Tag: education

Ketanji Brown Jackson Is A Trustee At School That Hosts Racially Segregated ‘Affinity Groups’ For Middle-Schoolers

Georgetown Day School, where Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is a member of the board of trustees, hosts racially segregated clubs, euphemistically referred to as “affinity groups,” for middle- and high-schoolers.

GDS describes these racially segregated groups as “safe spaces.” The website says that “most” of them are open to “allies” but goes on to define an affinity group as “​​a group whose members share a particular identity,” continuing to note that the groups “can help identify, interpret, interrupt and dismantle sources of oppression or discrimination.”

The only two middle-school affinity groups are for “Students of Color Mentoring,” which exclude white students. The description for the middle-school mentoring program reads:

“The MS SOC Mentoring Program continues to provide community support for any and all students who identify as Black/African/African-American, Asian/Asian-American, Middle-Eastern/Middle-Eastern American, Native-American/Native/American Indian, Latinx/Hispanic, and/or of Bi-racial/Multi-racial descent.”

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What Could Go Wrong? Millions of US Kids to Be Taught in School Which News is “Fake”

NewsGuard, a controversial service that ranks news sources read by clients online based on how trustworthy it considers them to be, will soon be available for free to millions of schoolchildren in the US.

The New York-based company signed a licensing agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, making the service available to members and their students, the two said this week.

AFT President Randi Weingarten called the deal a game-changer when it comes to helping kids, “particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction.”

She called NewsGuard “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”

The service was launched in 2018, when the position that Big Tech should openly censor information that it deemed undesirable was not as pervasive in the US as it is today. NewsGuard ranks thousands of news sources with a “street light” color code, and puts a nutrition label-like explanation on each one to explain the score.

The service comes in the form of a browser plug-in and costs $2.95/month, except for users of Microsoft Edge, since Microsoft licensed it to be a built-in feature of its browser in 2019.

NewsGuard claims to be apolitical and to apply a rigorous process when assessing the integrity of news outlets. After its launch, skeptics, however, questioned the abundance of people linked to the US government among its advisory board.

One of them, Richard Stengel, who served under Barack Obama as the Department of State’s public affairs chief, said on the record that state propaganda was fine and that all nations subjected their citizens to it.

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State-Run Pre-K Resulted in Worse Educational, Behavioral Outcomes for Kids

Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of “universal” preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are “critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.” Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden’s stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a “historic $200 billion investment in America’s future” to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling. 

Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that “studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That’s why we’re going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child.”

On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.

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Maryland Parents Shocked to Learn Children Were Given Race and Gender Scorecards to Calculate Privilege

A mother in Carroll County, Md., reported that students, including her daughter, were recently given race and gender privilege scorecards to complete as part of their preparation for an upcoming reading assignment in English class. Accompanying the scorecards were other media elaborating on the concept of privilege.

When the daughter questioned her teacher on what privilege has to do with learning English, expressing concerns that the material seemed “racist towards whites” and that it “portrayed the police in a negative light,” the teacher reacted by saying it was actually good to have those feelings and that the purpose of the lesson is to foster uncomfortable conversations.  

The girl’s mother sees things differently, calling such topics in the classroom “absolutely appalling.” She continued: “They’re teaching our kids to view and treat people based on their skin color, rather than treating each other as individuals. How this belongs in an English class is beyond me.”

The Concerned Parents of Carroll County Maryland, a local group organized to remove political indoctrination in schools and promote common-sense COVID policies, were originally sent the classroom documents. The group has received similar reports from many students and parents throughout their community’s school system. 

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