I remember how it was -- JR
The National Education Association’s summer reading selections aim to indoctrinate kids, not educate
Why did the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, put porn on its recommended-reading list?
The NEA presumably listed Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir” in its “Great Summer Reads for Educators” under “banned” books because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, correctly, got it out of his state’s school libraries.
The book is aimed at teens but was found in several elementary schools. It contains truly shocking, explicit descriptions and drawings of sexual acts.
The NEA pretends the book’s LGBT characters got it removed from school libraries, writing on its website: “Twilight used to be at the top of banned-book lists for its racy content. Today, those lists are much more likely to feature LGBTQ+ people or People of Color.”
This is true only because organizations like the NEA are using books with LGBT characters to put inappropriate sexual material in front of children.
“Twilight” had some kissing.
“Gender Queer” has oral sex.
It’s not at all the same.
More than ever, the teachers unions are on the opposite side of moms and dads.
What parent wants his or her kid to stumble onto a book about dildos and sexting, both concepts included in “Gender Queer,” at school?
In fact, when DeSantis wanted to show the images from the books he was pulling from school libraries, local news outlets had to cut out of his press conference because the pictures were so graphic.
Yet the NEA wants this book in your kid’s school.
Left’s hollow defense
The defense from the left seems to be that there’s no point in barring these books from a school library when a child can access far worse material on a phone or home computer.
By this theory, parents should have been buying teenage boys copies of Playboy to read behind the Piggly Wiggly — otherwise parents were committing censorship.
Just because kids, unfortunately, have access to inappropriate material doesn’t mean their school should supply it and their teachers encourage it.
NEA’s inclusion of the book on its list is meant to do just that.
In addition to being inappropriate and gross, “Gender Queer” is of poor literary quality.
Out of all the books in the world, classics as well as books written recently, it simply doesn’t rank as literature our kids need to read.
Our country has seen a sharp decline in reading scores, at many grade levels, in the last year.
An unexplored reason might be that schools are supplying nonsense books like “Gender Queer” and kids never learn to read and comprehend actual literary works.
But the NEA doesn’t care about your kid reading. It cares about activism, not education.
Another book on its “banned” list is “Ready Player One,” which, again, was not banned but taken out of Florida middle schools for profanity and plot lines including a sex robot.
School libraries can’t contain every book in the world. Why should they contain this one?
Best they have to offer?
Another book on the list, presumably not banned, is “Milo and Marcos at the End of the World” by Kevin Christopher Snipes.
In it, a boy is convinced God is punishing him for being gay. Religious people are weird and awkward. The book is also poorly written. So perfect for NEA teachers to read over the summer!
Also listed is Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” a book used to scam pathetic white liberals into paying for white DiAngelo’s pricey seminars to make sure they parrot the correct language on racism.
The NEA has an agenda and that agenda is far-left and child-last.
The union displayed it during the pandemic, by ensuring schools stayed closed even if that meant the poorest kids in the country would be hardest hit.
Now it’s moved on to fighting a culture war that is specifically a war against families.
It’s not interested in educating children, only indoctrinating them.
The NEA isn’t trying to hide its goal.
Parents just need to believe the union. And stop it.
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Nearly 40% of students at Brown University identify as LGBTQ+ — doubling what it was in 2010
About 38% of students at the Ivy League school identified as either homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other — more than five times the national rate for adults not identifying as straight.
A similar poll conducted at the school just over 10 years ago found that 14% of the student body identified as being part of the LGBTQ+ community.
The poll was conducted by The Brown Daily Herald, an independent student newspaper at the Rhode Island school, and released in June as a part of a Pride Month special issue.
It is unclear how many students were polled in the survey. As of fall 2022, Brown had an undergraduate enrollment of 7,222 students and another 3,515 in its graduate and medical programs.
The Herald could not be reached for comment, and the university declined to comment citing the paper’s independence from the school.
About 7.2% of American adults identified as being non-heterosexual, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, up from 3.5% in 2012.
Since The Herald first conducted a survey of sexual orientation on campus in 2010, Brown students identifying as lesbian and gay dropped by more than half from 46 to 22%. About 19% of that group were college-aged members of Generation Z.
The number of students identifying with other groups, however, soared: bisexual students increased by 232%, and other LGBTQ+ groups rose by a collective 793%, The Herald found.
Of the LGBTQ+ respondents, the most common orientation was bisexual at 53.7%.
Josephine Kovecses, a member of the class of ’25, told The Herald she thought those numbers were driven by broadening social norms in recent years.
“Queer people haven’t been able to be open in their identifications for that long. So it’s exciting that the numbers are growing and that queer people are able to be open in particular at Brown,” Kovecses said.
The Herald’s own poll question options over the years mirrored that viewpoint.
In 2010, students were given only heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and other as orientations to choose from. It wasn’t until spring 2022 that queer, pansexual, asexual, and questioning, were added to the survey.
Some have argued that the soaring number of LGBTQ+ students at Brown is an example of a “social contagion” at a famously left-leaning school.
“There are two theories, that greater tolerance is allowing more to come out of the closet, or Bill Maher’s assertion that LGBT is trendy among some youth,” professor of political science at the University of London Eric Kauffman told The Fix in June.
