I remember how it was -- JR
The Government Public Uneducation System
Over the last several years, there has been an undeniable decline in the public education system. As evidenced by the programs that have been invoked through past administrations, there is reason to suspect that the agenda is to intentionally create an entirely uneducated society.
In 2002, there was the implementation of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that essentially placed all determination of a school’s success on getting every kid to pass identical tests throughout the year. It discouraged creativity and exploration in education and stifled the unique talents and strengths of every teacher that they might have otherwise used to help children develop a love of learning and forced both educators and students into a box with little chance to grow outside of that set space.
The Obama era Common Core system was met with mixed feelings at best. Teachers were forced to switch to this new method of instruction in English and math, while parents were caught in the weeds of helping their children with homework assignments based on what sometimes seemed like nonsensical methods. While Common Core was adopted by all but four of the 50 states, many have since abandoned the standard, as there was little evidence to suggest that it was having the intended effect of boosting educational outcomes.
However, despite the underwhelming delivery of these past programs, it is probably safe to point to the school closures during the pandemic of 2020 as having the most devastating impact on the educational progress of any generation in modern history.
Since then, studies have suggested that the learning loss for children kept out of their primary learning environment for this extended period may be years, and it is a loss that would be almost impossible to make up under the best of circumstances.
Even so, every effort should be made to increase the focus on material that would possibly accelerate the lessons for these students, foster an environment to encourage setting goals and reaching milestones, and work to overcome these unprecedented challenges.
But this is the year 2023. And virtually nothing makes sense anymore.
Instead, there are schools that have decided to ride the downward spiral set by the events of the last few years. There are teachers who believe that students will thrive if all obstacles and challenged are removed. As these students were pushed back down to the lowest rung of the ladder in their educational progress, their instructors have decided that it’s where they should stay.
In Portland, Oregon, proposals are being put forward that would essentially set a groundwork of failure for students who are already struggling. The New York Post outlines some of the practices for teachers to consider: “No more zeroes, no more 100-point scale, no more points docked for late work, and no more grade penalties for those who cheat.”
Of course, if anyone is to question the motives of laying out a plan that will clearly punish those who work hard and reward those who slack off or cheat, you will be called a racist. Apparently, this system is “about reducing bias” and “considering the diverse backgrounds and needs of students.”
Similarly, across the country in another blue-state dystopia, math scores plummeted by 26% in Brooklyn’s Math and Science Exploratory School. Instead of examining the teaching methods that were used and brainstorming ways to improve the approach so that students could absorb what they were being taught and bring their scores back up, the administrative body decided to remove the word “Math” from the name of the school entirely.
It is now just “The Exploratory School.”
Students are being robbed. The younger years of childhood are the most opportune stages of life where it is possible to bounce back, to overcome, and to regain lost momentum.
By contrast, to encourage kids to believe that being challenged is unnecessary, and to have the adults around them make the intentional decision not to improve their education, denies them critical aspects of their growth and development.
We know that when we are challenged, we mature and flourish in ways that we would not be able to otherwise. It is that space of discomfort and having our abilities tested where the greatest progress is made, remarkable levels of confidence can be achieved, and the highest points of potential can be reached.
Yet these kids will grow up without that understanding.
The people meant to lead them there are, once again, shutting down the most crucial aspects of their learning environment, and making it unavailable for the foreseeable future.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100663-the-government-public-uneducation-system-2023-09-22
***********************************************The Left’s Priesthood: How DEI Offices Weaponize Virginia Universities
Tyler O'Neil
Those of us who work in the capital city I refer to as “Mordor” have slim pickings on where to live, and I chose Virginia, which I consider to be the most conservative option. Little did I know, the Old Dominion ranks first in the nation for applying the Left’s most effective tool in weaponizing public universities: offices purporting to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These DEI offices are the bureaucracy of the bureaucracy. They exist to push leftist ideology throughout the institution, hounding school administrators, staff, and professors to toe the line on “anti-racism” and gender ideology.
They represent a new priesthood pushing leftist dogma within noble institutions once dedicated to higher learning but increasingly acting as ideological factories that produce “woke” activists.
While corporate America has begun excising the DEI cancer, it has taken root and flourished in academia.
