What’s interesting in the news today?
Open Thread
1. The IRS is not a big fan of investigating the Clinton Foundation. I guess they feel the group is not conservative enough to warrant looking at.
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2. More schools are complaining about the lack of discipline in the “white privilege” theory of so-called education.
From EAGNews “Last week we were stunned to learn that chaos has been the norm in the St. Paul, Minnesota school district, due to a student disciplinary policy that replaces suspensions with time-outs, counseling and other less punitive measures.
We also learned that the controversial policy was influenced by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG), a radical San Francisco-based consulting firm that claims black students lag behind academically, and tend to have more disciplinary problems, because American K-12 education is designed to benefit white students – aka “white privilege.” Now it’s becoming obvious that several other large school districts around the nation are in the same situation as St. Paul.
They’ve all instituted radical disciplinary policies to reduce the number of black student suspensions, they’ve all experienced serious behavioral problems as a result, and they’re all included on a recent list of PEG client school districts.”
““Critics say PEG’s work has alienated some educators and, in recasting certain discipline issues as cultural misunderstandings, let disruptive students and their families off the hook.”
PEG’s connection to similarly passive disciplinary policies in the Madison, Wisconsin; Denver; Philadelphia; Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland school districts is not quite as obvious.
No news reports have surfaced claiming the organization played a direct role in encouraging school officials to adopt or implement policies that allow violent and unruly behavior to go unchecked.”
PEG has wiped the list of schools using their material from its website. But as we all know, the internet is forever, so here’s a link with the list.
Also from EAGNews
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3. The drive to take America out of US history.
From The NYPost “A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter Tuesday in protest of deleterious changes to the Advanced Placement US History (or APUSH) exam.
The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America’s unique ideals and institutions.”
“As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.”
So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”
The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development of America’s ideals and political institutions.”
The scholars, who hail from institutions ranging from Notre Dame and Stanford to the University of Virginia, Baylor, CUNY, Georgetown and Ohio State, decried the aggressive centralization of power over how teachers can teach the story of America. This is not a bug. It’s a feature.”
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Wandering Views 
Someday, having a mother and father at home will be considered a “white privilege”. I wonder what they plan to do about it?
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Chas, I think that’s already been suggested. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I recently read an article that said exactly that. If I can find it, I’ll post a link.
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Linda – Was that in the articles about how reading books to our kids gives them an unfair advantage?
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I will tell you what an experienced, about to retire African American teacher told me once: Every year the drugs get worse and every year the disciplinary problems and behavior gets worse.
Yesterday I received a survey from our school board. I told them I was no fan of computers in the classroom, it had made the teachers lazy and no matter what the students were using them to surf the internet rather than pay attention and that perhaps the teachers weren’t so much lazy as they were worn out with trying to maintain classroom order.
I beat myself up a lot over parenting mistakes I have made and the current one is that I didn’t yank my child out of public school and home school her.
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Recently, a couple of my liberal Facebook friends have shared articles about the growing police state in our nation. My libertarian friends, & even a couple conservative friends have also mentioned this concern in the past.
My liberal friends see the growing police state as being the fault of conservatives. I know that conservatives have generally tended to side with police officers in controversial situations, & have tended to be “law & order” types, but I don’t think the current situation is because of that.
By “police state”, I mean the fact that officers seem to be growing more aggressive in their behavior towards the public, there are many more incidents of police killing people, & the number of SWAT-like raids & behavior is also growing. Not to mention the government spying on us.
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What? Discipline problems in school?
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Out! I am Out of teaching. I am out of jail, too.I am so glad I no longer have to worry whether or not I will get arrested.
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Interesting piece on something I hadn’t heard before:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/russian-trolls-spreading-online-hoaxes-u-s/
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ADRIAN CHEN, The New York Times Magazine: We know the bare outlines of what it is and what they do. It’s a group in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that basically hires hundreds of Russians to spread pro-Russian propaganda on the Internet. And one of their tactics is to pretend to be people, Americans and Russians on social media like Facebook and Twitter.
…. I think the big picture is you have to go back to 2011, when there were huge anti-Putin protests in Russia. And those were all organized on Facebook, on social media, led by tech-savvy bloggers and readers who came up through the Internet.
And after that, it became a real priority for the Kremlin to basically crack down on the Internet, make sure that nothing like that happened again. And these trolls, this kind of work, from what I have gathered from talking to activists, it’s really to kind of pollute the Internet, to make it an unreliable source for people, and so that normal Russians who might want to learn about opposition leaders or another side of things from the Kremlin narrative will just not be able to trust it.
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That kind of reminds me of what a Facebook friend, David Norton, recently wrote about false narratives that people keep believing & sharing…
“There are echo chambers. Inside these echo chambers, people link to and quote each other. If you follow the links back, you get to the same handful of people, who frequently made up stuff out of whole cloth in order to sell books. …
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, for instance, were proven to be forgeries a century ago. And you can see almost word for word excerpts from an older French work which had nothing to do with the World Zionist Congress.
“But it was too juicy to dismiss. And a whole group of people make their living off this stuff. It is their whole lives…
“So, inside the echo chamber, no one knows it was a forgery. Everything is proven by quotes from others inside the echo chamber, fellow believers.”
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