Another Progressive Fusillade Goes Awry

 

In his tireless battle against Critical Race Theory (CRT), the latest allotrope of vicious anti-white, polymorphously perverse Marxist ideology, Rufo has had signal success.

He has succeeded in bringing the truth about CRT to the public’s attention, and his work has inspired a significant backlash.

He has inspired legislation in more than a dozen states and even a presidential order (though not, of course, by the current president) to check this moral Trojan Horse.

The Empire always Strikes Back, however.

The woke watchmen at the citadels of orthodoxy have begun to sit up, take notice, and sound the alarm about this patient and methodical gadfly buzzing about their efforts to subvert the wholesome, race-blind canons of liberal education as traditionally conceived.

Rufo’s critics face two huge hurdles.

One, CRT and allied ideologies are every bit as toxic as Rufo says.

To describe CRT is to discredit it, and Rufo describes it in patient, if not exactly loving, detail.

Two, those attacking Rufo seem to believe that by saying he represents an assault on “progressive” sentiment they have landed a damaging blow.

They don’t understand that, like Br’er Rabbit, he glories in being tossed into the Briar Patch of anti-progressive reaction

.

Read the whole thing

Freshman in high school SMOKES the school board. pic.twitter.com/Gv489lQqq5

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 22, 2023

School choice

pic.twitter.com/RF18VQi35y

— The Virginia Project (@ProjectVirginia) February 23, 2023

New Hampshire Democrat Chair Buckley claims "Schools Must Keep Secrets or Parents Will ‘Beat Their Children to Death’

This is how Democrats view parents: You are dangerous psychopaths who can't be trusted to love and care for your children.

 

 “The Biden administration labeled parents as ‘domestic terrorists,’ and now the chair of the New Hampshire Democrat Party is claiming Granite State parents beat their kids to death,” said Leavitt. “The Democrats’ hatred for parents who simply want to be involved in their children’s education is disgusting. It’s rooted in the fact that Democrats like Chris Pappas are funded by powerful teachers unions who want total control over our public education system. While Pappas continues to side with Joe Biden and radical bureaucrats, I will continue to stand with Granite State mothers and fathers.”

“I think Ray Buckley’s comments are reprehensible and an insult to parents,” said Bob Burns, the GOP candidate challenging Rep. Annie Kuster, who voted with Pappas to kill the parental notification bill. “Education in New Hampshire is and should remain local, and parents should have oversight into their child’s education.”

“Parents have a right to know what’s going on in and outside the classroom,” said the NHGOP via Twitter. “This is disgusting. Your NH House Dems voted for this!”

Terry McAuliffe doesn't think you should have a say in your child's education. Here's where his kids went to school.

 

Where Terry McAuliffe’s kids went to school; Potomac School. 

A FEW FACTS:

Tuition $39,150 to $45,650 per student

Situated on a 90-acre wooded campus.

71% faculty with advanced degrees.

1066 students and 182 teachers: 1 teacher for every 6 students.

After school music lessons and enrichment programs.

School sponsors 75 teams and 25 sports.

How does your school compare?  Or are you a member of the ruling class?

Fight for Schools

Lockdown Addicts

 The chief effect of school closures is to hurt students.

I am conflicted.  American schools are a toxic learning environment.  Students are taught junk science and American-hating history. 

So I'm conflicted about whether reading, writing, and arithmetic is enough to offset hatred of Western civilization. 

Homeschooling appears to be one answer.

Fixated on Race New York City’s new schools chancellor seems to care only about demographic representation in the classroom.

Carranza made it clear before he arrived that his principal interest is ethnic equilibrium in the nation’s largest public school system, not achieving positive, across-the-board performance outcomes. The system has some bright spots—they’re moving center stage as the chancellor’s obsession with “integration” unfolds—but New York’s schools in general are a mess. As recently as two years ago, 420 of the city’s 525 high schools had prepared fewer than half of their graduates for college or a career.

73% of 8th Graders Don’t Know Much About Geography

 And we're spending more money per pupil than any country in the world.