Last week, we saw DEI on full display when Virginia Tech’s DEI director, Catherine Cotrupi, used her publicly funded email account to forward someone’s email pleading with readers to campaign against school board candidates the email branded as “hateful.”
Why did the candidates qualify as “hateful?” Because they support Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s commonsense policies on transgender issues. Youngkin, of course, is a Republican.
One of the targeted school board candidates said she was considering filing a lawsuit. The other candidate is a father who personally experienced the “transgender” nightmare of having a school tell him it knows better than him what is good for his daughter.
From public comments on Facebook, it seems that some of Cotrupi’s colleagues have defended her, saying that it’s her job to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and that the school board candidates were spreading “hate.” Therefore, it is permissible for Cotrupi to use government funds to encourage people to campaign against these candidates—regardless of what the law or Virginia Tech’s official policy states.
This defense reveals the underlying mentality of DEI and why these offices pose such a threat to open discourse in American universities.
The email in question praises two school board candidates, one for attacking “anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric” by “comparing it to the racism she experienced growing up in the era of school integration resistance” and the other for opposing “the hateful proposals being set forth by the Moms for Liberty crowd.”
These sentences sum up the Left’s attack on the parental rights movement, specifically echoing the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents. In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center puts conservative groups on a “hate map” with the KKK. In 2012, a terrorist used this “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the target of the gunman’s attack on its “hate map.”
Earlier this year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, to its “hate map.” A few months before that, the SPLC compared the parental rights movement to the “Uptown Klans” of white southerners opposed to school integration in the 1950s.
It may seem an accident that one DEI director at Virginia Tech forwarded this one email opposing school board candidates and echoing the SPLC, but the DEI apparatus exists to forward a notion of “diversity” that brands opponents as “racist,” “bigoted,” or “hateful.”
Americans support the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but the DEI movement defines these terms in divisive ways: Racial diversity counts, but ideological diversity does not. “Equity” translates to redistribution of wealth along racial lines rather than equal rules for everyone to succeed according to his or her effort and merit. “Inclusion” encompasses any sexual or gender “identity,” but rarely the Judeo-Christian principles that built the very universities these DEI offices subvert.
DEI also isn’t limited to Virginia Tech.
A Heritage Foundation report measured the size of DEI bureaucracies at the 65 universities that in 2021 were members of one of the Power 5 athletic conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Southeastern Conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference), finding that the average university listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
DEI staff outnumbered professors at the average university’s history department (by a factor of 1.4 to 1). The average university had 3.4 employees working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
Although universities in California and Oregon employed many DEI staff, Virginia ranked No.1 in the nation for the most leftist culture warriors working full time, according to a recent Heritage analysis.
The University of Virginia listed 94 employees as part of its DEI bureaucracy, while Virginia Tech had 83 and George Mason University had 69—a far greater percentage of staff per 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty.
Virginians consider George Mason University a center-right school, but its University Life division hosts a “Black Lives Matter” website that recommends donating to or signing petitions for organizations that support abolishing police departments, engaging in Marxist revolution, treating Americans differently according to their race, and diminishing the nuclear family. The school’s “advocate” button links to an article entitled “Guide to Being an Anti-Racism Activist,” which implores readers to combat “systemic racism” and encourages white readers to acknowledge “the racism that lives within you.”
As Youngkin spoke at George Mason’s graduation ceremony in May, Galilea Sejas-Machado, a student who founded the Hispanic Latine Leadership Alliance (which appears to use “Latine” in its name and refers to Latino and Latina students as “Latinx”) and served as a student ambassador at the Center for Culture, Equity and Empowerment, held a sign reading “We Will Not Debate Humanity!”
Sejas-Machado had given a speech honoring “Indigenous communities and sovereign tribes,” in which she identified herself as “a strong, independent Latine woman.”
DEI activists have used the idea of “diversity” to set up an ideological bureaucracy in the academy, and this bureaucracy undermines the open debate and free inquiry that should define higher learning. These offices impose the tenets of woke ideology, from an obsession with race to the mandated belief that a man can become a woman just by saying so.
The Virginia Tech DEI director’s decision to use her publicly funded email account to oppose “hate” in an school board election marks one example of how universities’ DEI bloat impacts the world outside the ivied walls of higher learning.
