Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

Clearly Discriminatory

The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s preferences for the relatives of alumni and donors when making admissions decisions, according to lawyers for several groups that claim the practices are discriminatory.

“The U.S. Department of Education has notified Lawyers for Civil Rights that it has formally launched the federal civil rights investigation requested,” the legal group said in a statement.

The inquiry comes after a formal complaint that three groups filed after the Supreme Court’s decision last month on the use of affirmative action by colleges and universities that severely limit race-conscious admissions.

Lawyers for the groups — Chica Project, ACEDONE and the Greater Boston Latino Network — argued that Harvard’s practice of extending preferences to so-called legacy admissions illegally discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of wealthy students who were less qualified.

The Education Department said in a statement that “the Office for Civil Rights can confirm that there is an open investigation of Harvard University under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We do not comment on open investigations.”

Title VI is a part of federal law that prohibits discrimination, exclusion from participation or denial of benefits “on the ground of race, color or national origin.”

The move by the Biden administration comes amid heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices after the Supreme Court decision, which reversed decades of policies that increased admissions chances for Black students and those from other minority groups. In a case that grew out of a challenge to Harvard’s admissions practices, the court said that the practice of affirmative action violated the Constitution.

Groups angry with that decision are criticizing the longstanding practice of legacy admissions.

Nicole Rura, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a statement that the university was already reviewing the way it admits students to ensure it is in compliance with the law after the court’s decision.

“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information,” she said, “along with learnings from Harvard’s efforts over the past decade to strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community that is fundamental to our pursuit of academic excellence.”

Ms. Rura added: “As this work continues, and moving forward, Harvard remains dedicated to opening doors to opportunity and to redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admissions-civil-rights-inquiry.html

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California Math Framework: Proven Methods vs. Political Ideology

On Wednesday, July 12, The California State Board of Education adopted a new K–12 math curriculum and condemned the state’s 5.8 million public schoolchildren to innumeracy. The board has hobbled math education for the next eight years, until the curriculum is scheduled for re-examination.

The theme of the new curriculum is the fashionable shibboleth “equity,” meaning equality of results. Equity manifests itself in the curriculum in two ways: re-engineering the teaching of math so that it is easier and sugar-coated; and making political organizing and political issues the subject of math class.

Re-engineering takes place by making math class more frivolous and less demanding.

An example of frivolity is the creation of “math identity rainbows.” The students weave together six colored cords (pink, orange, yellow, blue, and purple) to show that they are part of a classroom community. Yellow, for instance, represents “communicating.”

Making math less demanding entails: Downgrading of memorizing addition-facts, subtraction-facts, and times-tables. Downgrading of standard algorithms (like long division). Vague, billowy “big ideas” (like relationships) instead of the normal course progression: arithmetic, Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, trigonometry, and so forth. Student self-discovery instead of explicit, direct instruction.

The new curriculum argues that math teachers should hold the political position that mathematics has an important role “in the power structures and privileges” in American society and that math class “can support action and positive change.”

The curriculum recommends that teachers employ “trauma-informed pedagogy” in the classroom. Such pedagogy contends that students are crippled emotionally by a racist, sexist, violent society ruled by a capitalist class. Consequently, teachers should train students to effectuate transformative social change.

Political organizing and making political issues the subject of math class leads to lessons on, for example, the need for decision-making about natural resources and ecosystems in light of “political virtue.” The teacher is supposed to highlight “connections” between math and “environmental and social justice.” Students might write an “opinion piece” or an “explanatory text.”

Another policy topic in math class is minimum wage laws. The curriculum promotes the idea of a “living wage” as the only “fair” wage—one wage must be enough to cover all basic living expenses. Of course, this policy topic doesn’t belong in a K-12 math class. Not only that, but the math curriculum designers have ignored social science.

In reality, wages are determined by marginal value productivity—what each worker contributes to the firm—not by wishful thinking. The curriculum is supposedly focused on equity, but the designers display woeful ignorance of the disparate impact of minimum wages. They should read the classic study by the late African-American economist Walter E. Williams of how minimum wage laws make black teenage unemployment compulsory.

The curriculum designers should not have wallowed in utopian political sentimentality, nor should they have neglected efficacy in teaching methods. There is no royal road to geometry; it takes hard work.

Teachers should adopt instructional methods tested by randomized trials and evaluation techniques that come close to random assignment. Education researcher Tom Loveless, now retired from the Brookings Institution, looked at what research is not cited or not drawn upon in the new California math curriculum. It turns out that the framework “ignores the best research” on K–12 mathematics.

Expert panels organized by the What Works Clearinghouse, Loveless points out, have combed through the research literature and have filtered out studies based on quality, using strict protocols. Is this the research that the designers of California’s math curriculum relied on? No, they ignored it. It didn’t match their progressive-education biases.

Brian Conrad, professor of mathematics and director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University, spent considerable time and effort looking at the research the California curriculum does cite. The curriculum claims to be research based, but in fact, relies on “false or misleading” descriptions of what’s in the cited papers. He found that curriculum designers were, at best, sloppy and, at worst, misrepresented the research. They pushed research claims that looked like they supported progressive approaches but didn’t really.

