Education

Half Baked: UC Berkeley’s Diversity Machine Loses Its Mind

Cupcakes diversity half-baked by Heather Mac Donald –

Tuesday’s now infamous affirmative-action bake sale at the University of California at Berkeley is unlikely to dissuade Governor Jerry Brown from signing a bill that would reintroduce race and gender preferences into the state’s public universities. It has nevertheless served one useful function: it has clarified just what Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity does for his whopping $194,000 annual salary.

Berkeley’s College Republicans wanted their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” to serve as a counterweight to a phone bank erected on the campus’s main thoroughfare, where students could call Brown and urge him to sign the preference-reinstating legislation, Senate Bill 185. Like other anti-affirmative-action bake sales on college campuses over the last decade, the College Republicans’ sale priced items according to the race and gender of the customer: whites paid $2 for a pastry, with Latinos paying $1 and blacks 75 cents, while women got a 25-cent discount on all items. [Read more…]

UK Atheists Push to Censor Academic Freedom

Atheists Censor Academic Freedom Intelligent Design by Christine Dao –
An atheist group is petitioning the British government to issue policy to censor academic freedom and push evolution-only indoctrination on primary school students in the United Kingdom.

Celebrity scientists such as David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins have joined the British Humanist Association (BHA) in the campaign, alleging that organizations like Truth in Science and Creation Ministries International (CMI) “are encouraging teachers to incorporate ‘intelligent design’ into their science teaching.”1

Students in the UK are not forced to learn about evolution until the age of 14 or 15. But the campaign supporters want teachers to teach evolution at both the primary and secondary level in all publicly funded schools.

Meanwhile, Truth in Science maintained that it “has never advocated the teaching of creationism in science lessons in schools. It has consistently advocated, promoted and distributed materials that encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of Evolution as an important component of science education, allowing individuals to follow the evidence wherever it leads.” 2[Read more…]

Why Young Americans Can’t Think Morally

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
Last week, David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Below are some excerpts from Brooks’ summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. (It was led by “the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.”)

“Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing …

“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all …

“Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner …

“The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste … [Read more…]

Dreher: ‘Anti-Bullying’ Another Battle in the Culture War

Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher
by Rod Dreher –
For many years now, the gay movement has been using school bullying as a wedge to work pro-gay teaching into curricula and into the life of public schools, and to marginalize religious students and others who hold a traditional view of the morality of homosexuality.

It goes under the mantra of making schools “safe.”

If you don’t affirm homosexuality explicitly, the argument goes, then you are making your schools unsafe for gay kids. You can well imagine how lawsuit-fearing school administrators hate to hear that.

It’s nonsense, of course.

There is no reason at all why pro-gay instruction, either in classrooms or extracurricular, has to happen for bullying to be opposed effectively. What’s wrong with a school administration saying that bullying will not be tolerated, and making good on that policy by coming down like a ton of bricks on bullies, no matter their target? That would be the most value-neutral way to handle it. [Read more…]

The Man Class – FOCUS

“Progressive polices have done more to exacerbate poverty than to alleviate it. They tear apart families and create a generational cycle of dependency. They do not fulfill the Gospel imperative to care for the poor. We must do better.” – Fr. Johannes Jacobse

Here’s an Orthodox effort that is trying to heal the effects of that Progressive policies are largely responsible for:
[Read more…]

‘I’ Is for Indoctrination

Indoctrination of Children by Lucia Rafanelli –
“Back to school” may soon mean something more like “back to political education camp” if liberal regulators have their way.

If your child is looking to get a high school diploma in Maryland, reading, writing, and arithmetic may no longer be enough. Students may soon have to be able to “[e]xplain that differences in the behavior of individuals arise from the interaction of culture and experience” in order to graduate.

Despite it sounding more like the stuff of sociology than hard environmental science, that line is taken from a draft of the state’s new “Environmental Literacy Curriculum.” The draft, according to William Reinhard of the Maryland State Department of Education, is meant to “help guide local [school] systems as they develop their own plans” to integrate environmental literacy into their curricula. [Read more…]

California Paves Way for Blatant Homosexual Promotion in Schools

Homosexual Indoctrination California SB48 Schools “It is an outrage that Governor Jerry Brown has opened the classroom door for homosexual activists to indoctrinate the minds of California’s youth, since no factual materials would be allowed to be presented,” said Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman and founder of Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). “By signing SB 48 today, California’s classrooms, textbooks and instructional materials will all become pro-homosexual promotion tools. If parents don’t already have their children out of public schools, this should cause them to remove them.”

Senate Bill 48, authored by homosexual State Senator Mark Leno, Democrat of San Francisco, is being called the “Fair, Accountable, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act” or FAIR Act. But there is nothing fair, accountable, inclusive or respectful about it. This bill is so far-reaching into the structure of California’s education system that it is possible its harmful effects could be never-ending.

SB 48 would amend current Education Code sections to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to the list of categories to be covered in all textbooks and instructional materials. These new textbooks and instructional materials would apply to ALL subjects in curriculum and to ALL grades K-12. [Read more…]

Immune to Reform

Teacher Unions Undermine Education Communist Teachers’ unions will never willingly give up their power, says Terry Moe.
by Marcus A. Winters –
Last fall, I took my wife—a well-informed, intelligent professional who unintentionally married into the contentious world of education reform—to see Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the plight of America’s public schools, Waiting for Superman. She left the theater convinced that our schools face clear problems that have some clear solutions. But she was puzzled about why reforming the system was so difficult. She knew that the teachers’ unions had something to do with what was wrong with the schools, but just how they wielded so much power baffled her. How is it that the unions manage to protect preposterous arrangements like lifetime job security and seniority-based layoffs while forcing students to attend schools that everyone knows are failing? I’d guess that many people emerge from Guggenheim’s film asking similar questions.

In his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe provides the answers. Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook. [Read more…]

The ‘Achievement Gap’ Fraud

by John T. Bennett –
Our educational system is self-destructing because of a fraud known as the “achievement gap.” One result of that fraud is that public school bureaucrats are taking away opportunities from good students in a misguided effort to help underperforming students.

When the mainstream media reports on progressive social policies, the results can be astonishing. A recent Washington Post “Metro” section featured a stunning educational policy: a school policy that ruins opportunities for bright students in order to help the less bright students (“Dumping honors classes for AP,” May 22). The Post reports that honors classes are being abolished from the curriculum in Fairfax, VA, and many schools across the country. The purpose of abolishing the honors courses: to help “underrepresented minority students.” With that article, the Post unwittingly exhibited the core of the problem with education in this country: The flawed system and students’ low culture. Each factor combines in a downward spiral to give us the bad educational results we have today. [Read more…]

Education that Corrupts

Education communist brainwashing by Chuck Rogér
It is the job of educators to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.” So proclaimed psychologist Benjamin Bloom, originator of Outcome-Based Education. The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1979, setting the stage for Bloom’s decree only two years later. In the 1980s, the already ugly transformation of America’s schools gained momentum.

Many of today’s K-12 and university classrooms serve as laboratories in which instructors breed minds poor in knowledge and logic but rich in political correctness. Morally bankrupt values like “tolerance” and “diversity” are recurring themes. Such conditioning often aims to create “citizens of the world,” despite there being no planet-wide entity of which people can become citizens. But educators wedded to utopian visions have no time for such mundane reality. Time is precious. Students must be conditioned to join the “global community.” [Read more…]