Education
April 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Further to the controversy over Florida’s “don’t say gay” law that doesn’t say “don’t say gay” anywhere in the text, it turns out that back in 2014 the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced a report to Congress on the problem of sexual abuse by public school personnel. And lo and behold, the report focuses on grooming behaviors throughout: To be sure, this report is oriented primarily at traditional predators, but
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April 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Per InstaPundit, the Left is up in arms because conservatives are referring to the forced sexualization of five, six and seven year old children in the public schools as “grooming.” You can always tell when we have hit on an effective theme: the Left declares it out of bounds. John Nolte has more, beginning with a response to David French, who likened the forced sexualization of small children to Donald
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April 1, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Yale Law School has long been a disgrace. I was surprised, when I searched for YLS on our site, at how often we have commented on farcical events there. Way back in 2003, we wrote about Yale Law School’s disgusting treatment of military recruiters. That was followed by Yale’s lawsuit trying to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional. The Solomon Amendment provides that universities that receive federal funding must treat
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March 16, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In a number of cases across the country, academics who have been fired or otherwise penalized for failing to go along with the “woke” fad have successfully sought legal redress. It is remarkable how little understanding the academics who run our colleges and universities have, apparently, of the basics of constitutional law. They generally seem to think that they have free rein to impose wokeism on all those within their
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March 10, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Education Minnesota, the NEA branch that runs Minnesota’s public schools, has been making war on the state’s children for the last two years. In 2020 the teachers’ union demanded that the schools be shut down, and in a Democratic administration, what the union demands, it gets. The result, when test results came in at the end of the 2021 school year, was a catastrophic collapse in student performance. That was
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February 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
This afternoon a Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, handed down a summary judgment in favor of parents who sued Fairfax County Public Schools for the recent changes in the admissions process for Thomas Jefferson High School, the extremely selective public high school that emphasizes math and science. The case, Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, strikes a significant blow to race-conscious policies in education. The County Board had
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February 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
If you roll back the timeline to 1978, you’ll recall that the “tax revolt” began with the landslide passage of Proposition 13 in California, which cut property taxes by more than half, severely limited their future increase, and imposed a 2/3rds requirement on the state legislature for all future tax increases. The tax revolt spread quickly around the country, with Michigan and even Massachusetts (!) cutting property taxes significantly. It
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February 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Via PJ Media, a story from San Francisco that I suspect is all too common across the country: Great news. A sixth-grader received glowing grades in P.E. and Social Studies from her teachers at a middle school in year three of San Francisco Unified School District’s COVID-19 annus horribilis. School records show that the unidentified girl received two As as a student at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. Bad
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February 9, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
“Diversity statements” are the latest device the left has come up with to impose and enforce woke conformity in education. Stanley Kurtz explains how they work: Let’s say you’re applying for a teaching job at a university. In addition to submitting a CV and a description of your academic research, many universities now require you to answer a series of questions designed to prove your commitment to the ideology and
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February 3, 2022 — John Hinderaker
We are surrounded by so much craziness on a daily basis that one could devote his life to deconstructing the follies of the Left and still not make a dent. I don’t choose to do that, but here are a few items in the news that represent peak stupidity, at least for today. First, Pramila Jayapal is a member of Congress, a Democrat from Washington. Here is her take on
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January 29, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
The virtues of a meritocracy may be lost on Harvard students like that “queer Middle Easterner,” but they come through clearly in this excellent New York Times article by Michael Powell. His piece deals with the subject through the lens of Brooklyn Tech, an elite New York City high school from which one of my cousins graduated in the 1960s. Brooklyn Tech hasn’t yielded to demands that it stop admitting
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January 27, 2022 — Steven Hayward
When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs. Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to
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January 18, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Glenn Youngkin won election as Governor of Virginia in considerable part because he championed the right of parents to be involved in their children’s education. His opponent, Terry McAuliffe, struck the opposite note when he told an interviewer that “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
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January 12, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Terry McAuliffe probably lost any hope of winning his race for Virginia governor when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” McAuliffe might well have lost anyway, but some observers thought at the time, and most think now, that he was doomed once he made that remark. In future elections, Democratic candidates will, I assume, avoid making statements like McAuliffe’s. But Stanley Kurtz
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December 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about the war on grades and homework in some of California’s largest school district. Inevitably, that war is spreading. It has come to Arlington County, Virginia, for example. Naturally, there is pushback in Arlington. Surprising, perhaps, some of the pushers are liberal. Let’s start by examining what the Arlington School Board is considering. Its preliminary proposal calls for the following: No late penalties for homework. No extra
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December 20, 2021 — John Hinderaker
In the corrupt wasteland of higher education, Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana and now President of Purdue University, has long stood out as a beacon of common sense. His leadership was tested when a Chinese student at Purdue spoke out in favor of freedom. In China, and sadly in today’s academic world, that is a dangerous thing to do. President Daniels tells the story in his letter to Purdue
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December 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Houston Independent School District board consists of nine members. None is a conservative. That will change soon, however, because conservative candidates won two seats in a runoff election on Saturday. One of them (a man who once lost his job with the city due to sexual harassment allegations) won by fewer than 100 votes in a district where turnout was less than seven percent. The other won more convincingly
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