Why the educated unemployed are dangerous.

When you spend considerable time and money becoming educated you expect a reward for your effort.  When that doesn't happen, either because your education is not needed or the supply of educated people exceeds the demand, the result could be terror or revolution.

Governments like expanding the numbers of the educated because it is the kind of goal they can set themselves and are more or less certain of reaching. All you have to do is pass a law saying children must attend school for such and such a length of time, and in the case of tertiary education, to lower standards of entry to university and of graduation therefrom. Furthermore, governments can present the expanded numbers as a triumph of their own policy and evidence of their own benevolence, for everyone knows that, if education is a good thing, the more of it the better.

That this results in a bad fit between the education that the young receive and what they will be called upon to do in adult life concerns governments far less. When graduates, however, discover that they will be lucky if they can get an ill-paying job that they would have been able to do by the age of sixteen at the latest, they are likely to be disillusioned and angry; they will feel that they have been deprived of something that they were promised. No group is more dangerous than the disgruntled literate, and if jobs cannot be invented for them, some of them will invent jobs of their own, among them saving the world by means of an idiotic general idea. What in youth is called idealism is more often resentment.

It's what happened in Africa and is beginning to happen here. Read the whole thing.

I don't know if the young recognize the facts yet. They may know that they don't like Obamacare's demands on their meager capital, for example, but I'm not sure that they realize that kids in America didn't routinely live in their parent's basement until they were 25 or 30 years old. I would suppose that only in the Great Depression, did such a generational imbalance exist in America, but maybe not even then. For certain, they have no concept of what "10,000,000 more jobs" would look like. There are no industry employee development programs of any consequence, because industry has more cheap, free labor that it can use. Foreign nationals, either legal or illegal, take up any resource slack with special skills. Kids have no idea that once in America, their hard earned education would actually field them multiple offers, and that not only better jobs, but better paying jobs could be expected within 4-5 years of starting work.

I remember those days because I'm old enough. When I graduated from college I have numerous job offers and the thought of living in my parents' basement never occurred.

In certain DC schools districts lagging children are no longer invited to remedial summer classes because they “are too far behind.”

What can you say about the education of children who are so bad that they don't even qualify for remedial classes?  Richard Fernadez: 

The Washington Post says that “fewer than half of D.C. children are proficient in reading, according to standardized tests, and more than a third of all city residents are functionally illiterate, according to a 2007 report.” This despite the availability of “public education” which by rights should have made illiteracy a thing of the past.

But public education’s achievements — or lack thereof — can be gauged by the Post’s further reporting that in certain DC schools districts lagging children are no longer invited to remedial summer classes because they “are too far behind.” They can’t even be included in remediation for fear they will prove an anchor round the necks of any students who might actually have a chance to escape the government-funded shipwreck. Money is apparently not the problem. The DC school district is already spending nearly more per capita than Harvard.

American taxpayers already spend some $600 billion per year on public elementary and secondary schools, with average per-pupil expenditures nationwide currently at an all-time high of about $11,000—a nearly fourfold increase (in constant present-day dollars) since 1961. But even this figure is dwarfed by the $29,400 per-pupil cost of a public elementary and high-school education in Washington, DC. That astounding sum is nearly as much as the yearly cost of an undergraduate education at Harvard.

Mark Steyn argues that the greatest devastation inflicted by political corruption on America has not been the destruction of buildings. It has been the annihilation of minds.

In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

when you hear the "black leaders" on TV talking about how they are working to solve the problems of the underclass, you can't believe them. Even a half-hearted attempt would do something about the creation of an illiterate population.  

Bobby Rush tried to deflect blame by telling Newt Gingrich that

"I have been working relentlessly since I've been in Congress, even when you were the speaker of the House and didn't want to hear any of these matters. I have been working on trying to deal with this violence. I'm astounded and ashamed about this violence. But this is also systemic to an overall problem. Chicago will take care of this violence. That's one of the reasons why on a Friday, the 26th, we're having this National Summit on Urban Violence. This was before the verdict we had planned this. The congressional black caucus is coming into Chicago so that we can work on solutions to this problem."

