Research Paper Specifications.

RP Thesis Question #3

Do black lives matter to Black Lives Matter?

Black Lives Matter (BLM) says it wants to create a more just and equal society for African Americans. What has the movement achieved in the past eight years? Evaluate both sides of the argument fairly and even-handedly.

Refer knowledgeably to at least five of the following texts:

“Why understanding the BLM movement is so important.”

“Why BLM still matters.”

“Why BLM matters in education, too.”

“BLM comes to the classroom.”

“Did BLM protests against the police lead to the 2020 spike in homicides?”

“These black lives didn’t seem to matter.”

Make sure your name and section number appear in the top left-hand corner of the first page. The essay begins with a title which states the thesis question. The introduction must supply the background information needed to tell the reader why your thesis is important, and provide a narrative outline of both sides of the argument. At the end of the introduction, state the thesis (the answer to the thesis question) simply and clearly. The introductory paragraph should be about 1/10th the length of the whole essay.

Paragraphs generally should be around 16 lines in length; they should run longer ONLY if full development and support require it.

The essay must

be between 8 to 10 pages long,

be double-spaced,

be in Times New Roman 12 point font,

have 2.5 cm. margins all round.

be in MLA format

be indented using TAB

have NO headers or footers

include Works Cited, even in the 1st draft, and

be carefully proofread.

Use the research proposal to develop your ideas on the chosen topic, and put extra effort into writing a rough introductory paragraph.

In your essay you must refer knowledgeably to at least six articles listed in the 2nd research paper section. You may also use any article I send you. Use the Internet or library only to find specific information that you cannot find in the course book or get from me.

I must have your proposal before the first draft is submitted. The 1st draft, at least 6 pages in length, must be sent in by midnight on Friday, the 23rd of April. I cannot guarantee full feedback on essays that arrive after that date and time. I cannot and will not accept final drafts that have not gone through the drafting process.

The Founders of Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter Founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

I first heard about the Black Lives Matter movement the year my son Trayvon was killed. It wasn’t on a national level yet. It was just something that people were saying in our circles. To know that Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi were out there organizing this movement—I felt supported and encouraged.

There are only three of them, but they are everywhere. They are getting people to think: What if you had a 17-year-old son in a hoodie, and no weapon, just a candy and a drink, and now he’s dead on the ground? What if your daughter was sleeping in her own bed and the police knocked down the door and killed her? How would you feel? That is what “Black Lives Matter” asks.

Why understanding the Black Lives Matter movement is so important

By Monte Frank – The Hill, 07/11/16

I have never experienced segregated schools.

I have never been denied the right to vote.

I have never been stopped and frisked.

I have never had the “discussion” with my children about how to act if stopped by a police officer. My father never had that discussion with me either.

I have never been questioned by a police officer when I have visited Black neighborhoods.

I have never been judged differently by my peers because of my skin color.

I have never experienced the devastating impacts of implicit bias in school or in my career.

When the 20 children and six educators were murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where I live, the national and international media flooded my town for months. When 26 people are murdered in Chicago on a summer night, it is a footnote in the national news.

As a result, I cannot discount the Black Lives Matter movement by simply saying “all lives matter.” That would not do justice to the struggle of my black friends, colleagues and all black Americans. I simply do not know what it is like to be a black man in the United States of America. But, change will come only if all Americans try to understand what is driving the Black Lives Matter movement and then work together to combat racism wherever it exists and promote dignity, justice and respect for everyone.

My ancestors suffered the worst kind of racism as a result of politics of hatred and ignorance during the Holocaust. I grew up knowing survivors, including my mother and grandparents, and the refrain “never again” was ingrained in me. That is why what is occurring in America today keeps me up at night and frightens me. We live in a country swimming in hateful rhetoric, guns and years of institutionalized racism. This toxic mix is now boiling over in the streets of our communities from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Minnesota to Dallas. And it won’t end there unless and until all Americans stand up and speak out. That is why trying to understand the Black Lives Matter movement is so important.

To be clear, however, violence against police officers will not solve anything. Indeed, the Black Lives Matter movement has condemned the attacks on the police officers in Dallas, calling it a “tragedy — both for those who have been impacted by yesterday’s attack and for our democracy.” The movement must be vigilant to make sure its rhetoric does not encourage violence against police officers, and to denounce it when others do so. The overwhelming majority of police officers are good people who defend our freedoms.

The Black Lives Matter movement should be considered by all Americans as a recognition and a challenge. We should recognize the effects of hundreds of years of discrimination. We should challenge our government, our institutions, our police forces, our criminal justice system, our corporations, and our schools and universities to constantly examine their policies to promote diversity and inclusion, to call out discrimination and reduce implicit bias. Implicit bias training must be part of police training. The U.S. Justice Department recently announced that more than 33,000 federal agents and prosecutors will receive training aimed at preventing unconscious bias from influencing their law enforcement decisions. That effort should be expanded.

In addition, we must solve our gun violence problem. If we continue to allow criminals and other dangerous people to easily purchase firearms, we are putting law enforcement in harm’s way and creating untenable situations for well-intentioned police officers. All of this will take time. But unless we start right now, the events of this past week will become more and more routine, and our democracy based on the rule of law will erode.

During the civil rights movement, white students joined the Freedom Rides, marched on Washington, spoke out against injustice and locked arms with black men and women to demand change. In these troubling times, each of us should think about how we can effect change in all of our communities and work to make it happen. It is time to speak out against politics of hatred and policies that divide us. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”.

WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER STILL MATTERS

By Peniel E. Joseph

New Republic, April 6, 2017

BLM emerged from the Ferguson uprising in 2014, combining street protest with modern-day social media activism.

Three years after BLM launched a nationwide uprising against police violence, what’s next for the movement? In this special section, a leading African American historian explores how the group is forging a powerful new form of civil rights activism. Plus: How police in 1970s Detroit unleashed an undercover execution squad, and the modern-day rise of “warrior policing.”

Even in the splintered and often fractious world of social justice movements, Black Lives Matter doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. Few grassroots uprisings have done as much, in such a short period of time, to focus attention on long-neglected issues of racial justice, gender, and economic inequality. Yet so far, BLM has not followed up on its initial victories by building the kind of lasting, hierarchical organizations that grew out of the civil rights movement; nor has it dedicated itself to a single, easily identifiable goal, like enacting the Voting Rights Act. How are we to make sense of organizers who themselves remain so loosely organized? And if Black Lives Matter isn’t devoting itself primarily to bringing about substantive legal and legislative change, then how can it hope to transform its resistance into lasting and meaningful gains in human rights?

Such questions are understandable, given the course that BLM activists are charting for their organization. But comparing the group to the civil rights movement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of both its importance and its broader agenda. BLM was certainly inspired, in no small measure, by the nonviolent civil disobedience that was so effective during the civil rights era. But its unique contribution comes from the way it has married those grassroots tactics to the radical structural critique of institutional racism and economic injustice developed by the Black Power movement. In so doing, it has issued a clarion call to an entire generation of social justice activists, placing the fledgling movement on the cutting edge of civil rights activism for the twenty-first century.

Comparing BLM to the Black Power movement, of course, is not without pitfalls. Many critics have been quick to dismiss BLM for trafficking in the angry polemics exemplified by groups like the Black Panthers. Indeed, Black Power is often viewed as the evil twin of the civil rights movement, one that undermined the heroism of more mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. In the popular imagination, Black Power exists as a kind of fever dream, populated by gun-toting Black Panthers, student militants who took over university campuses, Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X’s insistence that black Americans would be justified in resorting to violence to defend themselves from the violence of entrenched racism.

The reality is richer—and far more resonant to our current moment. The Black Power movement’s greatest achievement was turning racial consciousness into a weapon that could be used to promote institutional change. Transforming “Negroes” into proud black people wasn’t a rhetorical flourish—it was an essential and strategic move that helped bring about a corresponding transformation across a broad spectrum of racial identity.

Black Power inspired sweeping changes in American literature, art, and poetry; created a new wave of black scholarship in higher education; and helped elect two generations of black officials at every level of government. Without the consciousness-raising of the Black Power movement, there would likely be no King holiday or Black History Month, no movements to end mass incarceration or apartheid, no free breakfasts in public schools (an outgrowth of hot-meal programs launched by the Black Panthers), no black studies programs at Harvard and other major universities, no Do the Right Thing or Lemonade, no Barack Obama.

Like BLM, which was born in the wake of widespread incidents of police brutality, Black Power came of age in the violent racial landscape confronted by civil rights activists. If Martin Luther King presented himself as a shield capable of defending the black community from the evils of racial segregation, Malcolm X entered the world stage as a sword capable of defeating a Jim Crow system that excluded and brutalized black Americans. “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm’s historic speech in Detroit in November 1963, offered a blueprint for a black revolution, one sophisticated enough to recognize white supremacy as a national issue, rather than a regional concern, and bold enough to deploy radical strategies—including armed self-defense and political self-determination—to defeat it.

The movement gained its name three years later when Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), a Trinidad-born student activist who became a leader among the Freedom Riders and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gave a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, calling for “Black Power.” To Carmichael, Black Power was a call for radical self-determination: social, political, economic, and cultural. Black people, he insisted, had the right to define the framework of racial oppression—and the tools to combat it—for themselves.

“A new society must be born,” Carmichael insisted in one of his most important and powerful speeches, before 10,000 people at the University of California in Berkeley. “Racism must die,” he said, and “economic exploitation of nonwhites must end.” He then posed a fundamental question that BLM activists implicitly continue to ask: “How can white society move to see black people as human beings?”

The Black Panther Party answered this question with a vengeance. Inspired by Malcolm X, anti-colonial movements in Africa and Latin America, and an eclectic reading of Marxist-Leninism and the literature of Third World revolution, the Panthers (whose leadership at times veered toward authoritarianism and violence) deliberately cut a combative posture to strike fear in white Americans. But like BLM, the group quickly expanded its initial focus on police brutality to embrace a ten-point program that called for the radical transformation of American democracy. Within a year of their founding, the Panthers ended their armed surveillance of white police officers, and created local chapters in poor black neighborhoods that provided free breakfasts, health care, legal and housing aid, drug rehab, and transportation to visit relatives in prison. Equally important, the group’s revolutionary politics evolved into a full-blown anti-imperialist framework that connected racism and economic injustice at home with America’s wars in Vietnam and beyond.

Like the Panthers and others in the Black Power movement, BLM rose to prominence in a landscape of police violence and entrenched racism. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was created in 2013 by Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza, three queer, black activists who were outraged at the acquittal of the “neighborhood watch” volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old black Trayvon Martin. BLM evolved into a full-fledged movement during the urban rebellions in Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. Those political uprisings, like the larger conflagrations that spread throughout America during the long, hot summers from 1963 to 1969, represent a direct confrontation of institutional racism and economic injustice.

But BLM has moved beyond many of the blind spots and shortcomings of its predecessors, embracing the full complexity of black identity and forging a movement that is far more inclusive and democratic than either the Panthers or civil rights activists ever envisioned. Many of its most active leaders are queer women and feminists. Its decentralized structure fosters participation and power sharing. It makes direct links between the struggles of black Americans and the marginalization and oppression of women, those in LGBTQ communities, and other people of color. It has made full use of the power and potential of social media, but it has also organized local chapters and articulated a broader political agenda.

Last summer, following critiques that they had failed to put forth specific demands, BLM activists and affiliated organizations published “The Movement for Black Lives,” a detailed and ambitious agenda. Divided into six parts, it includes a host of interconnected demands: a shift of public resources away from policing and prisons and into jobs and health care, a progressive overhaul of the tax code to “ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth,” expanded rights to clean air and fair housing and union organizing, and greater community control over police and schools. More detailed than the ten-point program issued by the Black Panthers, the BLM policy agenda offers a remarkably pragmatic yet potentially revolutionary blueprint—one that it aims to implement through the concerted use of both protest and politics.

Unlike the activists of the civil rights era, those in BLM do not feel forced to make an either/or choice about which model of black liberation struggle they follow. Instead, BLM has merged the nonviolent civil disobedience of the civil rights movement with the radical structural critique of white supremacy and capitalist inequality articulated by Black Power activists. Indeed, the decentralized organizational philosophy of BLM most closely mirrors that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Founded in the aftermath of the sit-in movement that swept the South in 1960, SNCC became the most important grassroots social justice organization of the era. It served as a convergence point for several overlapping, at times contradictory, political tendencies. Christian pacifists, black nationalists, liberal integrationists, black and white feminists, and peace activists were all, at various points, a part of the group, which successfully straddled the competing models of black identity advocated by the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Like SNCC, BLM embraces what we now call the intersectional nature of black identity. By placing the lives of trans and queer black women, young people, and the poor at the center of its policy agenda, the group has enlarged our collective vision of what constitutes membership in the black community. In doing so, it has expanded the terrain of what it means to be human in a society that has, since its inception as a democratic republic founded in racial slavery, insisted that black lives were disposable. Whatever future success it achieves on the policy front, BLM recognizes that what Malcolm X called a struggle for “black dignity” has always traveled a path toward universal human rights. Freedom for black Americans, the group reminds us, ultimately means a better nation for all. Until the most marginalized among us—the trans teenagers traumatized by dehumanizing legislation, the Latina and queer youth with no access to HIV treatment, the single black women struggling to raise their children while holding down three jobs—are recognized as part of our collective American family, we all remain imprisoned.

Why Black Lives Matter in Education, Too

Kimberly Quick.

The Century Foundation. Tcf

March 12, 2020

June 21, 2016

Last month, the New Schools Venture Fund Summit in San Francisco—an invitation-only conference of education reformers—opened with words from a Black Lives Matter Teach For America executive, an advocate for undocumented young people, and a professor on social movements. Their opening plenary session reflected the growing commitment of many mainstream education reform organizations to explore how issues of race and identity impact education’s landscape.

But not everyone is happy about it.

Not too long after the conference, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, wrote a piece criticizing the “leftward lurch” of the education reform movement. He quoted several right-leaning education reformers who feel like conservative dissenting views are being ostracized by the “increasing dominance of social justice warriors.” Many of the unnamed sources, as well as Rick Hess of American Enterprise Institute, decried the increase of identity politics in education policy. Specifically, they seemed to have the biggest issues with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its unapologetic rhetoric.

One cannot ignore structural racism, anti-blackness, and institutionalized violence in schools and call themselves an education reformer. To assert that the vast disparities in educational and social outcomes between minority children and their white counterparts are not rooted in past and present racially discriminatory policies and pervasive biases is to intentionally misdiagnose the problem. In fact, let’s take it a step further and ask: Should we be comfortable with people teaching and creating policy for black children if they are uncomfortable proclaiming that Black Lives Matter?