For example, Conrad says the curriculum wrongly cites a paper to promote the general use of “invented strategies” (that is, students discovering their own strategies) as a proven approach to learning standard algorithms.

Conrad likewise finds that the curriculum distorts citations in a way that indicates “an ideological (rather than evidence-based) opposition” to students being allowed to progress in math ahead of their grade level.

Svetlana Jitormirskaya, professor of mathematics at the University of California at Irvine, sums up the “sad and dangerous” situation for K–12 math teaching in the state. The new curriculum, she says, makes California “a worldwide laughingstock.” Unfortunately, workforce preparedness will decline, and student knowledge will suffer because of the wrongheaded efforts of the new curriculum’s designers.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14628&omhide=true&trk=title

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The mendacious assault on Florida's new curriculum

by Jeff Jacoby

The Left will distort anything

THE LATEST left-wing indictment of Governor Ron DeSantis is that his administration, through its new Social Studies curriculum standards, is actively seeking to downplay the evil that was slavery. If you haven't examined the standards, or if you are easily swayed by tendentious headlines, you may be tempted to assume the accusation is true. In fact, the accusation is idiotic.

The new academic standards, approved Wednesday by the state board of education, is 216 pages long. The document covers a wide array of classroom subjects, including economics, geography, financial literacy, and Holocaust education. Considerable attention is devoted to African American History in general and to slavery and its impact in particular.

In fact, there are nearly 200 specific lessons related to slavery, racism, civil rights, and the persecution of Black Americans that Florida teachers are expected to cover. To mention just a few:

"how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad";

"how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights";

"how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates";

"the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, lynchings)";

"the shift in attitude toward Africans as Colonial America transitioned from indentured servitude to race-based, hereditary slavery"; and

"the immediate and lasting effects of organizations that sought to resist achieving American equality (e.g., state legislatures, Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens' Councils, [and] law enforcement agencies.)"

On page 71, the curriculum guidelines call for students to be taught about "the various duties and trades" that enslaved people were compelled to labor at, including "agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation." Within that context, the standards note that instructors can exlain "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

That single line — hardly more than a footnote in a remarkably detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive survey of Black history — has triggered the current explosion of hyperventilating outrage.

"Kamala Harris condemns Florida over curriculum claim of slavery 'benefit'," a Guardian story is headlined. Reports the Miami Herald: "Teachers enraged that Florida's new Black history standards say slaves could 'benefit.'" Former US Representative Will Hurd tweeted: "[S]lavery wasn't a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms."

Anyone who didn't know better would assume that the whole point of the new curriculum standards is to whitewash slavery. In their eagerness to bash DeSantis, progressives and their media allies have reduced a sweeping academic outline — one that thoroughly explores slavery's wickedness and brutality — to just one sentence.

"They want to replace history with lies," Vice President Harris said in Jacksonville on Friday, having flown down from Washington specifically to rail against DeSantis and the new curriculum. "How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?"

When DeSantis was asked about the attacks at a press conference, he said that the point of the instruction was "to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed — you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life." Whereupon The Washington Post declared that DeSantis was "intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state's public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved."

The whole thing is so foul and mendacious — one more illustration of how political discourse and news coverage in America is dominated by partisan fanaticism and utter disregard for fairness and objectivity.

And also, in this case, simple historical accuracy.

The eminent historian John Hope Franklin, who in 1995 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, writes in his authoritative work "From Slavery to Freedom" that in some of the South's biggest cities, enslaved Black artisans were a dominant segment of the workforce.

"In the Charleston census of 1848, for example, there were more slave carpenters than there were free Black and white carpenters," Franklin notes. "The same was true of slave coopers. In addition, there were slave tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, painters, plasterers, seamstresses, and the like." With the coming of emancipation, many white Southerners demanded legislation barring freedmen from certain trades. When that didn't work, they resorted to "intimidation and violence to eliminate the competition of free Blacks."

Nevertheless, Franklin writes, "thanks to . . . the practice of training many slaves as artisans, a considerable number of free Blacks possessed skills that enabled them to achieve a degree of economic independence."

The critics slamming the Florida curriculum might consider the testimony of Booker T. Washington, the great 19th-century educator and civil rights leader. Though he was born into slavery and wrote eloquently of its bitterness, Washington was likewise of the view that "notwithstanding the cruel wrongs inflicted upon us," plantation life had left formerly enslaved people with one advantage: a degree of "self-reliance and self-help" that many white people lacked. "My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry," Washington wrote. "All of this was left to the slaves."

Consequently, when freedom came,

"the slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry. They unconsciously had imbibed the feeling that manual labor was not the proper thing for them. On the other hand, the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were ashamed, and few unwilling, to labor"

It isn't necessary to accept this as the last word on the subject. But it is sheer poisonous demagoguery to claim, as Harris does, that making students aware of the range of skills many Black people mastered while enslaved is "replac[ing] history with lies." There is no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticize DeSantis — I am far from a fan of the Florida governor — but this doesn't come close to being one of them.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27113/the-mendacious-assault-on-florida-new-curriculum

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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