As more students such as Sejas-Machado matriculate through these institutions, this ideology will spread far beyond the university.
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Arizona State University’s Racially Biased Training Violates State Law, Watchdog Warns
Arizona State University officials appear to have violated state law by requiring staff to complete “racial equity” training, according to a new report by the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute.
Arizona has stringent laws against imposing training in diversity, equity, and inclusion—called DEI—in taxpayer-funded programs. These laws prohibit the use of taxpayer money for training sessions that assign blame or judgment based on race, ethnicity, or sex.
Arizona State University’s sessions, called training in “ASU Inclusive Communities,” require school staff to sit through lessons on how to “critique whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” The training claims that the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are “systems of [white] superiority.”
Goldwater Institute, a free market think tank, describes this training as a part of what it calls the state university’s “DEI regime—a cancerous web of taxpayer-funded, racially discriminatory initiatives that are seeping into every aspect of university life, from faculty hiring to faculty training to classroom indoctrination.”
Goldwater also alleges that ASU, also in Phoenix, requires journalism students in its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to take a “mandatory DEI course as a requirement for graduation.”
Stacy Skankey, a Goldwater staff attorney who authored the report, told The Daily Signal that the course includes units on preferred personal pronouns “and other biased language.”
This isn’t the first time ASU stoked controversy via progressive activism. In July, ASU professors told students not to attend a university event with Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk, resulting in donor Tom Lewis canceling future gifts to the university.
“Thirty-seven out of 47 faculty at Barrett signed a really nasty letter of condemnation for the event. You can find it online,” Lewis told the Daily Signal in an interview. “They were calling Prager and Kirk purveyors of hate and homophobes and things like that.”
Goldwater filed a public records request March 6 with ASU, asking for “copies of course syllabi for the ‘Diversity and Civility at Cronkite’ course for the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters.”
The think tank’s two requests for an update on the filing March 20 and 24 were unanswered. After an attorney requested an update April 7, Kimberly Demarchi, ASU’s vice president of legal affairs and deputy general counsel, replied that “some responsive records were gathered” and the school “would follow up in the next week with an update.”
Demarchi did not “follow up in the next week,” however. She didn’t respond until April 29, when she wrote that the university would not provide copies because of “copyright protection” for the course syllabi.
But no state or federal copyright law protects a state university’s course syllabi from a public records request.
Skankey’s report for Goldwater Institute concludes that “the school has delayed in providing full answers to what’s being taught in the DEI course, even though it’s public information under Arizona’s public records law.”
To combat Arizona State University’s apparently obstructive approach, Goldwater sent two letters to Fred DuVal, chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees and regulates the state’s public and private colleges and universities.
The two letters to DuVal allege that it’s illegal for ASU to be “spending public money and requiring faculty and staff to take the ‘ASU Inclusive Communities’ training course.” The letters cite state law (ARS § 41-1494).
“That statute prohibits the state and its agencies from: (1) ‘us[ing] public monies for training’; or (2) ‘requir[ing] an employee to engage in training … that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex,’” Skankey wrote.
Another letter from the Goldwater Institute, dated Tuesday, demands that ASU provide full access to the requested materials, threatening legal action if the university fails to comply with state law.
DuVal did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by time of publication.
Jay Thorne, associate vice president of media relations and strategic communications for ASU, responded to The Daily Signal’s earlier request for comment after initial publication of this report. Thorne confirmed some of Goldwater Institute’s claims while disputing its characterizations of them.
Thorne confirmed that all undergraduate students in the degree programs for sports journalism, journalism and mass communication, and digital audiences must take a required one-credit course called “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite.” Thorne insisted that the diversity aspect includes conservatives.
Although he disputed that the course includes a “section” or “module” on personal pronouns, Thorne confirmed that it “does discuss the concept of pronouns (along with many other concepts) as it relates to gender identity.”
Thorne also confirmed that ASU employees receive training on “Inclusive Communities” in order “to ensure their success in working with a very large student community that comes from all socio-economic backgrounds from all 50 states and 150 countries from around the world.”
The ASU spokesman disputed the notion that such instruction is a “DEI program,” however.
“There are no required DEI programs for ASU faculty or staff,” Thorne said.
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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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