Sure—some of BLM’s principles are divisive. Black Lives Matter’s bold mode of advocacy makes demands rather than proposals, and identifies more challenges than victories. But we should remember that this nation was divided on issues of race and class long before BLM emerged as a social force. Moreover, neither the conservative ed-reformers that criticized BLM, nor the activists that spoke on its behalf at the summit mentioned specific policies that they’d like to disagree with or promote. Rather than engaging in a discussion on debatable policy platforms and interventions, conservative reformers like Jeanne Allen of CER are perturbed by social justice activists “beating [their] chests over race and income.” Division is not why we fear BLM; its far-reaching calls for change implicate long-standing institutions and individuals alike. Black Lives Matter is a “radical” concept for three major reasons.

Flipping the Script

First, it decentralizes white people from conversations about policies and institutions that were previously created for maintaining the power and privilege of whiteness. Our public school system began to take shape during a time when, in most Southern states, it was illegal to teach black slaves to read and write. As the system developed and expanded, schools were thought to be vehicles to civilize, Christianize, and control black and brown children so they would not contribute to social upheaval. In this process, Congress made it illegal to teach Native Americans in their native tongues, and stripped young native children from their homes to “kill the Indian to save the man.” And although African-American leaders pushed for public education in the South during Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 jumpstarted generations of terror, legal segregation, sharecropping, and substandard educational opportunities. By 1932, a survey of 150 school districts showed the beginnings of racialized academic tracking, and by the time the Educational Testing Service is formed in 1948, the originator of the SAT, known eugenicist Carl Brigham had already performed research “proving” that immigrants and minorities were “feeble minded.” MORE SPECIFICS NEEDED

Most current education reform circles—while often innovative in outlook—have systematically failed to contend for the ways in which racially discriminatory policy is baked into our system of public education. While we have made progress, this disregard for black lives and black narratives limits the effectiveness of proposed reforms. How can one truly measure success through test scores without first deeply evaluating how those tests might contain racially biased measures? How can reformers push challenging curriculums but not first ask whether the books given to the children affirm or diminish their heritage? Do we trust charter schools to implement no-excuses disciplinary policies before wrestling with the historical tendency of public education to encourage white assimilation over black freedom?

In both blatant and subtle ways, our education, housing, criminal justice, and political systems center the needs, feelings, and experiences of white Americans. Racial segregation and marginalization are often foundational, and breaking that foundation necessarily causes fear, instability, and discomfort to those for whom it lifted up. Of course, white people—and particularly low-income white people—face real and legitimate problems and inequities in America as well. But unlike black and brown people, these challenges do not occur because they are white. Black Lives Matter doesn’t seek to remove cross-racial concerns from public policy discourse and creation, but to ensure that the concerns of African-Americans are consistently included in meaningful and effective ways.

Wanting It Now

Unfortunately, and in contrast to much political rhetoric, we have never been a “We’re all in this together” nation. We were for forced busing before we were against it: white families remained quietly satisfied with the practice as long as it was used to maintain segregated schools rather than as a tool for integration.  Majority-minority schools are much more likely to be overwhelmingly low-income, lack qualified or experienced teachers, have an insufficient number of therapists or counselors on staff, and fail to offer higher level or advanced placement coursework. The landscape of black economic deprivation and isolation is also bleak: people of color are more likely to experience discriminatory housing policies, live near environmental hazards like coal-fired power plants and landfills, and suffer from unsafe and contaminated living spaces than are low-income whites. And the low rate of intergenerational social and economic mobility in the black community means that even if a black family climbs into the middle class, there is no guarantee that their children will remain there.

Table 1. Percentage of Population Living in High-Poverty Neighborhoods Nationwide

Age

0-5

6-11

12-17

Adults 

All Ages

Total

Poor

16.5

15.6

14.7

13.8

14.4

Nonpoor

2.7

2.4

2.5

2.8

2.7

White 

Poor

6.2

5.2

4.6

8.2

 7.5

 Nonpoor

 0.9

 0.7

 0.7

 1.2

 1.2

Black 

Poor

28.0

26.6

25.2

24.2

25.2

Nonpoor

7.9

7.6

8.0

9.3

9.0

Hispanic

Poor

18.1

17.9

17.6

16.9

17.4

Nonpoor

5.3

5.0

5.0

5.9

5.7

Source: “The Architecture of Segregation”, 2009-2013 ACS.

This is old news. Research now confirms what minorities have long known to be true through their own lived experiences. Tired of waiting, Black Lives Matter demands sweeping and immediate change. If BLM activists seem perpetually dissatisfied, it’s because they are. And they should be. The issues facing black Americans are urgent, and small advancements, while good, are woefully insufficient. Moreover, marginal, slow improvements are too often used as excuses to cancel or postpone structural change. Many education reformers, resigned to passive incrementalism, are too quick to celebrate minor changes when vast racial and socioeconomic gaps persist when it comes to student achievement and opportunities.

Pushing Back to Push Forward

Finally, this push for immediate change necessitates more confrontational, more visible tactics. It’s worth remembering the marginalization that frequently accompanies minority voices. From delays in civil rights legislation, to the voter ID laws currently springing up in many states, the concerns and opinions of brown and black people have been drowned out by powerful leaders who do not look like them unless and until they raise their voices or disrupt the status quo. A significant catalyst for reform during the height of the Civil Rights Movement was the media imagery of black people facing violence in the forms of angry mobs, police dogs, and fire hoses head on, defying local laws and regulations that restricted their ability to protest and assemble. Black Lives Matter is in many ways a movement of black bodies in defiance.

It makes sense that this challenges us—particularly as people invested in education. Part of the purpose of school is to mold not just smart, but well-adjusted and civic minded kids, and at first glance, Black Lives Matter activists appear unconcerned with civility. But in many ways, BLM uplifts a vision of blackness that educators should want for their students: powerful, confident, inquisitive, social-justice minded, determined, and ultimately, heard. In an environment where black boys are three times more likely than white boys—and black girls are six times more likely than white girls—to be suspended or expelled from school, and where the vast majority of those punishments are delved out for “defiance” or other subjective, non-violent behaviors, it’s time to seriously reflect on the ways that society might conflate bad behavior and black expression. Educators, regardless of ideology, should advocate for spaces in which all student voices will be empowered, and should be particularly conscious of how black voices might need to be a little louder than the rest to be equally regarded.

The Conservative Voice: Pushout or Walkout?

The conservative voice in education reform remains important, and has contributed to challenging the status quo in several important ways. But Black Lives Matter is simply the notion that the humanity of black people deserves to be respected and regarded with the same vigor and consistency as that of white people in all policy and processes. It’s curious, then, that some conservatives have identified this basic notion—the still unfulfilled promise of “all men are created equal” as a force that alienates them from the education reform conversation.

It’s fully possible to be conservative and advocate for say, market-based reforms, while acknowledging structural racism and disparity and desiring to do something about it. In his essay on conservative pushout in the education reform movement, Pondiscio writes that “conservative theories of action are based on strong evidence of two claims: that markets have taken more people out of poverty than any force and history, and that full membership in civil society gives individuals and their groups power, builds social capital, and enables communities to thrive and express themselves fully.” He is correct that these ideas merit a full hearing. But they are not incompatible with equity-minded social movements—so long as conservatives are willing to acknowledge the ways in which minorities have struggled to gain access to both the marketplace and civil society. Anti-racism need not be connected to a particular partisan ideology, but for whatever reasons, some conservatives still seem to shy away from the concept.

Black Lives Matter Comes to the Classroom

Activists bring the movement’s spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary schools.

Peter C. Myers

City Journal, Summer 2019

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

No one should be surprised. As BLM statements repeatedly make clear, the movement has always linked the charges of police misconduct that brought it into existence with a comprehensive critique of the American polity. “State violence” against blacks “takes many forms,” the BLM network’s “About us” statement declares. The first plank of a widely publicized platform issued in 2016 demands “an immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth,” including “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.” BLM founder Opal Tometi heads the list of signatories of a 2018 letter urging teachers to support a “new uprising for racial justice” in the nation’s schools.

Neither Tometi nor BLM’s other two founders, however, initiated the latest campaign. In keeping with activists’ pride in their network’s decentralization—a self-conscious departure from the top-down organizational model that they ascribe to the civil rights movement—the present venture is akin to a franchising operation, with local cells of teachers’ union activists as the operators. K–12 educators sympathetic with the movement have successfully promoted the “Black Lives Matter at School” program, bringing its activist spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary classrooms.

One figure in the drive stands out: Jesse Hagopian, a teachers’ union activist and high school ethnic-studies teacher in Seattle. A veteran advocate for increased public school funding and opponent of high-stakes standardized testing, Hagopian first came to public notice in 2011, when he and fellow demonstrators tried to pull off a “citizens’ arrest” of the Washington state legislature, on the grounds that lawmakers had failed to comply with a state constitutional mandate to fund the schools adequately. For Hagopian, the funding and testing issues are tributaries of his main interest, the combating of “institutional racism”—a cause to which he was first awakened, he reports, by his course work in media studies and critical race theory at Macalester College, a notoriously left-leaning liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The catalyzing event for Hagopian’s BLM work occurred in September 2016. A local group, led by a student support worker, staged a demonstration called “Black Men Uniting to Change the Narrative” at Seattle’s John Muir elementary school. A decision by the school’s teachers and staff to wear BLM T-shirts in solidarity sparked public controversy, which, in turn, prompted a teachers’ union subgroup, Social Equity Educators (SEE), to plan a citywide event, “Black Lives Matter at School Day,” to be held a few weeks later. Endorsements flowed in from the Seattle Education Association (SEA), the Seattle School District administration, and the local NAACP branch. Thousands of BLM T-shirts were sold, and SEE and SEA disseminated BLM instructional resources to teachers and parents. According to participants’ chronicle of events, on October 19, the appointed day, “thousands of educators . . . reached tens of thousands of Seattle students and parents with a message of support for Black students and opposition to anti-Black racism.” The coauthors of that chronicle, Hagopian and local education professor Wayne Au, enthused over Seattle’s institutional and parental support “for a very politicized action for racial justice in education.”

Seattle was only a beachhead. Au circulated a letter that within days had gained the support of 250 education professors across the country. The parallel letter of support signed by Tometi received the signatures of big-name progressives, including Melissa Harris-Perry and Jonathan Kozol. News of the Seattle event spread, inspiring like-minded teacher groups in Philadelphia and Rochester, New York, to plan similar BLM days—or, in the Philadelphia case, a full BLM school week, in 2017.

Activist teachers formed a national committee and prevailed on the National Education Association to adopt a resolution of endorsement. Thus was conceived the BLM at School National Week of Action, to be held annually the first week of February to set the tone for Black History Month. The following year, school districts in more than 20 major cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Seattle incorporated BLM at School Week into their curricula. This past February, amid favorable publicity, school districts in more than 30 cities and counties participated.

The cover of the textbook used as part of the BLM curriculum, which seeks to make “classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-blackness.”

Hagopian, Au, and education professor Dyan Watson provide a pointed description of the movement’s goals in their introduction to Teaching for Black Lives, a textbook meant for use in the BLM at School efforts. The objective, they write, is to show how educators “can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness.” That ambition, in their view, cannot be satisfied by the opportunity to shape instruction for just one week per school year. As becomes clear in organizers’ statements of principles and demands, as well as in the burgeoning mass of instructional material that participating teachers have contributed (including lessons for every grade level), the ultimate objective is to catechize the nation’s students, from kindergarten through high school, in BLM’s race-based vision of the world.

Profiles of Hagopian leave the impression of a genuinely bighearted man, devoted to his students’ well-being. Yet those who believe that being antiracist today means supporting the BLM agenda should consider more carefully the ideas that the movement is urging us to embrace.

In the BLM statement “What We Believe,” which includes the “13 guiding principles” from which the school curricula are developed, one finds affirmations reminiscent of the best of the black freedom movement of a half-century ago: “We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities”; “We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.” Likewise, in the National Black Lives Matter in School Week of Action Starter Kit appears this comforting guidance on how to discuss BLM with young children:

We can also mention the movement as a group of people who want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, regardless of the color of their skin. We can say . . . “The Civil Rights Movement, with people we know about, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, worked to change laws that were unfair. The Black Lives Matter movement is with people who want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, because, even though many of those laws were changed many years ago, some people are still not being treated fairly.”

Looking beyond those relatively anodyne representations, however, one finds unambiguous expressions of social-justice extremism. Among BLM’s 13 principles, for instance, are various commitments to intersectionality—that is, the focus on overlapping categories of racial, gender, or sexual victimization. BLM dedicates itself to dismantling “cisgender privilege,” “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” The Starter Kit section on teaching young children declares: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everybody gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

BLM’s teaching about race is no less radical. The first sentence of the introduction to the Teaching for Black Lives textbook reads: “Black students’ minds and bodies are under attack.” Anecdotes of abusive treatment follow, preparing the central thrust of the BLM-at-school pedagogy: “The school-to-prison-pipeline is a major contributor to the overall epidemic of police violence and mass incarceration that functions as one of sharpest edges of structural racism in the United States.” The stoking of readers’ anger continues with this distorted characterization of the galvanizing event for BLM’s street protests: “In August of 2014, Michael Brown was killed in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the streets for hours as a reminder to the Black residents in the neighborhood that their lives are meaningless to the American Empire.” THE FACTS BEG TO DIFFER.

Instances of such incendiary rhetoric recur in the recommended instructional materials. The animating idea throughout is that African-Americans, intersecting with a familiar roster of other aggrieved identity groups, face systemic oppression, as they always have in America—even today, 50 years into the post–civil rights era. For all such groups and their “allies,” the proper relation to society must therefore be one of opposition, and a primary function of the education system must be to instruct students in the rationale, means, and ends of resistance—the more radical, the better.

Commonly recognized eminences such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., may be honored for their resistance, so far as it extended, but the real heroes, according to BLM’s pedagogues, are the most extreme figures and factions in the history of black protest. Presenting U.S. history as an unbroken chain of oppression, BLM’s instructional materials endeavor to burnish the reputations of black nationalists and socialists including Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Black Power founder Stokely Carmichael, and the leadership of the Black Panther Party. In a chapter devoted to them in Teaching for Black Lives, the Panthers are characterized as “one of the most important human rights organizations of the late 1960s,” a group whose “revolutionary socialist ideology” is credited for inspiring noble endeavors to provide decent housing, education, and health care to impoverished black communities and whose history “holds vital lessons for today’s movement to confront racism and police violence.”