Just like  O.J. Simpson has been working tirelessly to find out who murdered his wife.  What was bizarre was Rush's segue into quoting scripture.  Watch the whole thing beginning with the smarmy Candy Crowley.

Fernandez concludes by quoting Romany Malco on Trayvon Martin: 

To be brutally honest, the only reason people are even aware of Trayvon Martin is because it became a topic within mainstream news and pop culture. Meaning: News directors saw it as a profitable, sensational story. …

Our “government” continues to wreak havoc on our civil liberties and there is little to no protest from the black community because of media diversion tactics that keep such pertinent issues out of mainstream media. But if Jay-Z or Rihanna were to make mention of it, we’d suddenly be jolted out of our sugar comas and protesting on freeways.

My point being, people are up in arms about Trayvon based on regurgitated pundits and manipulated facts aired to elicit emotion while fueling America’s anger and division. That’s how you boost ratings. No different from Piers Morgan’s desperate rant over gun control when he knew his ratings were in the dumps….

I believe we lost that trial for Trayvon long before he was killed. Trayvon was doomed the moment ignorance became synonymous with young black America . We lost that case by using media outlets (music, movies, social media, etc.) as vehicles to perpetuate the same negative images and social issues that destroyed the black community in the first place. When we went on record glorifying violent crime and when we voted for a president we never thought to hold accountable. When we signed on to do reality shows that fed into the media’s stereotypes of black men, we ingrained an image of Trayvon Martin so overwhelming that who he actually may have been didn’t matter anymore.

No he didn’t matter any more. Because Trayvon Martin the fact was never of any interest to anybody. The facts never mattered; reality is unconstitutional. All the system cared about was Trayvon Martin the fiction; the meal ticket, the product, the Narrative. Nobody gave a damn about the actual man. In this respect he was exactly what all those illiterate multitudes in the crashing cities are: just meal tickets for a system that uses them as window-dressing to justify scams and job programs meant to benefit only political hacks.

This can't be said any better, and should be said many times and in many places.

“My child is gifted. He’s also 29, unemployed, and living in my basement”

From The Matt Walsh Blog

I don’t respond to most of the negative emails I get from people who listen to my show or read my blog. This one struck a chord, though. Here’s a message I received from a guy named Nick, in reference to a discussion we had on the broad subject of parenting. I think we can all benefit from reading this and confronting the sad reality that this country is full of Nicks:

“Matt, I heard your horrible conversation today about parenting. A few comments in response:

1) Based on your remarks, I have to say I feel bad for your kids. You sound like the sort of person who never should have been a parent. You said you plain to teach your kids “how to think.” I guess this is common in right wing religious fundamentalist households. Personally, I let my child form his own conclusions about things. To impose your views on a child is tantamount to child abuse. Do them a favor, let them think FREELY.

2) You greatly exaggerate the importance of “chores.” Also, the idea that a kid should be forced to “get a job” is abhorrent. My son was very gifted so we gave him all the tools to succeed academically. This meant we didn’t turn him into slave labor and we certainly didn’t tell him he needed to go work behind a cash register. He concentrated on his school work, and we did our job as parents and financially supported him.

3) It’s easy to mock a “30 year old who lives with is parents.” My son is almost 29 and he’s been home with us since he graduated.

....

Read the rest of the letter. The response is entertaining.

Black racists demand control of Roxbury Community College

This is how Detroit became what it is today.

Kambon now spearheads a group called “Friends of Roxbury Community College.” The group has written an outrageous letter to Governor Deval Patrick. Kambon is incensed because the newly appointed chairman of the board of RCC, Gerald Chertavian, is white. This, to Kambon and company, is an outrage. ...

Chertavian is a great choice to head the board. After a successful career on Wall Street, he began a highly regarded job training program for young people of color who struggled in traditional educational settings — exactly the constituency RCC serves. He is strategic, thoughtful, and the most unassuming zillionaire I’ve ever met....

