I remember how it was -- JR
Trump says federal government will directly oversee discipline in schools if he is re-elected
Donald Trump has announced he will “end the leftist takeover of school discipline and juvenile justice” and allow the federal government to oversee discipline in schools if he is elected president next year.
The former president, in a video message posted by his team on Twitter, said “troubled youth” were “going wild” by indulging in criminal activities.
He said he will push for the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Education (DOE) to take over school discipline of students.
“Many of these carjackers and criminals are 13, 14 and 15 years old. I will order the education and justice departments to overhaul federal standards on disciplining minors,” the former president said in his address video.
“So when troubled youth are out of control, they’re out on the streets and they’re going wild, we will stop it. The consequences are swift, certain and strong, and they will know that.”
He also hit out at Democrats who raise calls to “defund the police”, claiming they turned once-great American cities into “cesspools of bloodshed and crime”.
Mr Trump claimed his plan to restore law and order involves signing a record investment in hiring retention and training for police officers nationwide.
He also said vital liability protections for officers will be increased and alleged Democrats wanted to take such protections away from the police.
The one-time president said he wanted the police to do their jobs right and that they need to have the necessary support and protection to do so.
In another video message on Truth Social, Mr Trump painted a grim picture of the US, referring to the country as being in “serious decline” and argued that another four years with him as president would fix the situation.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s campaign announced the hiring of key staff in Iowa, where the GOP’s first 2024 caucus is set to take place. He is one of two declared candidates so far.
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Welcome to America’s Racialized Medical Schools
Knowledge is being replaced by propaganda
Earlier this month, the White House announced a five-year plan for redressing racial inequality. It is essentially the Biden administration’s version of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plan, like those issued by nearly every major university, only at a vastly larger scale. The policy aims to “advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities” by embedding equity goals in every aspect of the government.
From the highest offices of the state down to the smallest local bureaucracies, DEI now pervades almost all levels of American society. And while it was once thought that the fringe racial theories that animate the DEI agenda could be confined to small liberal arts campuses, it is clear that is no longer the case.
Increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.
That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.”
These race-first imperatives have now come to influence the research priorities of major institutions. Perhaps no better case study exists than that of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), an institution devoted exclusively to the medical sciences, and one of the top recipients of federal grants from the National Institutes of Health. Last May, UCSF took the unprecedented step of creating a separate Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research, which proceeded to make dozens of recommendations.
That task force builds on layers of prior DEI bureaucratic expansion, spanning nearly a decade. This programming includes the “UCSF Anti-Racism Initiative,” started after the summer of 2020, which established dozens of new institutional policies throughout the university, such as “evaluating contributions to diversity statements in faculty advancement portfolios.” The School of Medicine, meanwhile, has published its own Timeline of DEI and Anti-Racism Efforts, which documents such steps as adding a “social justice pillar” to the school’s curriculum and creating an anti-racist curriculum advisory committee.
The policies often promote an idiosyncratic and controversial understanding of concepts like diversity and racism. Through its Difference Matters initiative, the medical school created a document titled “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy: A Primer and Toolkit for Medical Educators”—which is filled with eyebrow-raising assertions. Racism, the guide asserts, “refers to the prioritization of the people who are considered white and the devaluation, exploitation, and exclusion of people racialized as non-white.”
Anti-racism, meanwhile, involves directly shifting power from those who are white to those who are Black. “Anti-racism examines and disrupts the power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people (white people), to shift power away from those who have been historically over-advantaged and towards people of color, especially Black people.” Of course, when applied to the allocation of lifesaving medical care, these ideals can carry weighty consequences. During the height of the COVID pandemic, New York, Minnesota, and Utah issued guidance for allocating monoclonal antibodies that heavily prioritized racial and ethnic minorities.
While this hyper-racialized approach has long been the norm in humanities departments, it now appears to have fully crossed over into the hard sciences as well, with medical schools leading the charge. Med schools across the country have aggressively embraced DEI programming, often instituting policies that promote a narrow vision of social justice. In 2021, the University of Michigan Medical School created its Anti-Racism Oversight Committee Action Plan, making a set of new policy recommendations that had won the endorsement of the medical school’s leadership. That action plan called for a new curriculum to help inculcate a “demonstrated increase in understandings of DEI, antiracism, and intersectionality concepts in medical students and residents.” For medical residents, the plan stipulated that the curriculum should be based on Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning.
Some of these initiatives create obvious issues of academic freedom. In 2020, the UNC School of Medicine created a “Task Force for Integrating Social Justice Into the Curriculum,” issuing a report with dozens of recommendations. One called for faculty to adhere to “core concepts of anti-racism,” listing several of these required “concepts,” including “race is not a set biological category” and “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders.”
The task force also called for students to “be trained in core advocacy skills”—even listing a number of political causes that it deemed important for students to embrace. These causes, which the report labeled “health realms,” included “restoring U.S. leadership to reverse climate change,” and “achieving radical reform of the US criminal justice system.” The school initially listed every recommendation as “On Time” on an online implementation tracker, though it eventually walked back some of the more controversial requirements.
All of this comes under the broad umbrella of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” illustrating how the term is both far more radical and more deeply entrenched than its defenders often claim.
Shorn of any context, the principles of diversity and inclusion strike many people as unobjectionable, and even laudable. But in practice they are used as a shorthand for a set of divisive ideological dogmas and bureaucratic power grabs. Under the banner of DEI, medical institutions that are supposed to focus on protecting human life are being sacrificed on the altar of the racialist ideology.
Because of the ideological project associated with DEI initiatives, critics often highlight their effect on curriculum and teaching. But the more potent effect, in the long run, could end up being on scientific research and scholarship.