Perusing the recommended BLM instructional materials, one confronts many questions—commonly pressed in the form of accusations—concerning race- and gender-related injustices in America. Undertaken in a spirit of genuine openness, such questioning would be perfectly consonant with the classical liberalism of America’s Founders, exemplifying a Madisonian mistrust of majority factions or a Jeffersonian vigilance against encroaching government. To assess the quality of the conversation that BLM’s enthusiasts would initiate in the schools, though, one must also consider questions not recommended for student reflection. Even as Teaching for Black Lives extols the Black Panthers as human rights champions and decries their persecution by law enforcement, for instance, it ignores the real-world track record of the revolutionary socialism that the Panthers espoused, leaving students to suppose that socialism in practice meant nothing more than feeding, educating, and healing the needy. Likewise, BLM advocates solicit no inquiry into the despotic character of Panther leader Huey Newton, a man prone to fits of psychopathic violence.

“Teaching for Black Lives” celebrates Black Panther leaders like Huey Newton (shown here in 1977) as human rights champions and decries their persecution by law enforcement.

In their zeal for intersectionality, in turn, BLM’s leaders and pedagogues announce their determination to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” while withholding any suggestion that students inquire into the effects—above all, on children—of fatherlessness, rampant among disadvantaged black and Hispanic-Americans, and increasing among disadvantaged whites. Likewise, urging students to affirm fluidity and autonomy in gender identities, they acknowledge no questions concerning the physical and psychological risks associated with gender-reassignment therapies, nor any reason to wonder what will remain of antidiscrimination protections for women if subjective choice overrides the biological fact of sex. Nor do they invite students to wonder, on the same grounds, whether racial identity can also be a matter of human will—and, if so, what would remain of protections against discrimination by race.

The most conspicuous unasked questions pertain to the movement’s core allegations about police abuse and the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Students, likely to be frightened or incensed by charges of an epidemic of antiblack violence perpetrated by law enforcement and of systematic bias practiced by school authorities, are not encouraged to ask—indeed, are discouraged from asking—such questions as the following, which I propose:

What were the results of the Obama administration directive, based on the allegation (propagated by BLM) of antiblack discrimination in schools’ disciplinary policies, that schools cease enforcing disciplinary rules that had a disparate impact on racial- or ethnic-minority students? Did classrooms become more orderly and conducive to learning, or less so?

With respect to claims of an “epidemic” of racially biased killings—“extrajudicial executions”—of black people by police officers, what do available data reveal of the absolute numbers of police deployments of deadly force in recent years? What do they reveal about the numbers of people shot by police, relative to the numbers shot by non-law-enforcement, “private-sector” perpetrators?

What do the data reveal about the numbers of black suspects shot by police relative to nonblack suspects? How do those numbers compare with the numbers of serious crimes committed by blacks relative to those committed by nonblacks?

Since the rise, beginning in 2014, of public accusations of racial bias in police officers’ deployment of violent force, how have officers responded in the policing of high-crime areas? What has happened to the violent-crime rates in those areas in that time period?

What evidence warrants BLM activists’ sweeping allegations of a U.S. “war against Black people,” of America’s “systemic violence against Black people,” of “a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” and the like? QUESTIONS

Perhaps those responsible for BLM at School Week avoid such questions because they presume the answers, or view the questions as biased. Whatever their reasons, were they to confront those questions squarely, they would discover what readers of City Journal likely know—that empirical evidence radically complicates their view of the American polity as an enduring antiblack despotism.

A fair-minded inquiry would note recent findings that a relaxation of school disciplinary policies does not improve outcomes, either in classroom orderliness or student performance—to the contrary. With respect to the charges of abusive and biased policing, BLM sympathizers willing to confront the evidence would discover that homicides by private actors vastly outnumber deployments of deadly force by police officers, and the vast majority of those involve perpetrators and victims of the same racial groups; that the majority of those killed by police were either armed or violently resisting arrest; and that the percentages of police killings that involve black suspects are roughly proportionate to the percentages of violent crimes by black offenders, while black citizens are much more likely than those of any other racial group to be victimized in violent crimes. They would also discover that murders in many of the nation’s large cities significantly increased in 2015 and 2016, reversing a long-running decline. The increase was coincident with the rise of BLM antipolice protests; some researchers have attributed the upsurge to the protests’ demoralizing effects on police. ANSWERS

Given these data, if the propagators of BLM’s vision of racial justice decline to address seriously the questions that that vision raises, they would leave their movement exposed to the most challenging question of all: Which black lives really matter to BLM—those of the law-abiding or the lawless, the peaceful or the violent, the orderly or the disorderly?

For many, what legitimates BLM’s bid to shape the minds of students is the notion that the group is the rightful heir of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Despite BLM leaders’ invocations of King and the “beloved community,” that notion is profoundly mistaken.

BLM does have a valid claim on a portion of the past century’s black freedom struggle—but it is the portion associated with the movement’s derailment, not its lasting successes. Whereas the old, and now broadly revered, African-American protest tradition, which reached its culmination in the classical phase of the civil rights movement, ultimately succeeded because it aimed to complete America, BLM’s explicit objective, inspired by the Black Power factions of the late 1960s, is to transform America. The trouble with BLM is that its activists and theoreticians cling uncritically to an ideologically blinkered rendering of America as an empire of seemingly incorrigible bigotry. That vision of America is a hallucination that, propagated in schools, promises to lower rather than to lift the life prospects of vulnerable young people.

Did the BLM Protests Against the Police Lead to the 2020 Spike in Homicides?

written by Wilfred Reilly

Quillette, January 27, 2021.

Serious crime, particularly murder, soared while everyone was supposed to be locked indoors. Between 2019—by no means a famously peaceful year—and 2020, homicides alone surged by 42 percent during the summer and 34 percent during the fall. Many politically acceptable explanations have been advanced for this, with left-leaning publications like Vox preferring to focus on the undeniable economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alternative explanation fits the data far better: crime increased because major police departments had their budgets slashed and reeled in their stops dramatically—and similar chaos has followed such “woke” policy moves nearly every time they have been implemented.

The plain fact of the crime surge is a matter of little if any dispute. According to a serious 20-plus page report from the Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice (CCCJ), “homicides, aggravated assaults, and gun assaults rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020.” As just noted, murder rates jumped more than 30 percent fall-over-fall and more than 40 percent summer-over-summer from 2019 to 2020. Across just the 21 core cities providing data to the CCCJ project, homicides increased by an astounding 610 between the two years. Further, most other serious crimes of violence were up as well: “Aggravated assaults went up by 15 percent in the summer and 13 percent in the fall of 2020; gun assaults increased by 15 percent and 16 percent.”

Data like these are even more striking when analyzed at the level of each individual city, as can be done via this excellent spreadsheet from Criminologist Jeffrey Asher. In Louisville, the nearest “big” city to my new Kentucky home, homicides had jumped 78 percent when this was recorded by Asher—from 78 in 2019 to 139 in 2020—and his confirmed data for the city dates only to the end of October. Nor was this leap particularly unusual. A scroll through the major urban centers in the Midwestern US reveals surges from 194 to 264 in St. Louis (35 percent) and from 98 to 191 (95 percent) in Milwaukee. Larger American cities followed the same pattern, with famously well-policed New York City seeing an increase from 314 to 437 and my hometown of Chicago witnessing a larger rise from 481 to 748. This last grim tally led all American cities, and seems to have been the second highest total in Chicago during the past two decades.

Multiple theories have been advanced to explain this depressing phenomenon. A December 2020 Vox article from German Lopez headlined “The rise in murders in the US, explained” provides a solid outline of many of them. In it, Lopez presents no less than seven potential explanations for the violence, including chaos caused by COVID-19 (“the pandemic has really messed things up”), secondary medical effects of the bug (“overwhelmed hospitals [could have] led to more death”),1 and the struggling economy. Some of Lopez’s theories are truly innovative: he speculates at one point that “trust in police” could have plunged after high-profile incidents of brutality such as the killing of George Floyd, leading to more “street justice”—and speculates at another that pandemic-purchased guns in the hands of citizens may simply have resulted in “more gun violence.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps something simpler is going on. One of the most robust findings in social science is that reductions in effective policing correlate with increases in crime. And 2020, a year which included the New York Times running a Sunday editorial headlined “Yes: We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” featured probably the most consistent and sustained attack on the Boys in Blue in the modern era. In New York City, roughly $1,000,000,000 was slashed from the annual police budget, with much of this money shifted to “youth and social services programs,” according to USA Today. Despite noting that these cuts directly caused the cancellation of a 1,200-person class of new officers, scheduled to enter the Police Academy in August 2020, the USA Today piece pointed out that “many say” they were not large enough.

In Los Angeles, similarly, the police budget was reduced by $150,000,000 “following calls to defund the police after George Floyd’s May 25 death.” By November 12th of the past year, these cuts had already resulted in the dissolution of the department’s entire Animal Cruelty Task Force, and more notably of the Sexual Assault/Special Victims unit “that investigated disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein.” Future LA cuts to “Air Support, the Metropolitan Division, Gangs and Narcotics, and Commercial Crimes” are possible or probable.

Along with axe-cuts to police budgets, 2020 also saw significant and measurable declines in police stops. In Minneapolis, which seriously discussed defunding police and slashed the police budget by millions, Bloomberg noted that the MPD “has been making an average of 80 percent fewer traffic stops each week since May 25.” May 25th, 2020, was the exact date of George Floyd’s death. In addition to routine automobile stops, stops specifically of suspicious vehicles—defined as those thought to have been involved in a crime—were down 24 percent since the same date. Similarly, suspicious person stops “were down 39 percent since May 25.” The Bloomberg piece pointed out that one obvious explanation for this could be “pullback—police reducing their proactive activity in the wake of public criticism of their performance.” Surely so: and data from Chicago and other cities indicate that Minneapolis officers hardly pulled back alone.

Alongside budget cuts and at least city-wide declines in stops came perhaps the ultimate empirical validation of Broken Windows Theory. BWT, the controversial if oft-validated criminological theory originally proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, argues that visible signs of crime, chaos, and disorder create urban environments that serve as breeding grounds for further and more extreme misbehavior. Throughout 2020, massive and widely tolerated urban riots swept the country. In Minneapolis, where George Floyd died, rioters destroyed much of a famous and heavily minority business district, and set an active police station on fire with the cops initially inside. In Seattle, Black Bloc and Black Lives Matter activists set up a literal city-state known as CHAZ (or CHOP), within which six people were eventually shot. In Portland (OR), the well-known federal courthouse was attacked for roughly 100 days running, often with M-80 fireworks used as home-made mortars.

It is no exaggeration to say that the huge majority of rioters were essentially given the unpunished “room to destroy” originally suggested by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake during her city’s 2015 riots. Empirical articles from sources such as Court-House News and Pamplin Media Group have pointed out that roughly 91 percent of arrested Portland rioters were never prosecuted for anything, and these figures frankly seem similar across other major cities like Chicago. It seems logically obvious that even crimes as serious as murder could occur with relative impunity in this environment: the majority of the attackers of the six people seriously or fatally shot inside CHAZ are still at large.

“Common sense” aside, considerable statistical evidence indicates that the chaos-and-pullback explanation for the 2020 American totentanz fits the data better than alternative hypotheses such as our economic downturn. First, the relationship between crime and poverty (if that even is the proper causal direction) is far trickier than often supposed, and rates of serious crime such as murder frequently do not increase during recessions and depressions. During the recent Great Recession, murders totaled 16,422 in 2008, 15,399 in 2009, 14,772 in 2010, and 14,661 in 2011—declining by 1,761 between the start of the crisis and the commonly used end date for it.

Data specific to 2020 provide further support for non-economic explanations for the murder surge. While homicides, aggravated assaults, and gun crimes all increased dramatically, crimes focused purely on obtaining money all decreased in frequency during a heavily locked-down year. The CCCJ authors note that: “Residential burglary, larceny, and drug offense rates dropped by 24 percent, 24 percent, and 32 percent from the same period in 2019.” Perhaps most significantly, crime data is tracked on a monthly as well as annual basis, and—as previously cited Minneapolis figures indicated—the largest 2020 increases in violent crime trace directly to the Riot Summer following the death of George Floyd, rather than to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Again as per the CCCJ report: “Homicides… rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020.”

This finding gels perfectly with recent history. The increase in murders from roughly 14,000 in 2014 to 17,294 in 2017, following the first wave of Black Lives Matter-associated riots and the resulting police pullback, gained international attention as the “Ferguson Effect.” More broadly, US murders jumped from 8,530 in 1962 to 24,700 in 1991, following a generation or two of criminal justice reforms including the Miranda and Escobedo protocols, the Fruit of the Poisoned Tree doctrine, and a general liberalization of sentencing policies. Other serious violent crimes jumped proportionately, as detailed by Mona Charen in the unfashionable but essential book Do-Gooders. In a sentence so obviously true that only an academic social scientist could deny it, more police policing more effectively decreases crime. TRUE

And crimes have victims. While I mourn for dead fellow citizens of any color, a sad and absurd reality of both post-Ferguson and summer 2020 violence is that a great many of those killed unnecessarily were black Americans. In Chicago, 81.8 percent of those murdered in 2020 were African Americans, while 3.9 percent of victims were white. The simplest possible sort of number-crunching shows us that, assuming consistent rates of homicide by race, the Windy City’s vertical move from 481 to 748 deaths by violence cost 218 black lives inside one year. Assuming that murders nationwide increased only by 35 percent from 2019’s total of 16,425 and that only 50 percent of these new victims were black, the equivalent toll country-wide would be 2,874 dead black folks, including horrifying victims such as hero cop David Dorn and little eight-year-old Secoriea Turner.

The numbers speak for themselves. The ideas advanced by Black Lives Matter may be popular and “woke,” but they are also very often the worst possible policies for those of us who actually want to preserve black, and other, American lives.

 

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. His most recent book is Taboo: Ten Facts You Can’t Talk About. You can follow him on Twitter at @will_da_beast630.

These black lives didn’t seem to matter in 2020

By Rav Arora

New York Post, February 6, 2021

At least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide in 2020, an increase of more than 1,000 compared to 2019.

In 2020, every major institution in the United States — including social-media platforms, sports leagues, universities, Hollywood, and major corporations — pledged their allegiance to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Protesters spanned the country, outraged at the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. 

It is understandable that the nation was so united in shock and horror after Floyd’s death, and his tragic case called attention to the need for some sensible police reforms.  But if we truly believe that “Black Lives Matter,” we cannot and must not focus only on a small percentage of those lives taken (less than half of a percent) during conflicts with the police. And we certainly should not be adopting policies that could lead to even more deaths in the black community. 

Last year saw the largest year-to-year increase in homicides ever recorded in US history. The homicide rate in 34 cities was 30 percent higher in 2020 compared to the previous year, according to a Jan. 31 report by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. 

