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 