For the UCSF Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research, the stated goal is to transform the university’s research enterprise. “To truly rectify the entrenched, structural harms from racism in research,” the task force report notes, “we must start from its foundations in the way that we privilege knowledge, methods, and people. The overarching changes required to mitigate racism in research is a philosophical shift in the mindset of those in power and those who produce research.”
Although the policies listed in the report are only recommendations, some have already been implemented, and many are likely to be in the future. The report’s first recommendation, for example, calls for a new vice chancellor for DEI in research. In September, UCSF announced the role was given to Tung Nguyen, co-chair of the task force. The report—referred to by Nguyen as a “labor of love and trauma”—states that the recommended policies will show that “anti-racism” is “centered in all aspects of the way we work and function as a research enterprise.”
That includes emphasizing diversity statements even more strongly in the promotion and tenure process, and evaluating university leadership along such lines as their “record of hiring women and members of historically excluded populations.” Not necessarily the qualities that people suffering from serious illnesses would look for in their medical care providers.
The task force calls for inserting similar DEI requirements into its research enterprise and adding “scoring criteria on equity and anti-racism” to UCSF’s internal grant programs. It recommends expanding UCSF’s existing anti-racism research grant program—something Nguyen has emphasized since taking his new role. The report itself links to UCSF’s “Pilot for Anti-Racism Research” program, which funds small research projects within the university.
That program provides perhaps the clearest articulation of what UCSF means by “anti-racism research.” It borrows the language of UCSF’s “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy” guide, noting: “Anti-racism examines and disrupts the power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people, to shift power away from those who have been historically over-advantaged and towards people of color.” It later adds, “Anti-racism research uses approaches such as the Public Health Critical Race Praxis for applying Critical Race Theory to empirical research.”
In other words, under the new ideological regime that has taken power both inside the federal bureaucracy and in institutions like UCSF, even medical research has become yet another front in a larger ideological battle. Tomorrow’s doctors and medical experts are being selected and trained on the basis of their willingness to “disrupt power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people.”
Much of the report raises obvious concerns. Some, for instance, might reject the task force’s assertion that racism pervades all areas of the university—especially in such a progressive bastion as UC San Francisco. It is telling that the university seems to actively encourage this assumption in research, but also unsurprising—after all, the “ordinariness of racism” is one of the tenets of public health critical race praxis, which is now being pushed by Nguyen under the guise of anti-racism research.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-racialized-medical-schools
****************************************************Free the charters: The right choice for New York’s families is obvious
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to allow about 100 more charter schools to eventually open in the city should be a no-brainer,
In all too many neighborhoods, especially lower-income minority ones, the only good public-school option is a charter. But many ’hoods still lack that option, because state law prevents new charters from opening by “capping” the number in the city.
When it comes to teaching their students, public charter schools overall do a far better job than the regular public system. In 2018-19 (the last pre-COVID school year), 62% of charter students citywide scored proficient on statewide math tests, vs. 45% at Department of Education schools. In reading, the gap was smaller but still substantial, 57% vs. 47%.
And that’s despite the fact that charters enroll few kids from higher-income families, and far fewer white children, who are usually more “privileged.”
Charters mainly enroll children from black and Hispanic lower-income families, though that could change as efforts (in the name of “equity”) to lower standards in the regular system drive ever-more white and Asian-American parents to seek alternatives.
If the cap continues to deny them that possibility, they may well leave the public schools (and even the city) entirely: DOE enrollment is already falling drastically, with no end in sight.
When it comes to special-needs students and English Language Learners, charters do an exceptional job of addressing learning disabilities and actually teaching English, so that these kids are far more likely to be genuinely “mainstreamed” than if they’re condemned to the regular public schools.
“I have to say, I really feel that [first] charter school saved my life and my daughter’s life,” says Marcia Ward-Mitchell, whose daughter Kimana, who has autism and ADHD, is now 14 and thriving at her third city charter school.
“She can read,” says Azalia Lopez Volpe, “she can read. Like, she can read!” of her daughter Violetta, diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade and only getting the help she needed after switching to Bridge Preparatory Charter School on Staten Island, the city’s first public school that caters specifically to students with literacy disorders.
Sure would be nice to have such schools in all five boroughs — but the state’s current “charter cap” for the city prevents it.
On top of everything else, charters are also safer than DOE schools, because they have the freedom to put kids in time out, suspend them, separate them — that is, to ensure that one misbehaving student doesn’t bring down a whole class, and so reduce misbehavior because kids learn actions have consequences.
Charters excel despite getting less than half the per-pupil funding. All by itself, that disproves the lie that they “steal resources” from DOE schools.
Hochul’s plan simply does two things: 1) Permits about a dozen charter allowances “used up” by schools that closed to be re-used by new ones. 2) Removes the NYC-only cap on total charters allowed so that the 100 or so still available in the rest of the state can be issued in the five boroughs.
Of course, after two decades when the Empire State’s “experiment” with allowing charters has proved a huge success, any policy reason for capping them at all vanished long ago.
Yet the Legislature resists, thanks solely to the power of the teachers unions — the city United Federation of Teachers and New York State United Teachers — which hate charters because they’re mainly non-union.
The UFT and NYSUT are elephants in Albany, spending millions in members’ dues to buy support and mounting hefty get-out-the-vote operations that are key to many legislators’ re-elections. Somehow, lawmakers normally obsessed with race ignore the fact that the overwhelmingly white unions fight furiously to prevent new hope for mainly minority families that want better futures for their children.
We pray that the governor stands strong, not using the charter issue as a bargaining chip to be traded for some other part of her agenda. And that enough lawmakers listen to their consciences, not to this special interest, and stand with the children.
The right choice couldn’t possibly be more clear.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/26/free-the-charters-the-right-choice-for-new-yorks-families-is-obvious/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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