Victims of these homicides are disproportionately African American. At least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide in 2020, an increase of more than 1,000 compared to 2019 (7,484). Violent crime is concentrated in primarily low-income, marginalized black communities where the police are under-resourced and Democratic leadership has abysmally failed. In Chicago, 80 percent of gun-violence victims in 2020 were black. According to the latest data in New York City, 71 percent of shooting victims are black — even though black people constitute just 26 percent of the city’s population. The tragic reality is one black life was killed less than every hour in America last year. 

Meanwhile, politicians and the mainstream media sensationalize and magnify any questionable case involving a black suspect and a white police officer to affirm dogmas about “racial oppression” (even if the suspect was at fault). They obsessively lament racial disparities in every nook and cranny of American life, but the most egregious disparity — in homicide victimization rates — is rarely ever mentioned. Why? 

Since more than 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders, the ghost of endemic white supremacy cannot be invoked to push racial grievance narratives. As a result, the media turns a blind eye. Black lives only seem to matter when racism is involved

And yet, the probability of an African American being killed by a civilian is more than 30 times higher than that of being killed by a member of law enforcement. In Chicago’s marginalized neighborhoods last year alone, more than three times as many black children died of homicide than the total number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police in 2020.  Of course, police officers are agents of the state and we must hold them to a higher standard than the average citizen. But a life taken is a life taken. The victim’s family grieves whether the assailant is a gang member or an officer in blue. 

I recently attended a virtual prayer session with Mothers In Charge, a Philadelphia-based organization for families affected by gun violence. Chantay Love Maison, whose brother died after being shot seven times, lamented, “This harm is so horrific, that there are no words that could describe it. There is not a scream that is loud enough that will describe the pain a family will go through.” 

And yet, our society is systematically failing citizens like her, partly because the BLM movement has pushed to defund the police and reduce their presence across the nation. These efforts drove police forces nationwide to significantly reduce traffic stops and arrests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Paul Cassell revealed in a recent study. As a result of the drop in proactive policing, homicide rates dramatically rose across major US cities in the summer and fall of 2020. 

“When police don’t maintain order and enforce quality-of-life offenses, when arrested violent offenders aren’t detained, violent criminals become more violent,” Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore PD officer who today teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. “They have more opportunities to become more violent. This isn’t news.” 

Meanwhile, despite BLM’s anti-police narrative, poll after poll shows most black Americans don’t support the movement’s radical ideas. Last summer, a much-publicized Gallup poll found that 81 percent of black Americans favored the same or higher levels of police presence in their neighborhoods. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, a poll in Minneapolis showed that reducing the city’s police force was more unpopular among black residents than their white counterparts. 

A group of aggrieved black residents have even sued the city of Minneapolis for the lack of police protection in their communities.  “We hear gunshots every night, people’s houses being riddled with bullets,” Don Samuels, one of the residents involved in the suit, told Time magazine. “There is this kind of fantasy component that the police are not necessary and that is a life and death factor.” 

His story never went viral, however, probably because he saw police as part of the solution rather than the enemy. 

Yes, we need police reform. There are too many police abuses in our country, and activists are right to call for better training and other measures to improve this problem. But the greatest threat to black lives isn’t the police. If we truly cared about black lives, we need to get serious about fighting the scourge of violence that has killed so many black Americans, while being given such scarce attention from our ideologically driven media and political elite. 

Research Paper Specifications.

RPTQ #4: Do U.S. educators want to reform the system to create a better educated population or to bring they system down to their own level?

ENG 102-007

SUMMER 2021

Educators are always looking for more effective ways of education students, from kindergarten on up to university. Every innovation, however, seems to the make the system less effective, especially in math and language. Perhaps it’s time educators began to take a long, hard look at themselves?

Refer knowledgeably to the following texts:

“Is meritocracy an idea worth saving.”

“How math can be anti-racist.”

“Mediocrity for all.”

“The decline of education schools: 10 questions and answers.”

“Declining medical school in a time of pandemic .”

Make sure your name and section number appear in the top left-hand corner of the first page. The essay begins with a title which states the thesis question. The introduction must supply the background information needed to tell the reader why your thesis is important, and provide a narrative outline of both sides of the argument. At the end of the introduction, state the thesis (the answer to the thesis question) simply and clearly. The introductory paragraph should be about 1/10th the length of the whole essay.

Paragraphs generally should be around 16 lines in length; they should run longer ONLY if full development and support require it.

The essay must

be between 8 to 10 pages long,

be double-spaced,

be in Times New Roman 12 point font,

have 2.5 cm. margins all round.

be in MLA format

be indented using TAB

have NO headers or footers

include Works Cited, even in the 1st draft, and

be carefully proofread.

Use the research proposal to develop your ideas on the chosen topic, and put extra effort into writing a rough introductory paragraph.

In your essay you must refer knowledgeably to at least six articles listed in the 2nd research paper section. You may also use any article I send you. Use the Internet or library only to find specific information that you cannot find in the course book or get from me.

I must have your proposal before the first draft is submitted. The 1st draft, at least 6 pages in length, must be sent in by midnight on Friday, the 23rd of April. I cannot guarantee full feedback on essays that arrive after that date and time. I cannot and will not accept final drafts that have not gone through the drafting process.

Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deceptions, the Dogmas.

New York: The Free Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 2
Impaired Faculties

NO DISCUSSION of American education can be realistic without considering the calibre of the people who teach in the nation’s schools. By all indicators—whether objective data or first-hand observations—the intellectual calibre of public school teachers in the United States is shockingly low. While there have been, and continue to be, many schemes designed to raise the qualifications and performance of the teaching profession, the intellectual level of this occupation has, if anything, declined in recent times, just as the performance of the students they teach has declined. To understand why innumerable efforts to improve teachers and teaching have failed, it is necessary to understand something about the occupation itself, about the education which prepares people for that occupation, about the kind of people who become teachers, and about the institutions which attempt to educate American children.

THE OCCUPATION

There are well over 2 million school teachers in the United States—more than all the doctors, lawyers, and engineers combined.1 Their sheer numbers alone mean that there will inevitably be many exceptions to any generalizations made about teachers. However, a number of important generalizations do apply to the great majority of these teachers. For example, public school teaching is an overwhelmingly unionized occupation, an occupation with virtually iron-clad job security, an occupation in which virtually everyone has a degree or degrees, and yet an occupation whose lack of substantive intellectual qualifications is painfully demonstrable.

The National Education Association (NEA) alone has approximately one and a half million members and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has more than 600,000 members. Together, they represent the great majority of teachers.2 Both organizations are highly effective lobbying groups at both the federal and state levels, and both aim much advertising at the general public, both to generate a favorable image of teachers and to get the public used to seeing education issues in a certain framework, favorable to the profession—for example, to equate more money for the public school establishment with “an investment in better education.” Everything from television commercials to bumper stickers promote their cause, unopposed by any comparably organized counter-propaganda. Moreover, huge political campaign contributions assure teachers’ unions favorable access to the seats of power in Washington and in the state capitals.

Given the political realities, it can hardly be surprising that public school teachers are among the most difficult of all employees to fire—regardless of the level of their competence or incompetence. Rates of pay likewise bear virtually no relationship to competence or incompetence, but are largely determined by longevity and college credits.3 A teacher who ruins the education of generation after generation of students will be rewarded by continually rising pay levels.

Just how incompetent a teacher can be and still keep the job was illustrated by an extreme case in South Carolina, where a school tried to get rid of a teacher who had been warned repeatedly about her poor teaching and poor English. At a hearing where she was given a ten-word vocabulary test, she could neither pronounce nor define the word “agrarian.” She could pronounce the word “suffrage” but defined it as “people suffering from some reason or other.” The word “ratify” she defined as “to get rid of something.” In her own defense, she said: “I’m not saying I was the best, but I don’t think I did more harm than anyone else.” A judge ordered her reinstated.

To complete the tightly controlled monopoly, both the supply of customers and the supply of labor are almost totally under the control of the education establishment. Compulsory attendance laws guarantee a captive audience, except for about 13 percent of American youngsters who attend private schools,5 and official requirements of education courses for permanent tenure keep out the unwanted competition of potential teachers from outside the existing establishment. These multiple monopolies serve the interests of two narrow constituencies: (1) public school teachers and administrators, and (2) those college professors who teach education courses—courses notoriously unattractive in themselves, but representing the toll gates through which aspirants must pass in order to acquire tenure in public school teaching. “Emergency” or “provisional” credentials can be obtained to enter the classroom, but education courses are officially required to stay there permanently as a teacher.

INTELLECTUAL LEVELS

The extremes to which job security for the individual and job barriers for the profession are carried suggest a desperate need to avoid competition. This fear of competition is by no means paranoid. It is very solidly based on the low levels of substantive intellectual ability among public school teachers and administrators, and among the professors of education who taught them.

Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university. The word “contempt” appears repeatedly in discussions of the way most academic students and professors view their counterparts in the field of education.6 At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be “the widest street in the world” because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.

Nor is Columbia at all unique in this respect. “In many universities,” according to a study by Martin Mayer, “there is little it any contact between the members of the department of education and the members of other departments in the school.”7 When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he told the institution’s overseers that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.”8 More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, “the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work.”9 Education schools and education departments have been called “the intellectual slums” of the university.

Despite some attempts to depict such attitudes as mere snobbery, hard data on education student qualifications have consistently shown their mental test scores to be at or near the bottom among all categories of students. This was as true of studies done in the 1920s and 1930s as of studies in the 1980s.10 Whether measured by Scholastic Aptitude Tests, ACT tests, vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, or Graduate Record Examinations, students majoring in education have consistently scored below the national average.11 When the U.S. Army had college students tested in 1951 for draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students passed in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, but only 27 percent of those majoring in education passed.

In 1980-81, students majoring in education scored lower on both verbal and quantitative SATs than students majoring in art, music, theatre, the behavioral sciences, physical sciences, or biological sciences, business or commerce, engineering, mathematics, the humanities, or health occupations. Undergraduate business and commercial majors have long been regarded as being of low quality, but they still edged out education majors on both parts of the SAT. Engineering students tend to be lopsidedly better mathematically than verbally, but nevertheless their verbal scores exceeded those of education majors, just as art and theatre majors had higher mathematics scores than education majors. Not only have education students’ test scores been low, they have also been declining over time. As of academic year 1972-73, the average verbal SAT score for high school students choosing education as their intended college major was 418—and by academic year 1979-80, this had declined to 389.

At the graduate level, it is very much the same story, with students in numerous other fields outscoring education students on the Graduate Record Examination—by from 91 points composite to 259 points, depending on the field.14 The pool of graduate students in education supplies not only teachers, counselors, and administrators, but also professors of education and other “leaders” and spokesmen for the education establishment. In short, educators are drawing disproportionately from the dregs of the college-educated population. As William H. Whyte said back in the 1950s, “the facts are too critical for euphemism.”

Professors of education rank as low among college and university faculty members as education students do among other students. After listing a number of professors “of great personal and intellectual distinction” teaching in the field of education, Martin Mayer nevertheless concluded:

On the average, however, it is true to say that the academic professors, with many exceptions in the applied sciences and some in the social sciences, are educated men, and the professors of education are not.

Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that “most education courses are not intellectually respectable, because their teachers and the textbooks are not intellectually respectable.”17 In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers. There are severe limits to how intellectual their teaching could be, even if they wanted it to be. Their susceptibility to fads, and especially to non-intellectual and anti-intellectual fads, is understandable—but very damaging to American education. What is less understandable is why parents and the public allow themselves to be intimidated by such educators’ pretensions of “expertise.”

The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. These courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent. It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers.

The weeding out process begins early and continues long, eliminating more and more of the best qualified people. Among high school seniors, only 7 percent of those with SAT scores in the top 20 percent, and 13 percent of those in the next quintile, expressed a desire to go into teaching, while nearly half of those in the bottom 40 percent chose teaching. Moreover, with the passage of time, completion of a college education, and actual work in a teaching career, attrition is far higher in the top ability groups—85 percent of those in the top 20 percent leave teaching after relatively brief careers—while low-ability people tend to remain teachers.18 This too is a long-standing pattern. A 1959 study of World War II veterans who had entered the teaching profession concluded that “those who are academically more capable and talented tended to drop out of teaching and those who remained as classroom teachers in the elementary and secondary schools were the less intellectually able members of the original group.”19 The results in this male sample were very similar to the results in a female sample in 1964 which found that the “attrition rate from teaching as an occupation was highest among the high ability group.”20 Other studies have had very similar results.21 Sometimes the more able people simply leave for greener pastures, but the greater seniority of the least able can also force schools to lay off the newer and better teachers whenever jobs are reduced.

The dry statistics of these studies translate into a painful human reality captured by a parent’s letter:

Over the years, as a parent, I have repeatedly felt frustrated, angry and helpless when each spring teachers—who were the ones the students hoped anxiously to get, who had students visiting their classrooms after school, who had lively looking classrooms—would receive their lay-off notices. Meanwhile, left behind to teach our children, would be the mediocre teachers who appeared to have precious little creative inspiration for teaching and very little interest in children.

With teachers as with their students, merely throwing more money at the educational establishment means having more expensive incompetents. Ordinarily, more money attracts better people, but the protective barriers of the teaching profession keep out better-qualified people, who are the least likely to have wasted their time in college on education courses, and the least likely to undergo a long ordeal of such Mickey Mouse courses later on. Nor is it realistic to expect reforms by existing education schools or to expect teachers’ unions to remedy the situation. As a well-known Brookings Institution study put it, “existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem.”

Teachers’ unions do not represent teachers in the abstract. They represent such teachers as actually exist in today’s public schools. These teachers have every reason to fear the competition of other college graduates for jobs, to fear any weakening of iron-clad tenure rules, and to fear any form of competition between schools that would allow parents to choose where to send their children to school. Competition means winners and losers—based on performance, rather than seniority or credentials. Professors of education are even more vulnerable, because they are supplying a product widely held in disrepute, even by many of those who enroll in their courses, and a product whose demand is due almost solely to laws and policies which compel individuals to enroll, in order to gain tenure and receive pay raises.

As for the value of education courses and degrees in the actual teaching of school children, there is no persuasive evidence that such studies have any pay-off whatever in the classroom. Postgraduate degree holders became much more common among teachers during the period of declining student test scores. Back in the early 1960s, when student SAT scores peaked, fewer than one-fourth of all public school teachers had postgraduate degrees and almost 15 percent lacked even a Bachelor’s degree. But by 1981, when the test score decline hit bottom, just over half of all teachers had Master’s degrees and less than one percent lacked a Bachelor’s.

