Tag: education

To whom does this woman think she is going to appeal for help? Conservatives and Christians have been relentlessly driven out of academia for the last 50 years!

A former University of Maryland professor is preparing for a legal battle against school administrators who she claims discriminated against her over a trip to Israel.

Dr. Melissa Landa, a Jewish professor who worked in the Education Department at UMD until last June, claims that her contract was not renewed by administrators due to discrimination against her pro-Israel beliefs and her stance against the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement.

“Once my involvement with Israel became political, that is when things started to change.” 

According to its official website, the BDS movement claims to work “to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.”

In a video published on her website, Landa, who has been vocal regarding anti-Semitic, pro-Palestine movements, argues that her active stance contributed to her being “ostracized” by colleagues and eventually dismissed from the university. Landa also alleges that the acts taken against her are not unique, and are just one example of the “one-sided” administration that she believes are biased toward the BDS movement.

“Across the country, Jewish professors and Jewish students are being intimidated and silenced for their opposition to the BDS movement,” Landa states in the video. “This must stop.”

I, for one, couldn’t care less about Jewish professors and Jewish students being driven out of academia across the West. This is isn’t just the future they wanted, this is the very future they demanded. To paraphrase Thomas More, they cut down the trees of academic freedom and now there is nothing to protect them from the devil that is coming for them.

Clearly, these strategic cretins have learned absolutely nothing from the predictable consequences of their actions, given that the astonishingly stupid response to the growing popularity of the BDS movement has been to launch an organized attack on the 1st Amendment rights of Americans. Even Americans who don’t care about Israel one way or the other are going to be supporting BDS soon.

Willem Griffioen, Executive Director of the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) issued the following statement in response to Governor Haley’s signing of H 3583.

“We applaud the State of South Carolina for making H 3583 the law and delivering a historic piece of pro-Israel legislation in doing so.  The timing and importance of this groundbreaking legislation cannot be overstated. It was truly an honor for our organization to contribute our expertise and educational resources to this effort.”

“Our work on this issue has only just begun. IAF’s team of experts have merged South Carolina’s H 3583 with Illinois’ SB 1761 into one piece of model legislation. IAF has now proven its preparedness to help lead the legislative battle against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) in all fifty states. We are offering all of the supporting resources legislators need to accomplish this important point of public policy. IAF is pleased to announce that a bloc of sponsors across 18 states has already committed to introducing similar legislation in their next legislative cycle.”

This is “Ground Campaign Against Russia”-level political stupidity.

Five more reasons to homeschool.

On April 23rd of this year, parents across America staged a “walkout” (taking their kids out of schools) to protest the sexually explicit and perverse instructions by Planned Parenthood that are being taught in their schools. PJ Media has previously reported exactly how the Planned Parenthood curriculum uses pornography to teach sexual deviancy.

Is this the kind of education you want for your kids in elementary school, middle school, or high school? If not, then maybe you should consider having a protest at your school. It might help. Or it might not. My hunch is that the educrats in charge of your public schools by and large will not care. The educrats in charge might remove a thing or two today, but they will bide their time  and eventually sneak in more destruction later — when parents are not looking.

(This article is not a cut against the many dedicated and courageous teachers who slug it out day after day in the public schools. They are missionaries, trying to be lights in a very tough environment. I am simply asking if parents should continue to keep their kids in environments that are increasingly harmful to their moral, physical, and academic wellbeing.)

Instead of just walking out of your traditional neighborhood public school for a day, why not pull out your kids permanently? Parents should consider the following list of disturbing trends and reconsider their child’s education in the public schools.

Then again, if at this point you still haven’t figured it out, perhaps you might as well leave the little cretins in the lobotomy factory. They’re obviously not going to be rocket scientists… or literate, for that matter.

This expanding lawsuit against Harvard University is not entirely unrelated from the recent discussion of intelligence, success, and ethnicity:

The Justice Department is actively investigating Harvard University’s use of race in its admissions policies and has concluded the school is “out of compliance” with federal law, according to documents obtained by CNN.

The Justice Department’s battle with Harvard potentially sets the stage for the first major legal test of affirmative action policies under the Trump administration. Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that race can be one among many factors universities use in making admission decisions. Two letters from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division indicate that Harvard has challenged the department’s authority to investigate, and further state that if the school fails to provide documents to the department by December 1, the agency may file a lawsuit against the school….