Throughout the turmoil at RCC, there has been a persistent undercurrent that outside forces are somehow conspiring to deprive Roxbury of control over the college. Obviously, accusing Patrick of racism is beyond ludicrous, but there is still resentment among people who care more about turf than education.

And this is really about turf. The RCC administration — most of which remains in place — has failed at virtually every aspect of running a college. But none of that ever outraged Kambon and his followers — not a graduation rate in the low single digits, not the financial aid problems, not the unreported campus crimes, not the attempt to keep quiet a student’s report of sexual assault by a professor. No protests, no letters to the governor, about any of that.

No, the real focus of their outrage is that this white guy might not view the incompetents who turned RCC into an educational and bureaucratic mess as untouchable. That’s what the “Friends of Roxbury Community College” find intolerable. They have an unbroken record of being upset about everything except RCC’s real problems.

Fighting education fanatics (Glenn Reynolds)

Is sending your child to public school parental malpractice?

For a while, I've been wondering if it's parental malpractice to put your kids in public schools. More and more, it's gone beyond wondering. For example, last week the Washington Post reported a nasty case of abusive behavior by school officials in Calvert County, Maryland: A five-year-old who brought a cowboy-style cap pistol on a school bus -- orange-tipped, and something that no one could possibly mistake for a real gun -- was interrogated for two hours (an interrogation that was so long, or so stressful, that he wet his pants) and then suspended for 10 days. Who treats a five-year-old that way?

[snip]

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, another kindergartner was punished for bringing a tiny Lego gun -- the illustration in the Boston Herald places it next to a quarter coin -- with detention, and forced to write a letter of apology to the school bus driver. For bringing a tiny piece of plastic.

What's up with this? It's not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there's more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.

In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it's about the administrative class -- which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible -- doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It's some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that's tough. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Read the whole thing.

Is Online Learning for Steerage?

Peter Sachs asks the question of what the side-effects of online education can have on society. I applaud him for his efforts. Too often we make fundamental changes in in our economy or our culture without any real discussion of its side effects. Comprehensive welfare made possible a feral underclass that survives without work and aided the virtual destruction of the black family. Let’s change the definition of marriage; proponents tell us that all the results are going to be good. It’s taken Social Security about four generations before people woke up to the fact that it’s demographically unstable. Medicare is imploding faster. Let’s turn the nation’s health care system over to the government; what could possibly go wrong?

So looking at what can go wrong with our system of higher education if it’s transformed into a virtual system – online – as opposed to classroom instruction. Let’s first admit that higher ed has severe problems. One is cost. The other is the product. The third is its utility.

Higher ed costs have grown faster than inflation, faster than medical care, faster than virtually any other industry in the country and its growth simply unsustainable. Only the wealthy can afford a college degree without going into debt.

 

The second is the product. The education that students receive is ill-matched to the needs of either the student or our economy. Why do so many college graduates work in retail stores, call centers or the food industry? Because degrees in English Literature, for example, are not in great demand outside of academia. English Lit or History are fine fields of study and attracted people in the past who came from well-to-do families or who saw themselves as starving artists living in a garret in Paris. Other majors like the various grievance studies majors are only of use as a way of becoming a professor of grievance studies, getting a job at the Tides Foundation or becoming a politician.

The utility of a college education should be a subject for careful study and meaningful change. Several generations ago a high school student was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up; today he’s asked what college he plans to attend. College is the new high school. It’s an indication you’re trainable for something useful. Unless you’re a graduate of one of the hard sciences, you have not developed any useful skills in college. And even graduating engineers, chemists or physicists have to be trained to on the job once they are hired. Worse, if you are a graduate of one of our “elite” schools you come equipped with a sense of entitlement and hubris that’s been ingrained to an extend that it's obnoxious. You can hardly wait to fix all the obvious (to you) flaws in America.