Despite the questionable value of education courses and degrees as a means of improving teaching, and their role as barriers keeping out competition, defenders of the education schools have referred to proposals to reduce or eliminate such requirements as “dilutions” of teacher quality. Conversely, to require additional years of education courses is equated with a move “to improve standards for teachers.” Such Orwellian Newspeak turns reality upside down, defying all evidence.

It should not be surprising that education degrees produce no demonstrable benefit to teaching. The shallow and stultifying courses behind such degrees are one obvious reason. However, even when the education school curriculum is “beefed up” with more intellectually challenging courses at some elite institutions, those challenging courses are likely to be in subjects imported from other disciplines—statistics or economics, for example—rather than courses on how to teach children. Moreover, such substantive courses are more likely to be useful for research purposes than for actual classroom teaching. When Stanford University’s school of education added an honors program, it was specifically stated that this was not a program designed for people who intended to become classroom teachers.

The whole history of schools and departments of education has been one of desperate, but largely futile, attempts to gain the respect of other academics—usually by becoming theoretical and research-oriented, rather than by improving the classroom skills of teachers.28 But both theoretical and practical work in education are inherently limited by the low intellectual level of the students and professors attracted to this field.

Where education degrees are not mandated by law as a requirement for teaching in private schools, those schools themselves often operate without any such requirement of their own. The net result is that they can draw upon a much wider pool of better-educated people for their teachers. The fact that these private schools often pay salaries not as high as those paid to public school teachers further reveals the true role of education degrees as protective tariffs, which allow teachers’ unions to charge higher pay for their members, who are insulated from competition.

Schools and departments of education thus serve the narrow financial interests of public school teachers and professors of education—and disserve the educational interests of more than 40 million American school children.

INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS

While the low—and declining—intellectual calibre of public school teachers limits the quality of American education, there are also institutional reasons why even these modest limits are often not reached. There are, after all, better and worse teachers, so that greater selectivity in hiring and a weeding out of the incompetent could, in theory at least, get the best performance out of the existing pool of people. However, the policies, practices, and legal constraints placed on educational institutions often prevent such rational maximization of teaching performance.

Even the bleak picture of the ability level among people who major in education leaves out institutional possibilities of better teaching, for it leaves out those people whose college majors were not in education but in other, more solid subjects, and who simply took education courses as well (either contemporaneously or later), in order to become teachers. Such people with non-education majors are in fact a majority among high school teachers. Nevertheless, the attrition of the able and the institutional protection of the incompetent make American educational quality lower than it has to be, even with the existing pool of potential teachers.

Many of the constraints within which schools, school districts, and boards of education operate originate within the education establishment—with teachers unions, and schools of education, for example—but other constraints are imposed from outside. Legislators, for example, may mandate that new, non-academic subjects like driver education be taught in the public schools and judges may interpret laws and contracts in such a way as to make it an ordeal to get rid of either incompetent teachers or disruptive and violent students.

Incompetent Teachers

While mediocrity and incompetence among teachers limit the quality of work possible in public schools, institutional rules and practices often protect teachers whose performances fall far short of those limits. An academic scholar studying the problem of incompetent teachers during the 1980s discovered that several of the administrators he interviewed set aside $50,000 to cover procedural costs for every teacher they found to be a likely candidate for dismissal. Nor was this sum always adequate. One successful dismissal in California cost more than $166,000 in internal and external procedural costs, including more than $71,000 in legal fees to fight the teacher’s court challenge. Had the school district lost in court, they would have had to pay the teacher’s legal fees as well. Moreover, only truly egregious cases are likely to lead to attempts at dismissal. More common responses include (1) ignoring the problem, (2) transferring the teacher, if parental pressures become irresistible, and (3) buying out an older teacher near retirement age.

At the heart of this pattern of evasion of responsibility for firing an incompetent teacher is the iron-clad tenure system and its accompanying elaborate (and costly) “due process” procedures for dismissal. Although tenured teachers are 80 percent of all California teachers, they were less than 6 percent of those involved in dismissals. Meanwhile, temporary teachers, who were only 7 percent of all California teachers, were involved in nearly 70 percent of all dismissals.31 These statistics are especially striking because the research scholar discovered what data on test scores already suggest—that “incompetent teachers are much more likely to appear among the most senior segment of the teaching force than among the least senior.”32 In other words, where the problem is the worst, less can be done about it. The most senior teachers simply have too much job protection for an administrator to attempt dismissal, except in the most desperate cases. The teacher must not only be incompetent (or worse), but must also be recognized as such by many complaining parents, and these parents in turn must be people who know how to push a complaint through the system and exert influence.

Low-income and minority parents are less likely to complain and less likely to know how to make their complaints effective. Administrators are well aware of this and respond (or do not respond) accordingly. In any kind of neighborhood, however, the mere fact that the teacher is incompetent and known by the authorities to be incompetent is unlikely, by itself, to lead to any action without parental complaints. As one school district administrator put it:

Principals are apprehensive about moving against a teacher. They need a reason to act other than the teacher is incompetent because it can be very difficult to prove.34

Another administrator:

Without parent complaints, we leave the teacher alone.

Still another administrator:

You need a lot of external complaints to move on a teacher. The administrator is not willing to make tough decisions until he has to; that time comes when there are complaints.

Even when a chorus of parental complaints forces an administrator into action, that action is unlikely to be dismissal. Transferring the teacher to a different school is far more common. This buys time, if nothing else. If and when the parents at the new school begin to complain about the same teacher, then another transfer may be arranged, and yet another. These multiple transfers are so common that they even have nicknames, such as “the turkey trot” or “the dance of the lemons.”37 From the administrator’s point of view, the problem is not that the teacher is incompetent but that the parents are complaining. If the teacher can be put in a low-income neighborhood school, where many students are transient or the parents unable to make effective complaints, then the problem has been solved, as far as the system is concerned, without the expensive and time-consuming process of attempting dismissal.

Non-Academic Orientations

The academic deficiencies of American teachers and administrators, and the institutional insulation of incompetence, are only part of the story. Such factors might go far toward explaining the academic shortcomings of American schools, but there is an equally pervasive phenomenon in American education—an ever-growing intrusion of non-academic materials, courses, and programs into schools across the country. These non-academic intrusions include everything from political ideologies to psychological-conditioning programs, and their sponsors range from ordinary commercial interests (such as automobile manufacturers pushing driver education) to zealots for a vast array of “causes.”

That outside interests should see 40 million school children as a captive audience to be exploited is not so difficult to comprehend as the fact that educators themselves are not merely acquiescent, but are often enthusiastic apostles of these innumerable non-academic courses and programs. Throughout most of the twentieth century, public school educators have pressed—usually successfully—for the inclusion of ever more non-academic materials in the curriculum, while the counter-pressure for more academic rigor, “back to basics,” and the like, has come primarily from laymen. As laymen have urged more emphasis on teaching mathematics, science, languages, and other traditional academic subjects, educators have promoted such personal concerns as nutrition, hygiene, and “life adjustment” in an earlier period, or sex education and death education more recently, along with such social crusades as environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement, or such exotic topics as the occult. While the particular subjects that are fashionable change over time, what has been enduring is the non-academic thrust of the professional educators. As far back as 1928, John Dewey lamented the anti-intellectual tendencies of so-called “progressive education,” though many educators had used his theories as a justification for abandoning or deemphasizing traditional disciplines.

Strange as it may seem that people hired to teach academic subjects should be straining to do something else instead—for decades and even generations—this is far less strange in light of the academic backgrounds of the people who constitute the teaching and administrative staffs of the American educational system. It is not simply that they are academically deficient. They are not academically oriented. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to have a dedication to academic work, which brought them so little success when they were students in high school or college.

In addition to particular outside interest groups pushing to get their own interests and views represented in the school curriculum, there have been general theorists providing rationales for abandoning traditional academic education in favor of a wide variety of psycho-therapeutic activities known collectively as “affective education,” designed to re-mold the emotions and values of students. Whether called by general names like “values clarification” or by more specific titles like “death education,” “sex education,” or “drug prevention,” these psycho-therapeutic activities have flourished in the public schools—without any evidence of their effectiveness for their avowed purposes, and even despite accumulating evidence of their counterproductive effects (as will be seen in subsequent chapters). The theorists or gurus behind these ideas and movements have been very influential with educators highly susceptible to non-academic fashions and dogmas. The net result has been a deflection of public schools’ efforts, interests, time, and resources from academic objectives toward what can only be called classroom brainwashing.

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

The Decline of Ed Schools: Ten Questions and Answers

By James Guthrie

Education Next, 09/30/2009

1. Does America need education schools?  Should steps be taken to defund or eliminate them?

America does not now need education schools.  They add little and cost a great deal. They are unable to attract talented entrants and fail to add value to their graduates (either by boosting teacher performance or teacher’s lifetime incomes).  Graduate students who attend them have to forego significant amounts of income. Today, ed schools face an increasing number of attractive, lower-priced, online competitors.

2. How many U.S. ed schools are currently operating?

U.S. News and World Reports estimates that in 2009 there are 278 education schools, 187 public and 91 private. (This may be a conservative number, as it omits those that failed to respond to questionnaires related to the rankings developed by U.S. News.)

3. How many degrees do ed schools issue per year?

A great many.  In 2007, almost 200,000 education degrees were awarded:105,641 bachelors degrees, 76,572 masters degrees, and 8, 261 doctoral degrees.  Masters and doctoral degrees in education meet or exceed all other categories of graduate degrees. (According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education)

4. How high are the academic skills of ed school students relative to those of other professionals?

Low.  The College Entrance Examination Board reports that students pursuing graduate degrees in education had a GRE Verbal score mean of 449 and a mean GRE Quantitative score of 533, for a combined total of 982. This puts ed school students at the 40th percentile of test takers, lower than students intending graduate study in all other professional fields (including business, engineering, and health).

5. What is the direct cost of ed school degrees to enrollees? What is the foregone income of enrollees? How much does it cost to operate education schools?

A conservative estimate of ed school tuition payments made annually is $1.283 billion. [This estimate assumes that three quarters of our nation’s 100,000 undergraduate ed school enrollees are paying in-state public college and university tuition and related fees of $10,260, and the other one quarter of undergraduates in ed schools are paying out-of-state or private school tuition and fees  ($18,303). It also assumes that similar proportions of graduate students in ed schools are paying in-state ($507) and out- of state/private ($703) tuition for 6 credit hours each.]

The income foregone by students attending ed schools amounts to approximately $1.2 billion.  [This assumes that only graduate students forego income to attend ed schools, that only half of ed school students at the graduate level attend full time, and that these students would otherwise earn an average salary of $30,000.]

If tuition is taken to be fifty percent of college operating costs, then ed schools can conservatively be estimated to spend $2.5 billion annually in direct operational expenditures.

6. What does it cost a student to obtain an education degree online?

Education degrees online range from $300 to $800 per credit.  Assuming thirty credits are required to obtain a degree, the cost would be $9,000 to $24,000 for a masters degree, and twice that for a doctoral degree.  The major cost advantage, however, for students pursuing education degrees online (when compared to students pursuing a conventional, on-campus education degree), comes because online students don’t have to give up their incomes and don’t have to absorb expenses like room and board and transportation.

7. Are online ed schools any good?

No one knows.  The performance of their graduates has not been systematically compared to those completing conventional ed school programs.

8. Don’t ed schools add value to graduates’ instructional capacity? Don’t ed schools contribute by undertaking valuable research?

No on both counts. Researchers (e.g., Hanushek and Rivkin) cannot discern a positive association between students’ academic achievement and their teachers’ post-BA course credits, degrees, or certificates.

Most education school faculty do not undertake research. Those who do are often ideologically, not scientifically, oriented. The few scholarly education schools, e.g., Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, and Wisconsin, that do conduct serious and useful research do not train many teachers.  Other highly visible education schools such as Harvard, Stanford, and University of Washington have forfeited much of their research agenda to other parts of their universities, e.g., econ departments, public policy schools, or university-based think tanks.  Finally, worthwhile education research is increasingly undertaken outside of universities altogether, in think tanks and shops such as RAND, AIR, AEI, and Mathematica, and in regional educational laboratories.

9. What is the long-term future of ed schools? Have any education schools disappeared already? What forces currently prop up ed schools? What political constituencies will defend education schools?

A few major institutions (i.e., Yale and Duke) have dropped their ed schools. Several other visible institutions (e.g., the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley) have marginalized education through budget deprivation. However, these examples are idiosyncratic.

Newly emerging conditions will more likely shape the future.  It is likely that the inability of ed schools to boost the economic well-being of graduates, their ineffectiveness in engendering professional competence, public low regard, the prospect of accountability, and the growth of online programs will gradually begin to erode ed schools’ market share.

Ed schools presently benefit from a lack of public accountability, low political visibility, public policy inertia, and iron triangle protectionism provided by self-interested coalitions of executive branch credentialing managers, teacher union officials attempting to restrain labor market entry, and a few aligned legislators.  If ever subjected to performance accountability, intense high politics, or partisan scrutiny, this protective shield would likely fade quickly.  Ed school alumnae are notorious for their disaffection from and disregard for their training institutions.

10. What possibly could change this scenario?

The development of a science of pedagogy would positively alter the above described scenario, and possibly preserve ed schools, but this development seems improbable.  Conversely, the demise of ed schools would be accelerated by any visible steps toward demanding public accountability of those schools, by evidence that online programs were equally or more effective, or by decreased state insistence upon formal credentials for entry into teaching.

 

Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?

Anastasia Berg, Ross Douthat, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Caitlin Zaloom discuss a contested concept.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 07, 2020

Back in February, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse convened a forum on “Meritocracy in Higher Education.” The event was hosted by Sarah Treul, a political scientist at UNC, and featured the New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, the philosopher Anastasia Berg, and the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, the latter three of whom had written about meritocracy for The Chronicle Review a few months earlier.

This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real purpose of education — are as relevant as ever. As we figure out what to make of our university system in the wake of this unprecedented crisis, this conversation offers an urgent and intelligent guide.

Sarah Treul: When I think of the meritocratic ideal — that social and economic rewards, rather than family status, should track achievement — it’s very much in alignment with the American dream, working hard, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But here, with the exception of Thomas, all of you seem to be against meritocracy, which is an increasingly popular opinion in American culture.

How did we get here?

Caitlin Zaloom: Meritocracy begins with the idea that people have to be measured on a scale of human value. So when we have decided that meritocracy is the way into higher education — or in particular into government, via higher education — it becomes an essential problem, because participation is then premised on the idea of achievement on a hierarchy of values which you may or may not have subscribed to in the first place.