“I think the second theory better fits the data and explains more of why the rise occurred.”
Citing data from the right-leaning Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Kauffman said LGBTQ+ identification has increased much more than sexual activity in those groups.
“If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together,” he said.
“What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT.”
Others, including Sharita Gruberg of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project with the Center for American Progress, agree with Kovecses that the environment of greater awareness that Gen-Z was raised in has driven the numbers.
“Gen Z has grown up at a time when stigma around LGBTQ identities is on the decline and rights are expanding,” Grunberg said in 2022 after Gallup released its findings, according to CNN.
“As greater awareness about the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities grows, and as stigma surrounding LGBTQ identity lessens, we’re likely to see more people self-identify as LGBTQ.”
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‘Adversity scores’ meant to boost medical school diversity would ‘ignore’ patients’ best interests, expert says
After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that it is unconstitutional for educational institutions to use race as a factor for college admissions, some medical schools reportedly are looking into other ways to try to bring in a diverse study body.
One so-called idea is the notion of considering adversity when weighing applicants.
President Biden himself said after the Supreme Court ruling, “What I propose for consideration is a new standard where colleges take into account the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that both Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs unlawfully discriminated against Asian Americans by considering race as a specific factor in admissions.
“Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points,” he noted.
The ruling still allows colleges and universities to consider race in the overall context of an applicant’s life experiences. “In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts added, in his majority opinion.
Diverse medical class at UC Davis
One medical school, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), has gained national attention for having one of the most diverse medical school classes in the nation, although its own state banned affirmative action in 1996.
The medical school became well-known for its controversial affirmative action policies after a contentious 5-4 Supreme Court decision on June 28, 1978, when the court ruled its quota system was unconstitutional.
Allan Bakke, a White student, sued the school after he was twice denied admission when he learned the school reserved slots for students of color, according to the school’s website.
Although the court ruled in his favor, it decided the school still could allow race as one of many factors to achieve a diverse class — but it could not have specific quotas.
The most recently admitted UC Davis medical class contains 133 students, with 84% coming from “disadvantaged” backgrounds — 14% are Black and 30% are Hispanic or Latinx, according to the school’s matriculant data.
“Word has gotten out,” noted a recent New York Times article, “about the U.C. Davis scale.”
Some 20 schools reportedly “recently requested more information” about the process, the Times piece noted, quoting Dr. Mark Henderson, head of admissions at UC Davis.
Fox News Digital reached out to UC Davis to learn more details about how it boosts diversity. The school declined to comment.
‘Race-neutral’ score
Multiple reports highlight the UC Davis socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D, to help increase the number of students of color, especially those who come from unrepresented backgrounds.
Every applicant is rated from 0 to 99 based on socio-economic characteristics, such as family income or education of parents, yet admissions decisions are still based on a complete evaluation combined with the “race-neutral” score.
But if the student is a child of doctors, then that student receives a score of zero, per a recent report.
“We are familiar with this particular program and have followed its progress, but were not participants in its design or implementation,” said Geoffrey Young, PhD, senior director of Transforming the Health Care Workforce at AAMC in Washington, D.C.
“What we do know is that the [recent] court’s decision allows admissions committees to strengthen or implement holistic review in admissions to consider the whole individual, including their academic metrics and personal, lived experiences,” he added.
“Holistic admissions programs can help increase diversity even when race or ethnicity are not factors that can be considered,” he also said.
Critics of adversity scores say this minimizes individuals by crunching their life circumstances into a single score.
In 2019, The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT, piloted a program to measure a student’s “adversity” from 0 to 100 — but after receiving immense backlash later that year, the board scrapped the score.
Even so, medical schools around the country have tried for years to increase the number of underrepresented minorities to better reflect the population they serve.
Still, only about 6% of practicing doctors are Black, although there are roughly twice the number who identify as such in the country, according to a 2022 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) report.
Also, only 0.1% practicing doctors identify as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, while only 0.3% are American Indian or Alaska Native.
‘Flawed notion’ for producing ‘better health care outcomes’
Others argue “adversity scoring” does not usher in the best and brightest physicians.
“Medical school does not exist to ameliorate society’s problems. It exists to create competent physicians,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, told Fox News Digital.
Do No Harm fights for patients and physicians against discriminatory ideology in medicine, according to its website.
“The notion that adversity scores should be a component of medical school admissions depends on the flawed notion that physicians who have overcome some adversity will produce better health care outcomes,” he added.
“To feel that individuals who have overcome some prior difficulties in their life have a unique right to become physicians simply ignores the best interest of patients.”
Despite its drawbacks, though, some experts say that adversity scores are not unconstitutional.
“The recent Supreme Court decision targeted the explicit consideration of race in college admissions,” Jerry Kang, UCLA distinguished professor of law and Asian American studies, who is based in Los Angeles, told Fox News Digital.
“It does not prevent taking socioeconomic class into account,” added Kang, who is also UCLA’s founding vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion.
“Any good faith measure of an individual’s overcoming adversity, whether it be qualitative or quantitative, may be considered in the admissions process.”
https://nypost.com/2023/07/10/adversity-scores-hurt-more-than-help-perspective-medical-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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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