cap for student scholarships, create a committee that will look at ways to ensure student financial literacy, and allow retired teachers to return to the classroom full time in areas with high demand.

“Unfortunately, there are those outside our state, and other members in the General Assembly, who chose partisan politics over commonsense reforms to put our students and our parents first,” Kemp said. “But standing up for the God-given potential of each and every child in our schools and protecting the teaching of freedom, liberty, opportunity, and the American dream in the classroom should not be controversial.”

“Making sure parents have the ultimate say in their child’s education should not be controversial,” he added.

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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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