Anastasia Berg: I don’t think I am against meritocracy. Obviously certain roles in society and certain honors should be going to someone who is most competent for them: the Nobel Prize, or a teaching award, or who should perform eye surgery on us.

The question is whether this is the right measure for determining who should be entering universities. There are objections from the left and from the right. I find the left ones persuasive, which is to say, in effect, that the pretensions to meritocracy are not borne out, if we actually look at who gets into colleges. We find out that there’s huge correlation between the kind of material support that people have, and their ability to perform on the kind of exams that allow people to get into colleges.

But what I also find problematic has to do with what has formerly been thought of as a conservative critique, although I think that leftists and liberals and progressives should be as concerned about it as anyone else: The current way of running college admissions concentrates talent, ambition, and competence in very few areas — on the coasts, in a very few universities — and draws potential leaders from communities elsewhere. Moreover, the current system leaves people blind to all the ways in which they owe gratitude to a community, for all the help that allowed them to achieve.

Ross Douthat: It’s useful to remember that the term “meritocracy” was coined as a description of a dystopia, in a book by a British civil servant written in the late ’50s called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was a tongue-in-cheek evocation of some pompous civil servant from somewhere around our own era, looking back on what he saw as the self-selection of the cognitive elite to rule over a society that was drained of talent, drained of ambition, and had all power centers outside the elite deprived of leadership and talent from within.

It’s reasonable to look at class divisions in the United States and much of the West and say that at least a partial version of that dystopia has come to pass. College-educated and more-than-college-educated Americans cluster together in geographic hubs in ways that they did not 50 or 60 years ago. With that concentration comes a mix of economic and cultural stratification that is linked to populist disturbances on the right and the left alike. You can trace similar geographies in Brexit, and support for the National Front in France, and so on.

There are two questions that hang over meritocratic debates. First, are there ways to successfully either devolve or claim from below forms of power in our society that aren’t dependent on credentialism? And second, is there a different kind of education that we could give to our meritocrats that might better equip them to govern the Western world slightly better than it’s been governed for the last 20 years or so?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: At the risk of being the most myopic analyst here, I want to talk about meritocracy not in the abstract but through the lens of personal experience. My father was a black man from the segregated South, really old enough to be my grandfather — he’s 82, born in 1937. He is the first in his family to get an education, and he did not grow up in a meritocracy. He grew up in an America that told him when he was pursuing his graduate education that niggers don’t get deferments in the state of Texas. So he was getting drafted when every white student was getting a deferment. That, in my book, is not a meritocracy.

But he raised my brother and me with a kind of immigrant’s belief in the idea that knowledge and effort and exertion are the only power of the poor and the oppressed. We attacked everything that was in our control. That really came down to the SAT test for me, because I didn’t even go to the kind of high school that offered AP courses. So my GPA wasn’t going to reflect the same type of effort as people who were going to prep schools. But there was a standardized measure that I could put all my effort into, and that was the SAT. To do well on the SAT also gave me confidence that I wasn’t getting a handout, that I could perform in spaces where other people had greater advantages than I had. I understand that that’s a selfish way of looking at the matter, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it takes a kind of privilege to sneer at meritocratic measures that allow people to advance.

Treul: Why has meritocracy as it relates to college admissions become such a lightning rod?

Zaloom: For families, getting into a prestigious college feels like the way that they can give their kid a shot. But lower-income people are largely shut out or discouraged from elite universities — that’s a background fact — and now, even for middle-class people, 50 percent of middle-class young adults can expect to do less well than their parents. We’re in this very unequal and unstable situation, even for middle-class people who these universities were designed to support.

Treul: How do we strengthen public education before college? I feel like we’re putting a lot on colleges.

Zaloom: There have been incredible funding cuts in public policy, especially since 2008. So the first thing to do is to get back to earlier levels: strengthening the middle, not only at the Chapel Hills of the world but also at state-tier public universities and community colleges. That will make this kind of moonshot less important, so that young adults can get a good education close to home and without meritocratic assessment feeling like it’s going to be a life or death, make or break situation.

Berg: There are amazing, overqualified teachers everywhere, at the 150 top colleges and universities in this country. I went to Harvard, and I don’t remember anything I learned in college. What distinguished Harvard is not the classes, and it’s not the teachers, and it’s not the library, and it wasn’t the reading list. What really distinguished the experience that I had at Harvard was my colleagues or peers.

My experience was seeing a lot of people’s talents being completely wasted by isolation: moral isolation, geographical isolation, cultural isolation. Even people who started out on interesting careers took a hard left to building an app or making more money.

Douthat: That is what Harvard is in the business of doing, the sort of condensation of networking and people having access to each other’s ideas and family connections and all the rest. That’s what Harvard institutionally is committed to, and that’s how the Ivy Leagues made the transition through the 1960s from being finishing schools for a particular elite that had particular power in the Northeast, and over U.S. foreign policy and on Wall Street, but that was not yet a national, let alone an international, elite. So the Ivy Leagues basically said, all right, the age of the WASP is over, we’re gonna commit WASP suicide — a very dignified thing involving boat shoes and Europe — and we’re gonna field an international elite. The way we’re gonna do this is by becoming a networking hub that doesn’t attempt to teach any particular quantum of anything.

There’s no Harvard curriculum. There are great professors and wonderful classes and, God help you, you can cobble it together yourself. But that’s not what the school is there for. Part of the problem with the idea of meritocracy is that it becomes a justification for saying that you don’t need to impart some particular idea, because we’re just in the business of picking the best students — we’re not, like, building an elite or something. Meanwhile, they’re totally building an elite!

It’s the same dynamic with affirmative action. If Harvard is an elite-forming institution, then it isn’t unreasonable to say we want the percentage of students in our classes to reflect the racial composition of America. But you can’t say that with one side of your mouth while, with the other side of your mouth, saying, Oh, we’re just about equal opportunity. That’s a permanent tension in the life of meritocracy.

When I was in school, in 1998-2002, my sense was that the system was in its flower — people believed in meritocracy. My parents’ generation benefited intensely from meritocracy and had a really strong belief in the system. My sense of things since then is that the sort of ruthless inner logic of meritocracy has become such a devouring force that lots of those upper-middle-class white people want out.

And they especially want out because suddenly they’re being outcompeted by mostly Asian immigrants. So you have this strange dynamic of upper-middle-class white people who suddenly are like, Well maybe we should get rid of the SAT! You have to study the whole student!

I’m not sure whether to be sympathetic or not. On the one hand I think that inner logic of meritocracy is vicious and terrible in certain ways. It’s careerist and horrifying. At the same time, if the alternative to it is upper-middle-class white people pulling up the ladder so that immigrant strivers can’t get into the Ivy League, I’m not sure that’s necessarily an improvement.

Treul: I think one of the problems that much of your writings touch on is that in our overemphasis on scores, GPA, a high-powered career after university, we have lost our sense of civic duty. How can we bring that back?

Williams: There’s two questions. One is, what is life for? What is meritocracy for? It can’t be that all of this enormous emotional, financial, and scholastic investment goes toward creating the next meaningless app.

Hanging above all of this is, What is equality? And how can human beings be equal? Are we equal? I’m not sure that you can have a conclusive conversation about meritocracy if we can’t figure out equality, figure out the difference between equality and equity. Figure out how in this extraordinary era of inequality to stem some of that. Meritocracy just reflects much of our inequality — and not just within society. In a family of four, the members are not equal in terms of their abilities. How can you pretend that the city of New York can all be equal?

Treul: And perhaps we shouldn’t be so concerned with equality and outcomes. Perhaps it’s more about opportunities.

Zaloom: One of the problems of focusing on elite universities is that we are privileging one mission in the university over another mission, which is, How do we develop citizens? That is what universities have been for since the beginning: not only producing an elite at Harvard or UNC or whatever, but actually developing citizens and citizenship skills with which graduates can go back into their communities and lead and participate. The conversation around meritocracy has pulled us away from a discussion of the university citizenship mission.

Williams: I do think we are constantly having the wrong conversation. Going to Harvard is cool, but it’s not a human right, you know? My brother rebelled against the kind of meritocratic regime my dad was trying to put us through. He would have benefited from a society like Germany where there was a value placed on vocational training, where you can have path toward a well-paying, dignified career that didn’t require you to pretend you wanted to sit around studying the great books when you don’t.

Berg: If universities could make citizens, that would be nice. But the numbers, which people are quite proud of now, are that a third of Americans go to college — and that’s the highest it’s ever been? I mean if that’s the only way to get citizens….

Douthat: A third finish. It’s closer to half who go.

Berg: Suppose even the half finish. That still leaves the other half. If that’s the way to make citizens, what do we do with the rest? We have to make room for the dignity of other paths.

Zaloom: I don’t think universities can exclusively do this, but they’re one of the places that can do it.

Berg: When we talk about civic duties, there are abstract ideals we can teach our students, but part of civic duty is feeling that you have something in common with somebody who’s radically different than you. And that’s something that Harvard will never give you. And you will never turn back from it. I think getting to actually know people who are different than you is essential to the cultivation of civic duty, and that is not something we can simply do in a classroom.

Zaloom: But it is something that happens in classrooms, and especially in our public colleges and universities. I’m a graduate of the University of California, and there’s no place on earth like the nine schools in the University of California for mixing people who did not think they were gonna end up together. Classrooms are places where citizenship is taught because we enter them and engage across differences — that is an essential part of what teaching is and what our university systems do in their best moments.

Douthat: There’s citizenship as democratic participation. And then there’s a sort of special elite obligation — to whom much is given, much is asked. Those two blur together, but they aren’t quite the same. Some of the arguments that are specific to elite education are about the second. I think you can see some of what gets described as social-justice-warrior activism on campuses as, in part, a response to the dynamic you’re describing. People feel like they’re in a world that is about elite self-dealing and self-interest and never having contact with people outside the elite. There’s a desire for something like religion, or military service, these kinds of things we associate with the older elite.

You can see left-wing agitation on campus as in part a desire to re-moralize. To say, You’re an elite, these are you obligations — you need to scrutinize your own privilege. I have fairly strong disagreements with some of the places those discourses end up, including places that might exclude me from speaking on campuses someday, but I think the impulse is reasonable.

This doesn’t resolve the separate but equally important question of why the elites are all going to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. They do go to Washington, just not in the spirit of service. There’s a sense that opportunity in America exists in the entanglement of Harvard, Silicon Valley, D.C., and Wall Street. That is opportunity in America today. What are the power centers that aren’t connected to that world? Labor unions? No, they’re gone. Religion? No, it’s in decline. Regional elites and power brokers? No, they don’t matter anymore. That dynamic can’t be addressed with the discourse internal to meritocracy. It has to be addressed with political action that involves people who are traitors to their class. It also has to come from below.

How mathematics can be an anti-racist, feminist enterprise

If we can agree that mathematics can operate as whiteness, then we have a moral duty to ask how mathematics might be otherwise.

Tian An Wong

The Print, 6 February, 2020

Representative image (Commons)

XXXXIn 2017, mathematics education professor Rochelle Gutiérrez wrote that “mathematics operates as whiteness.” Word of this spread quickly, leading to a strong backlash of hate mail and offensive comments on Gutiérrez’s social media. This soundbite is often quoted without context, so here is some context:

Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White. School mathematics curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans. Perhaps more importantly, mathematics operates with unearned privilege in society, just like Whiteness.

In this sense, at least in the US, one could certainly argue that mathematics operates as whiteness. In this blog, I would like to pose the question: Can mathematics do otherwise? Can mathematics be antiracist?

Last semester, I developed a class called Inequalities: Numbers and Justice, aimed towards non-majors. My students ranged from undergraduate seniors to students in the local high school, with majors ranging from Government to Chinese to Computer Science. It was the second incarnation of a course I had taught years ago, in which we worked through the ideas in Gutstein and Peterson’s Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which was written at the middle-school level. In Inequalities, my hope was to develop these ideas into a college-level course.

Over the course of the semester, we explored how notions of fairness and equality have been considered from the point of view of mathematics and economics. What ways were these ideas defined, and given the definitions, how can they be measured? We covered topics ranging from the misuses of statistics to gerrymandering to racial capitalism and climate change. In the end, students were able to appreciate the complexities of fairness, the deep inequities that capitalism produces, and questioned the idea that mathematics is politically neutral.

Can mathematics, specifically beyond the K-12 level, be antiracist? Are critical mathematics pedagogy (the application of critical theory to mathematics education) and “higher” mathematics (college mathematics and beyond) necessarily in opposition to each other? Social justice is a popular phrase these days, even in mathematics circles, but what does it mean? In a recent volume, Mathematics for Social Justice: Resources for the College Classroom, editors Gizem Karaali and Lily Khadjavi describe the work as part of a “national movement to include social justice material into mathematics teaching”. While the volume represents an important effort in bringing discussions around race, gender, class, and power into the college mathematics classroom, I am left wanting more.

Attempts to shoehorn social justice into mathematics curricula perhaps say more about the political leanings of the teacher than anything else. At the same time, we must be wary of diversity initiatives in mathematics which simply reproduce a different class of scientists that perpetuate structures of domination and oppression, in place of work to dismantle the whiteness which mathematics operates as, and to truly equip students for a world of growing inequality and climate catastrophe. After all, would it have been better if it were nonwhite people who developed the atomic bomb? Or the technology to surveil, incarcerate, and deport vulnerable communities?

These small-scale reforms to the system leave the larger problems of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy intact. As Piper H. wrote in an earlier post,

Most of us do not have good role models for what a feminist math department would look like. I have this talk that I give and afterwards, I will often get concerned white men asking me what they can do to fight sexism. But they’re not really thinking about ending sexism. They’re thinking about progress. They want to know which benefits the cis male hoarders-of-power can offer to women so that we don’t feel so bad and complain so much and contribute to such dismal numbers. This is natural, reasonable even, but sexist all the same.

Indeed, what would a feminist — an intersectional, anti-racist, and class-consciously feminist — math department look like?

Should mathematics be antiracist?

Before we consider the question further, we ought to ask whether mathematics should be doing the work of social justice. Such questions have been asked for some time now in the physical sciences. See the update below.

To be certain, mathematics educators have thought long and hard about the ways in which mathematics education intersects with issues of race, gender, class, and power, at least since Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The teaching of mathematics is deeply embedded in politics, and inasmuch as some would prefer to view abstract mathematics as occurring in a vacuum, the social dimension of mathematics education has wide implications.

But what about the majority of college mathematics professors who are not trained in mathematics education but in mathematics? They are highly involved in the production of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors and the maintenance of power structures in college mathematics classrooms and departments. These mathematicians are not hired primarily based on their pedagogical ability, even at many liberal arts schools.