Additional correspondence obtained by CNN shows that the Justice Department formally notified Harvard it was under investigation on September 20 and since that time, lawyers for the agency and the school have been trading letters over the scope of the department’s document requests, despite what Harvard noted were “its concerns about the highly unusual nature of this investigation.” The Justice Department’s interest in Harvard’s policies stems from a 2015 federal complaint that accuses the school of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. When The New York Times reported in August that the Justice Department was looking for lawyers to work on “possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” the department said that the posting was related to an ongoing case rolled over from the Obama administration.

But these more recent letters from the Justice Department, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, mark the first confirmation that the school is currently under investigation.

Who knows whether Harvard will be able to wave its magic wand and make it all go away somehow. But if they can’t, here is what the statistics very strongly indicate they are trying to hide:

• Asian-Americans are being heavily discriminated against.
• White Christians are being moderately discriminated against
• White residents of Midwestern, Southern, and Southwestern states are being heavily discriminated against.
• Many unqualified Jews are being admitted by Jewish admissions officers
• The majority of the Jews who attend an Ivy League university would not qualify for acceptance without affirmative action on their behalf.

It’s remarkable how this article on 10 reasons why things are going wrong with public education didn’t mention the single biggest problem:

Something is wrong—very, very wrong. Teachers across the country at all grade levels, in all subjects, teaching a wide variety of student populations, can sense it. There is a pulse of dysfunction, a steady palpitation of doom that the path we are on is not properly oriented.

There is a raw and amorphous anxiety creeping into the psyche of the corps of American teachers.

We may have trouble pinpointing the exact moment when something in our schools and broader culture went wildly astray, leaving in its wake teachers sapped of optimism and weighted with enervate comprehension. The following is a small sampling—this list could easily have been twice as long if my conversations with fellow teachers are any indication—of problems that teachers were not facing ten years ago.

Every failure of civil society—institutional rot, political cynicism and polarization, tattered family and other filial relations, depressed expectations of student behavior, a preening and non-apologetic narcissism, extravagant self-regard, anti-intellectualism in our minds and moral relativism in our hearts—manifests itself in our schools. The result is a weight of responsibility, an anvil of obligation, now pushing against the outer periphery of what schools can realistically achieve given their inherent limitations. It is no headline to announce that schools mirror the dysfunction of society writ large. With this in mind, I offer the following list of ten things teachers did not have to deal with just a decade ago.

Translation: the percentage of white American students is now too low to maintain the pretense. There is no longer a “school community”, or even a “town community” thanks to the post-1965 immigration. Sure, all the educational fads and new management philosophies don’t help, but none of those things would have made much of a difference in your average 1950s or even 1980s suburban high school.

This isn’t really debatable. The busing battles of the 1970s and 1980s was fundamentally based on the idea that blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities can’t be successfully educated without being surrounded by a sufficient number of whites. So, what are they going to do now that they are running short on white students?

The Atlantic simply cannot solve the mystery of ongoing US illiteracy:

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

My guess is because the teachers have lower-than-average IQs and they can’t read either.

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine – I got out of the lion’s cage and then I got back in to taunt the lion again. Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I’d been through high school and college without getting caught – so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read. 

You’ve got much bigger problems, science fans:

A new survey has found that a third of young millennials in the U.S. aren’t convinced the Earth is actually round. The national poll reveals that 18 to 24-year-olds are the largest group in the country who refuse to accept the scientific facts of the world’s shape.

YouGov, a British market research firm, polled 8,215 adults in the United States to find out if they ever believed in the “flat Earth” movement. Only 66 percent of young millennials answered that they “always believe the world is round.” Science teachers across the U.S. will be shaking their heads after learning that nine percent of young adults answered that they have “always believed” the planet was flat.

Another nine percent said of young adults said they thought the planet was spherical but had doubts about it. In a disturbing display of indecision, 16 percent of millennials said they weren’t sure what the shape of the planet was.

And good luck with that “global warming” narrative.

I suspect that this lawsuit, if successful, will spell the beginning of the end of the Jewish century in America:

A group that is suing Harvard University is demanding that it publicly release admissions data on hundreds of thousands of applicants, saying the records show a pattern of discrimination against Asian-Americans going back decades.

The group was able to view the documents through its lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 and challenges Harvard’s admissions policies. The plaintiffs said in a letter to the court last week that the documents were so compelling that there was no need for a trial, and that they would ask the judge to rule summarily in their favor based on the documents alone.