Let me now turn to Mr. Sachs analysis of the issue of social stratification. He uses data from U.S. Department of Education from 2007-2008. This is the first problem and one that goes to the point that on-line education is not even in its infancy; it’s in the gestation phase. Data that’s 5-6 years out of date in a brand new industry is as useful as a similar study from 2005 on the popularity of Facebook. I’m frankly surprised that even then as many as 18% of students were enrolled in online programs exclusively.

•Test scores. Among the highest-scoring students on admissions tests, virtually all (95 percent) were enrolled in traditional education programs. Low-scoring students were more than twice as likely as high-scoring students to enroll in online programs.

Answer: Well, yes. High scorers were more likely to be accepted to the college of their choice and were willing to make the financial sacrifice to go to traditional colleges. There is also a correlation between high scores on admissions tests and family income, the educational attainments of parents and social expectations. I suspect this group is least likely to either need to seek alternative educational opportunities or wish to risk the chance that on-line education would be perceived as lacking in prestige or inadequate.

•Selectivity. Just 8 percent of students at colleges with very selective admissions criteria were enrolled in an online program. By contrast, 13 percent of students at moderately selective institutions, 16 percent of those at minimally selective colleges, and 23 percent of students at open admissions colleges, were enrolled in online programs.

Answer: I believe this criterion is directly linked to the Test Scores issue and my comments would be the same.

•Economic background. Students who enrolled in online programs were more likely to be first generation college students from lower income families than students enrolled in traditional settings. Some 20 percent of students considered low-income and first-generation college-goers were enrolled in online college programs. By comparison, just 14 percent of students considered not low-income and not first- generation college-goers were enrolled in such programs.

Answer: Of course. The issue of cost is by far the biggest driver for online education. Any other result on this measure would be absurd.

•Parental education. Students whose parents were relatively uneducated were more likely than students with highly educated parents to enroll in online college programs. About 21 percent of students whose fathers completed no more than a high school diploma were enrolled in online programs. That compares to just 9 percent and 12 percent of students whose fathers had attained a professional degree or a doctorate, respectively, going to college online.

Answer: Parental education and economic background are virtual synonyms for each other. That is why the statistics for both are almost identical.

 

The question is still valid: will graduates of online colleges be considered second class? That remains to be seen. However, as a small business owner I would have to evaluate each candidate who came before me in terms of their attitude, their intelligence and their desire to excel. I would also have to look within and see if my antipathy toward academia and its modern products would make me automatically prefer the graduate of Online U.

Turn Your Children Over to Government

School Offers Counseling for Students Troubled by Pastry-Gun Incident

The teaches and the people who run this school should be dismissed and run out of town.  Tar and feathers needs to make a comeback.

As you know if you have been following this dramatic story unfolding in Brooklyn Park, Maryland, seven-year-old Josh Welch has been suspended for two days after he allegedly fashioned his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.

 

And now that the brutal rampage of Josh with his Pop Tart  is under control, it's time, according to school administrators, to call in the psychologists to council the students traumatized by pastries.

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the ... Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org....

If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Josh's dad seems to be the only truly sane person in this drama.

But Josh's dad is not happy saying, "I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it's a pastry.., Ya know?"

Are teachers and students more violent than the general population?

 

If one bothers to think about schools as "gun free zones" for more than a moment, does it strike you as logical?  Why should schools or college campuses prohibit the carrying of guns by people who are licensed to do so? 

 

The only logical reason to prohibit guns on school or college grounds is if teachers teachers and students are more apt than the general public to commit violent crimes with guns. 

 

Is that what educators and legislators believe?

High School Student Disarms Gunman…Gets Suspended?

A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return....

The school’s referral slip said he was given an “emergency suspension” for being involved in an “incident” with a weapon. Lee County School District spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said in a statement that “If there is a potentially dangerous situation, Florida law allows the principal to suspend a student immediately pending a hearing.”

I have a suggestion: have a Zero Tolerance Policy for Zero Tolerance Policies. Any school that has a zero tolerance policy must immediately fire the superintendent of schools and anyone who enforces such idiotic conduct.