There are practical and cultural differences between research mathematics and mathematics education (let us admit this binary for the sake of discussion). One could say that mathematics education is concerned about the formation of mathematically literate students, the interplay between oppression, power, and privilege in the context of mathematics education, especially in K-12 settings; whereas in mathematics, we are concerned about mathematics qua mathematics, often as divorced from social reality (except as applied to the physical sciences and engineering). Indeed, in my field, number theory, it is a common boast that the solution of famous problems like Fermat’s Last Theorem are of no immediate practical use. Therefore, simply to attempt to have abstract and socially-engaged mathematics at the same time is to have a kind of a mathematical double-consciousness, and to attempt to bridge the two is a highly non-trivial endeavor.

Nonetheless, one thing is clear: if mathematics is political (and also racial and gendered), then we must be on the side of justice, whatever that may look like. In other words, if mathematics can be antiracist, then it ought to be.

Towards a critical research mathematics

Mathematics education research has made it clear that the teaching of mathematics is a highly political act. But what about the content of mathematics? In other words, what kind of “pure” mathematics might be useful for antiracist mathematics? Is that even the right question to ask? Can the abstractions in college mathematics and beyond, ideas from say, category theory, differential geometry, or abstract algebra open up new ways of critically approaching the social?

In Inequalities, we discussed applications of social choice theory, metric geometry, and random walks to gerrymandering. Some of this follows the work of Moon Duchin’s Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) at Tufts and MIT, which is doing exciting work, especially given the upcoming 2020 census. We debated Andrew Hacker’s controversial op-ed, Is Algebra Necessary?, which advocates for replacing the standard mathematics curriculum with “citizen statistics” that would “familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.”

We also spent time on fair division, a subfield of behavioral economics initially studied by mathematicians such as Hugo Steinhaus, which continues to hold the interest of mathematicians. More complicated fair division problems lead to matching problems in graph theory, for example the Gale-Shapley algorithm in the Stable Marriage problem. The latter was applied to the School Choice problem of matching students to schools, as described in the module. This is an example of a class of problems that construct simplified models of social reality, as one does in the physical sciences, in order to study it.

Another example is the Petrie multiplier, which describes a power law in a model of sexism. The model assumes that men and women are equally sexist, similar to the way that the Schelling model of segregation assumes that people are equally (non)racist, and simply prefer to be with their own kind. One might argue that this approach reveals mathematical laws that force certain phenomena to occur, without discussing how external factors might intervene in reality. Might it be possible for models of social phenomena to account for the complexities of race, gender, class, and nation?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to the questions I am asking. This small sampling suggests a handful of possibilities for mathematics as, say, an intersectional, anti-racist, and class-consciously feminist enterprise. In any case, if we can agree that mathematics can operate as whiteness, then we have a moral duty to ask how mathematics might be otherwise. There is much work left to do. With the strength of our combined mathematical creativity, what might we come up with if we dared to imagine?

Subversive Education

North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.”

Christopher F. Rufo

City Journal, March 17, 2021

Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

The February 2020 conference, attended by more than 200 North Carolina public school teachers, began with a “land acknowledgement,” a ritual recognition suggesting that white North Carolinians are colonizers on stolen Native American land. Next, the superintendent of Wake County Public Schools, Cathy Moore, introduced the day’s program and shuffled teachers to breakout sessions across eight rooms. Freelance reporter A.P. Dillon obtained the documents from the sessions through a public records request and provided them to City Journal.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”

This isn’t an aberration. In fact, the district’s official Equity in Action plan encourages teachers to override parents in the pursuit of antiracism. “Equity leaders [should] have the confidence to take risks and make difficult decisions that are rooted in their values,” the document reads. “Even in the face of opposition, equity leaders can draw on a heartfelt conviction for what is best for students and families.” In other words, the school should displace the family as the ultimate arbiter of political morality.

The equity plan outlines this new ideology in chart format, announcing the district’s commitment to a series of fashionable pedagogies, including “color consciousness,” “white identity development,” “critical race theory,” “intersections of power and privilege,” and “anti-racist identity and action.”

The equity program in the Wake County Public School System is a massive enterprise. Founded in 2013, the district’s Office of Equity Affairs has now amassed a $1 million annual budget and hosts an ongoing sequence of school trainings, curriculum-development sessions, and teacher events. In 2019, for example, the office hosted a series of “courageous conversations” about race and a five-night discussion program about the podcast Seeing White, which asks listeners to consider how “whiteness” contributes to “police shootings of unarmed African Americans,” “acts of domestic terrorism,” and “unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring.”

According to Wake County Public Schools, the purpose of these programs is to achieve “equity,” which it defines as “eliminating the predictability of success and failure that correlates with any social or cultural factor.” This is naïve, at best. Cultural traits such as family environment, transmitted values, and study habits have an enormous influence on academic outcomes. The radical-left educators believe that this is an injustice. They see their job as leveling cultural differences, grouping students into the categories of inborn identity, and equalizing outcomes.

The administrators have the logic backwards. Rather than seek to level cultural factors, they should seek to uncover and then cultivate the cultural traits that lead to academic success across all racial groups. Despite all the recent focus on racial issues in education, the greater disparity in student outcomes today is, in fact, related to social class. As Stanford’s Sean Reardon has shown, the class gap in academic achievement is now twice as large as the race gap—precisely the opposite of what it was 50 years ago.

This news should suggest an opportunity to school administrators. They could pursue pedagogical strategies that help struggling students of all racial backgrounds. Sadly, rather than seizing this opportunity, teachers in Wake County are busy planning conference presentations on “toxic masculinity,” “microaggressions,” “trauma-informed yoga,” “peace circles,” and “applied critical race theory.” North Carolina might be a red state, but in its largest county, the school system has fully bought in to the latest progressive dogmas.

Parents across the U.S. should not assume that their local district is immune to these trends. The new political education is spreading everywhere.

COMMENTS

STEM_Academic • 3 days ago

After working in academia for 30 years I’ve witnessed the rise and metastasis of this racist, sexist, anti-white and anti-male dogma, starting in higher education and now spreading like wildfire throughout our society. What once was a fringe, crackpot, conspiracy theory-laden fever dream found mostly in the women’s and other identity studies realm has now gone mainstream.

From what I can tell, the vast majority of people who promote this dangerous racist and sexist dogma are woke white women, thus, I think that we should consider woke white women to be the most dangerous demographic group in our society. They tend to be highly authoritarian, so I it’s really important that we identify, isolate, and marginalize those folks so as to minimize the damage they do to our children and society at large. Additionally, we must work to remove them from power and prevent them from attaining positions of power in the future.

Carolyn STEM_Academic • 3 days ago

It does seem to be the case. Same group that has ruined Sweden and led to it becoming the rape Capitol of Europe and the grenade Capitol. But it could not have happened if emasculated men didn’t let them do it. Same thing here.

STEM_Academic Carolyn • 3 days ago • edited

Completely agree. Emasculated, “woke” men are every bit as much of a problem as woke women. My comment was focused on education, where teachers and the vast majority of administrators who are calling the shots are women, especially in K-12 (although this is rapidly becoming the case in academia as well). Hence, my argument addresses the statistical reality, understanding that there are always exceptions to the general trend.

I can’t remember where I heard it, but this rings true in a way: When a man was asked how he viewed women he said (paraphrasing) “I take a man and remove all logic, reason, and common sense.” I personally would change that to describing woke people in general, men and women. I know quite a few very sensible and reasonable women, and being from academia, I know a lot completely irrational nutcases who are men.

Teaching Hate

The Seattle school district claims that the U.S. education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children.

Christopher F. Rufo

City Journal, December 18, 2020

Seattle Public Schools recently held a training session for teachers in which American schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students. The United States is a “race-based white-supremacist society,” the training instructed, and white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

According to whistleblower documents I’ve obtained from the session, the trainers begin by claiming that the teachers are colonizers of “the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish People.” Then, next to an image of the Black Power fist, they claim that “the United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved Black people’s work, which created the profits that created our nation.”

In the presentation materials, the organizers of the session identify themselves by both gender pronouns and race labels. For example, one speaker is identified as “He/Him, White,” while another is identified as “She/her pronouns, Black (half Black and half White).” It has become commonplace in academia to use gender-pronoun identifiers, but the expectation for explicit race-labeling in the workplace appears to be novel.

The central message is that white teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege in our society” because of their “possession of white skin.” Consequently, to atone for their collective guilt, white teachers must be willing to reject their “whiteness” and become dedicated “anti-racist educator[s].”

The trainers acknowledge that this language might meet resistance from white teachers. They explain that any negative emotional reaction to being denounced for “whiteness” is an automatic response from the white teachers’ “lizard-brain,” which makes them “afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any kind of ‘ism.’” The trainers insist that the teachers “must commit to the journey,” regardless of their emotional or intellectual hesitations.

In the most disturbing portion of the session, the teachers discussed “spirit murder,” which, according to Bettina Love, is the concept that American schools “murder the souls of Black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence.” Love, who originated the concept, declares that the education system is “invested in murdering the souls of Black children,” even in the most ostensibly progressive institutions.

The goal of these inflammatory “racial equity” programs is to transform Seattle schools into activist organizations. At the conclusion of the training, teachers must explain how they will practice “anti-racist pedagogy,” address the “current social justice movements taking place,” and become “anti-racist outside the classroom.” They are told to divide the world into “enemies, allies, and accomplices,” and work toward the “abolition” of whiteness. They must, in other words, abandon the illusion of neutral teaching standards and get in the trenches of race-based activism.

Unfortunately, this indoctrination is not an aberration—it reflects deep ideological currents within Seattle Public Schools. In recent years, the district has expanded its Department of Racial Equity Advancement and deployed “racial equity teams” in dozens of neighborhood schools. The stated goal is to “advance educational racial equity,” but in practice, these programs often serve to introduce, perpetuate, and enforce a specific ideological agenda.

This is a tragedy for students. Seattle public schools have been closed to on-campus learning since the early days of the Covid outbreak. In September, the school district reported that fewer than half of students attended any of the school’s remote instruction, with even worse attendance rates for minorities. Rather than address this crisis, which has doubtless expanded racial disparities, the district prioritized “white privilege” training for teachers.

Unless we see a change of course, this new orthodoxy—gradually replacing academics with activism—will cause educational disaster. School districts will subordinate traditional learning to the latest academic fads. When those inevitably fail, desperate teachers and administrators will be increasingly tempted to drop the old “three R’s” in favor of the new “three R’s”: racism, racism, and racism.

As Seattle’s public school administrators consume themselves with racial ideology, students will pay the price. Teachers can “bankrupt their privilege” in front of their colleagues, but their exhibitionism will do nothing for third-graders struggling to read or high school seniors preparing to graduate.

Seattle schools, which did not provide comment for this story, claim that they are “teaching tolerance.” If only. In truth, they are teaching hate.

“Hands up, don’t shoot” demonstration in Seattle.

Mediocrity for All!

written by Steve Salerno

Quillette, October 25, 2019

It strikes me as ironic that in a realm like education, the lesson America’s scholastic visionaries never seem to learn is also the most simple lesson of all—that education should be about educating. Theorists persist in reinventing the wheel, sometimes with good intentions and sometimes in the service of agendas that are rather less defensible and/or wholesome than those publicly stated. Such is the case with the hottest currency to emerge from the pointy-headed precincts of pedagogical theory: social-emotional learning, or SEL.

SEL assumes as its mandate “the education of the whole child,” a lodestar concept among today’s educational brain trust. Though the approach has been gaining traction for about a decade, SEL is now poised for what is sure to be its flagship implementation. As New York mayor and erstwhile presidential candidate Bill de Blasio vowed in a recent article for Fortune, SEL is to be rolled out “in every classroom,” serving the 1.1 million school kids of the sprawling New York City system. The mayor goes on to describe a prototype for the plan: We glimpse a morning at a Brooklyn junior high school that begins with a town hall meeting at which students share their latest positive experiences and commiserate over their latest travails. It’s an anecdotal statement of de Blasio’s SEL-driven thesis that ‟[t]he emotional well-being of students is vital to their success in school.”

That sounds plausible enough on the surface, so let’s get a bit more granular. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), has emerged as SEL’s leading advocacy group, with friends in the highest of places, including at least two ex-presidents and the National Education Association. According to CASEL, social-emotional learning is:

The process through which children…acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. USUALLY LEFT TO PARENTS

By now one starts to get the sense that any points of intersection between this and hardcore book learning are pure happenstance. Similarly, browse the more expansive list of 15 SEL goals in this piece and you’ll be struck by the preponderance of the social and the relative absence of the learning. Not surprising, inasmuch as another popular SEL tip sheet deems it advisable “to incorporate SEL skill-building into academic instruction whenever possible.” As we move along, you’ll also notice how many of the phenomenon’s goals seem rooted in today’s social justice pieties.

In any case, it should be apparent that implementing all this necessarily presupposes some dilution of the traditional nuts-and-bolts curriculum—the diversion of finite class time to topics and methodologies that have nothing to do with mastering, say, long division. The gurus of SEL make no apologies for this. Rather, as de Blasio insists in his Fortune piece, “these are hard skills….just like reading and math, that must be taught, practiced, and strengthened over time.”

SEL’s unflinching emphasis on the so-called “non-cognitive factors” in cognition is bad news for all supporters of no-nonsense education—that is, the kind that doesn’t encourage students to devote class time to communicating their current emotional status to their peers via emojis, as has happened in some SEL implementations. For while New York’s mayor frames this as a watershed moment in education, we already have a compelling case history in what happens when education is reconfigured around factors extrinsic to schooling’s basic mission. The notion that an emotionally nourished “whole child” should be better at math than his less contented counterpart rests on the same spurious assumptions as self-esteem-based education, which proved such an unmitigated disaster in terms of measurable outcomes that by the turn of the millennium it was repudiated by even some of its loudest early voices.

Indeed, to some educational observers, this is déjà vu all over again (to quote the immortal Yogi Berra). As Chester E. Finn Jr., distinguished senior fellow at of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, argued in a controversial essay for Education Week, self-esteem education has not disappeared, but rather continues to thrives “across a broad swath of America’s K-12 schooling, supported by foundation grants, federal funding, and both nonprofit and for-profit advocacy groups”—except the name has changed “to social-emotional learning.” Educational theorists of the 1960s reasoned, based on pure supposition, that subpar academic performance resulted from subpar self-esteem. Ergo, they surmised, rectifying that deficit would pay dramatic dividends in overall educational excellence, especially among at-risk students. One major task force report “ascribed ‘near-magical powers to self-esteem,’” writes Finn, insisting that it “inoculates [children] against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and educational failure.” OH, THE IRONY!