The plaintiffs also say that the public — which provides more than half a billion dollars a year in federal funding to Harvard — has a right to see the evidence that the judge will consider in her decision.

Harvard counters that the documents are tantamount to trade secrets, and that even in the unlikely event that the judge agrees to decide the case without a trial, she is likely to use only a fraction of the evidence in her decision. Only that portion, the university says, should be released.

“This is an important and closely watched civil rights case,” William S. Consovoy, the lawyer for the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in his letter to the court. “The public has a right to know exactly what is going on at Harvard. Even if this were a commercial issue — as Harvard would like to portray it — the public would have a right to know if the product is defective or if a fraud is being perpetrated.”

At stake in the dispute is the secrecy of the university admissions process, especially at elite institutions like Harvard that are competing for a small pool of highly qualified students, and whether and how race and ethnicity play a role.

Students for Fair Admissions includes more than a dozen Asian-American students who applied to Harvard and were rejected. They contend in their lawsuit that Harvard systematically and unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants by penalizing their high achievement as a group, while giving preferences to other racial and ethnic minorities. They say that Harvard’s admission process amounts to an illegal quota system.

U.S. Jews have perpetrated four self-serving myths that have contributed to their control of the intellectual high ground in the United States. One, Judeo-Christianity. Two, the historically nonsensical “nation of immigrants” narrative. Three, that they are unusually intelligent. And four, that their statistically improbable success in Hollywood, the media, and the financial sector is primarily a consequence of that superior intelligence.

Those myths have been severely eroded, but not exploded entirely yet. The primary reason that Harvard is so desperate to conceal the extent to which it has engaged in racial, ethnic, and religious favoritism is that it will a) reveal how far superior the Asian intellectual elite is to the Jewish intellectual elite, and, b) expose the extent to which Jewish admissions officers have compromised Ivy League admissions on behalf of their co-ethnics for the last five or six decades.

At a certain point, even those who are not particularly bright will eventually grasp the significance of the fact that the supposedly brilliant guys whose whip-smart intelligence is supposed to be the basis of their success reliably turn out to be the Sam Harrises and Ben Shapiros of the world, intellectual charlatans with elite degrees who are observably third-rate intellects at best.

A not-entirely-unrelated thought struck me when I was reading E.O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence the other day. Although Wilson cites the way in which kinship selection has been disproven, it did strike me as a potentially useful basis for a model that mathematically quantifies the extent to which nepotism influences group outperformance, one which, in this particular application, would demonstrate the essential silliness of the myth that has snared even the likes of the eminent Jordan Peterson.

Sometimes these jokers openly admit what is readily obvious to even the casual observer: the basis for their professed knowledge is remarkably shallow. In this particular circumstance, one might even say callow.

Jeffrey Gundlach warns we may be repeating the mistakes that led to the Great Depression. The bond investor was asked for his view on the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China.

“It’s not a positive. I mean it is really interesting when I was in elementary school and high school we talked about the Great Depression … [What] my teachers told me was that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates prematurely in a not so strong economy and also the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act,” he said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Halftime Report.”

Well, if the opinions of public school elementary teachers from four decades ago aren’t a sound basis for modern economic policy, I don’t know what could be. Sure, my elementary school teacher didn’t know the difference between a triceratops and an allosaur, but I’m confident her knowledge of economic history was considerably more sound.

Instapundit is troubled by Marquette University microaggressions:

During a recent forum at Marquette University, students and faculty members enthusiastically agreed that the university’s seal is a “microaggression” because it depicts a white explorer being guided by a Native American. “According to one professor at the forum, the seal shows how Marquette’s namesake, French explorer Fr. Jacques Marquette, ‘took advantage of an economic disparity to have a Native American as his guide.’”

I agree. Shut down Marquette and give the land back to the Indians.

On behalf of my people, I accept the good professor’s gracious and historically sensitive offer. This will take Voxiversity to a whole new level!

Just in case you needed another reason to homeschool:

A high school student in Hilliard, Ohio, didn’t want to pick sides in the contentious gun debate surrounding Wednesday’s “National Walkout,” so he stayed in class instead of joining the largely anti-gun protest or an alternative “study hall.” Hilliard Davidson High School senior Jacob Shoemaker was then reportedly slapped with a suspension.

One suspects his teacher was just bitter that he was actually going to have to show up for the class.