But these would-be educational reformers encountered an immediate stumbling block: Any excellence that surrounded underperforming students might get in the way of the inspirational vibe administrators hoped to establish. It would do little good to sell the mantra that “you’re all winners!” if students could simply glance at their test papers or report cards, compare to those around them, and realize that they were plainly losers. So, administrators decided that they had to de-emphasize excellence in order to achieve the self-esteem benefits that would drive excellence. They regarded this incoherence as just a “temporary” concession to a paramount goal.

There ensued a wholesale celebration of mediocrity. Schools abandoned honor rolls so as not to bruise the feelings of those who failed to make the cut. Red ink disappeared from students’ papers as administrators mandated that teachers make corrections in less “stigmatizing” colors. Teachers were encouraged to recognize the originality and classroom contributions of so-called “individual spellers and pronouncers,” who for whatever reason couldn’t get the hang of orthodox spellings and pronunciations; this was especially desirable in cases where corrections risked treading upon cultural or ethnic sensitivities. Counselors championed pass/fail grading and social promotion, wherein substandard students, instead of being left back, were promoted to keep their friendship circle intact. Kids’ shirts and blouses became bulletin boards for a hodgepodge of ribbons and pins that commemorated everything but genuine achievement: effort, attendance, a cheerful attitude. Children in one lackluster southern school district disembarked from buses each day to be greeted by a full-length mirror inscribed: ‟You are now looking at the most important person in the world!”

In subsequent decades, it became clear that academic greatness is not what generous dollops of self-esteem promote. In 1963, the liminal margin of America’s national experiment in teaching self-love, there began an uninterrupted 18-year slide in SAT scores. But in that same period, the contingent of college-bound seniors who boasted an A or B average jumped from 28 percent to an astonishing 83 percent, as teachers systemwide felt increasing pressure to adopt more “supportive” grading policies. Tellingly, in a 1989 study of comparative math skills among students in eight nations, Americans ranked lowest in overall competency, Koreans highest—but when researchers asked the students how good they thought they were at math, Americans placed highest, Koreans lowest. (What the system had actually wrought were school-kids who believed the hype about themselves and took new pride in the same old mediocre performance.) Meanwhile, 1999’s omnibus Third International Mathematics and Science Study, ranking twelfth-graders from 23 nations, put U.S. students in 20th place, besting only such historic hotbeds of innovation as South Africa, Lithuania, and Cyprus.

The Brookings Institution 2006 Brown Center Report on Education found that nations in which families and schools emphasize self-esteem cannot compete academically with cultures, mostly throughout Asia, where no one worries much about cute emojis or  those ‟non-cognitive” factors. As psychologist and author Michael J. Hurd once told me, “Kids don’t feel better about themselves and then do better in school. They do better in school, then feel better about themselves.” Educational researchers also learned that those temporary relaxations in standards had to be institutionalized systemically after students who were shunted on to the next level couldn’t do the higher-level work, either. The fallout lingers: today, the number of incoming college freshmen who need remedial courses in order to handle college work hovers at an abysmal 50 percent.

There were unintended emotional and behavioral consequences as well, captured  memorably in a 2004 Alexandra Wolfe essay, “American Coddle.” Wolfe described a generation who, thanks to unending infusions of ego amplified by helicopter parents, have insufferable expectations and get damned cranky when those expectations aren’t met—kids who act as though they might never encounter so much is a speed bump on their journey to fulfillment everlasting. Other observers intuited even darker consequences. The work of psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge suggests that the frustrated entitlements stoked by the self-esteem movement play a significant role in the rise of the incel community and mass shootings, and today’s epidemic of suicides.

More troubling still, SEL’s elevation of social behavior above all else makes it the perfect Trojan Horse for delivering indoctrination in social justice themes. SEL literature is awash in familiar references originating in academia’s activist wing, from talk of an “emotionally safe” learning environment to “culturally responsive classrooms” that honor the “primacy of group differences.” Other sections of the SEL canon seem to have been lifted, at least in part, from intersectionality and critical race theory. One Stanford white paper even uses the phrase ‟social-justice education” interchangeably with social-emotional learning.

This is a highly politicized vision of social progress indeed. And because teachers wield the power of the gradebook, compliance with such outlooks can be forced upon suggestible students. “Here we have government demanding that young people exhibit certain feelings and social behaviors, and if they don’t, their schools could be dinged for it,” SEL critic Wendy Pullman writes in the Federalist. “That’s not only manipulative but creepy.” So, when de Blasio writes in Fortune that children must learn to “embrace diversity” and “challenge stereotypes,” he is not using those words in their neutral, generic senses, but rather to evoke the omnibus set of justice imperatives surrounding the righting of historic wrongs, the undoing of privilege, and so forth. SEL assumes that injustice has put certain groups at an almost congenital disadvantage, and seeks to build consensus for the idea that remedies must be undertaken. VOCABULARY

This ethic is legible in the first major proposal to emerge from a task force impaneled by de Blasio to improve diversity in what is (improbably?) ranked as the nation’s most segregated school system. The School Diversity Advisory Group recommended eliminating New York’s “gifted and talented” programs as well as “selective admissions” screening for many of the city’s better-performing schools. De Blasio’s influential hand-picked education czar, Richard Carranza, cites the steps as necessary to achieve the regime’s full-throated commitment to an educational system in which, a decade from now, the typical school reflects the melting-pot demographics of the city as a whole. As it stands today, New York’s gifted-and-talented programs are overwhelmingly populated by Asian and white students (in that order), who also win the bulk of available slots in the magnet schools with demanding admissions criteria.

The task force’s plan harks back to the downwardly mobile thinking of the self-esteem movement, effectively penalizing superior achievers for creating the imbalances that so embarrass equity-minded mayors like de Blasio. The plan “solves” the disparity somewhat in the manner that thoroughbred handicappers make races fairer by forcing top horses to carry added weight. It is clear from de Blasio’s public statements that what he seeks is educational homogeneity: all student bodies basically look the same, all students basically receive the same instruction.

This is a common thread in SEL-inspired thinking: Everyone meets at the same level. Alas, except in exalted environments like MIT or Harvard Law, educational homogeneity seldom occurs at the level of excellence. Throw poor learners into a class to achieve a jury-rigged demographic balance and the teachers will have to teach down to lowest common denominator, lest they risk losing the lesser students entirely. One supposes that such tactics strike progressively-minded administrators as a relatively easy way of achieving a more balanced, equitable system. But why stunt the growth of the better-performing students who are the most likely spark plugs of the engine of American progress?

Beyond that—and just as unforgivably—what is the message to the minority children that these strategies are supposed to benefit: that in a meritocratic system, you can never hope to compete? What is the message to minority parents? That programs reserved for the “gifted and talented” cannot achieve a desired level of minority representation, so if we seek full integration we must scrap those programs as well as all criteria designed to assess educational readiness? There is no way around the implication that integration and excellence cannot peacefully coexist. Seldom has there been a more naked statement of the cynicism embodied in what George W. Bush speechwriter and policy adviser Michael Gerson dubbed the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The better approach would be to invest meaningfully in the lousy schools that leave minority children so ill-prepared to compete. But that step is hard, costly and time-consuming. It is so much easier and politically expedient to make a grand gesture—simply doing away with programs and assessments that make minority children look bad. At its outer limits, SEL-based thinking opens the door to some truly bizarre curricula. Seattle, a historic hotbed of progressive-inflected education, has implemented in its public schools its Ruler program, a customized version of SEL. One manifestation is “Math Ethnic Studies, a K-12 slant on the “power dynamics” underlying arithmetic. Check out some of the topics listed here. Aside from wasting class time in a subject that’s difficult enough for some to master as it is, such coursework undermines the pursuit of an all-important STEM lingua franca by stoking suspicion of math and science…by blaming the tools for the misuse of those tools.

To return to where we began: Education should be about educating. When that mission is hijacked or distorted by extraneous or overarching goals, everyone suffers—most notably the innocent children who were the putative beneficiaries of your enlightenment. Yes, black Americans are still redlined and sometimes forced to pay exorbitant rent for dubious housing; that has nothing to do with whether they have sufficient math skills to properly balance their checkbooks after paying that rent. In the end, today’s “enlightened” SEL approaches seems guaranteed to offer (at best) justice for some, and mediocrity for all.

Declining Med School Standards in a Time of Pandemic

written by Steve Salerno

Quillette, April 11, 2020

In the beginning were the Medical College Admission Tests, or MCATs, a time-honored means of ascertaining worthiness for medical school. Formulated by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the MCATs assessed an applicant’s cognitive heft and baseline acumen in such no-nonsense disciplines as anatomy, biology, kinesiology, chemistry, and other precincts of hard biophysical science.

Then, around the turn of the millennium, early social-equity advocates began insisting, in essence, that the MCATs unfairly limited med school to people who showed significant potential as doctors. Specifically, the pool of physicians being churned out each year was judged insufficiently diverse. A chief concern was that African Americans, 13 percent of the US population, represented barely six percent of medical school enrollees. Efforts were made; the numbers ticked up incrementally.

Then in 2009 the body that accredits medical schools, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), touched off a parity panic across the med school landscape by issuing stern new guidance on diversity. In order to remain accredited, declared LCME, medical schools “must” have policies and practices in place that “achieve appropriate diversity.” Enough airy talk of opportunity; let’s talk outcomes.

Words like “quota” were judiciously avoided but were legible in the reams of bureaucratic gobbledygook produced by newly socially aware medical administrators. Example:

Addressing the structural inequities laden in our system of selection of medical students… begins with ensuring we are using accurate metrics to set goals and track our progress. The representation quotient, one such metric, can be applied at the state and institutional level to ensure efforts align with the intended goal of creating a future workforce reflective of their respective patient populations.

Translation: If your enrollment of underrepresented minorities skews too far from population demographics, watch out. Thus began a willy-nilly search for correctives that today seems poised to eliminate all barriers—that is, uniform standards—that prevent med schools from simply anointing desired candidates qualified to practice medicine.

In the wake of the LCME’s watershed edict, working groups were convened, budget line items were created, and high-profile hires were made to facilitate diversity boosting and community recruitment. A main stumbling block seemed to be minority candidates’ poor performance on gatekeeper exams like the MCATs. Unintentionally ironic assertions began appearing in the literature. From anesthesiologist and author Dr. Maxime Madhere: “A huge obstacle to diversity is that most medical schools have the same criteria for all applicants.”

Equity advocates championed tests that emphasized “non-cognitive” factors in admissions decisions, such as the SJTs, with the SJ standing for situational judgment, not social justice (though a felicitous coincidence). SJTs, which appraise soft-sided skills like emotional intelligence, became at least a supplementary criterion at several dozen American med schools. Now, it’s beyond dispute that some of the skills tested for in the likes of the SJTs are desirable in a medical professional—emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion. They’re likely desirable in any professional, which is why such testing has been used in workplaces and other settings for years. And that is indeed the way the new testing was framed upon its entry into academic medicine.

But given the tenor of the times and the mandate from on high, it seems clear that the new testing was implemented at least in part as a workaround and as a sop to progressive dogmatists, who argued that admissions officers needed a benchmark to use apart from the knowledge testing in which minorities seemed relatively non-competitive (that disadvantage lingers, by the way). The primary selling point of SJTs was thus that they allowed schools to consider factors other than such blind metrics as a straightforward ranking of applicants’ college grades and MCAT performance. The MCATs themselves were revised in 2015 to give meaningful weight to areas of the social sciences.

Alas, under-represented minorities, once admitted, didn’t necessarily thrive. In fact, they were 97 percent more likely than were their counterparts to struggle academically as well as substantially more likely to wash out before graduation. This begat more scrutiny of the output end of the process. One white paper asserted uncritically, “In the competition to recruit minority students, most medical schools relaxed their admissions standards… On the other hand, no school relaxed its graduation requirements.”

There ensued calls for more hands-on mentoring and an increasing switch to pass/fail grading, thus creating less clear-cut performance gradients among students. Some advocated that the MCAT itself be pass/fail, in order to open up a larger pool of “qualitatively similar” applicants and allow more leeway in acceptance decisions.

The language of the social justice Left began appearing in diversity statements at even the most elite schools. From Harvard: “We acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of our history and actively promote social justice, challenge discrimination, and address disparities and inequities.” Does that sound like med school rhetoric or a mission statement coming from an activist working group at Evergreen State? Yale’s statement stressed the importance of “speaking truth to power,” and that the school’s “ultimate goal is to better support student advocacy for social justice within and beyond the campus community.”

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Seemingly left unasked was whether or not a medical school’s ultimate goal should have more to do with graduating quality doctors. Nonetheless, schools that failed to take heed risked having their hands slapped. The University of Missouri School of Medicine was twice threatened with loss of accreditation. By the decade’s end, this blitzkrieg approach to deepening the pool of diverse physicians began to pay noticeable dividends, according to a December 2018 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that tracked minority enrollment since the 2009 LCME accreditation standard. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, the number of black students enrolled in US medical schools rose by 4.6 percent.

Unimpressed, critics complained that med school students were still 58.9 percent white. This, even though that stat remains well below census demographics, which indicate that 72 percent of Americans are “white alone.” Observers indicted even the newer generation tests for an endemic bias towards “privilege”: “Applicants with disadvantaged backgrounds still score lower on SJTs than their privileged peers, even if the difference is less than with the MCAT.” Always, that circular foundational assumption: that under-performance is, must be, a byproduct of some diabolical social antecedent: If the numbers don’t support an equity agenda, the playing field cannot, by definition, be level.

One sees the same line of argument in rhetoric from a group calling itself White Coats for Black Lives, or WC4BL. Founded in 2014, and modeled after the Black Panthers’ work in achieving equal healthcare access, WC4BL immediately demanded that med-school curricula include coursework in Black Studies and even intersectionality. Last year the group issued its second “Racial Justice Report Card,” which evaluated 17 medical schools through a social-justice lens. No medical school was graded higher than a B-. Harvard and Johns Hopkins received a C+. WC4BL told the Guardian that this signals a need for even more “robust” anti-racism training.

Other activists then called for a warmer embrace of so-called holistic admissions processes that further emphasize non-cognitive factors, with bonus points awarded for socioeconomic status, community service and “life experiences”; some suggested dropping the pretenses and unapologetically ranking candidates by race.

Let us close with a bit of inescapable context, the infectious elephant in the room, as it were: The world’s current struggles against COVID—19 underscore the vital importance of quality medicine. If you are the best and the brightest, you should be in medical school. You should not be in medical school for reasons other than that.

6

6

The post Research Paper Specifications. RP Thesis Question #3 Do black lives matter to appeared first on PapersSpot.