US History Tests Show the Falling Floor for Student Achievement

By Nat Malkus AEIdeas May 04, 2023

This week’s release of 8th grade US history and civics tests delivered another round of bad news for students and schools. The top line results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed the first declines ever recorded in civics scores, and even larger drops in US history scores.

Though not totally surprising on the heels of the pandemic, the disappointing results raised concerns across the board about the amount and quality of civics and history instruction students are getting. Certainly, there are legitimate concerns here, and inevitably there will be unserious ones, but one that likely won’t get its due is the uneven distribution of changing scores over time. Two graphs that depict test results over time starkly illustrate why we should be concerned with that pattern, especially since it is not limited to history or civics.

The first figure below shows changes in 8th grade US history NAEP scores over two decades for students scoring from the 10th through 90th percentiles. Across the board, the high water mark is in 2014 with declines in 2018 and 2022. Not all of apparent changes are statistically significant, but the action is clearer at the low end. Students at the 10th and 25th percentiles saw more growth before 2014 and greater losses afterward. These differences look relatively small because the scale of the graph, at 90 points, makes the differences between the highest and lowest scores stand out more than the differences within those groups. .............To Read More....

Editor's Note:  Since I think Richard Dreyfuss is a Hollywood leftwing ideologue nut and an idiot, I almost broke out in hives.  I was shocked that I totally agreed with Dreyfuss.  So, what can we take away from this?  If an ideologue like Dreyfuss gets it, there's not excuse for the rest of the Hollywood trash not to get it.  

Actor Richard Dreyfuss Discusses Importance of Teaching Civics in American Schools - By Ella Kietlinska and Jan Jekielek May 5, 2023 - Understanding the Constitution is necessary for good citizenship, Dreyfuss says. Passive citizenship in America is the direct consequence of public schools not teaching about people’s constitutional rights and the rules for governing the country enshrined in the Constitution, said actor Richard Dreyfuss..............

People who have not been taught civics do not understand the powers civil authorities have been given or the hierarchy of powers, said Dreyfuss, who has advocated for the need for civic education in the American school system since 2008 with his organization, The Dreyfuss Civics Initiative. Dreyfuss explained that it is too late to learn civics after a person gets elected to Congress. “You have to learn it and learn it so that it’s in your DNA. And that’s why you study the Constitution,” he said............

In his book, Dreyfuss asserts that civics has not been taught in American public schools for over 50 years. Civics has not been completely abandoned by schools, as many schools teach a subject named civics, but they do not teach about how the republic governs itself, and the requirements vary from state to state. As a result, students lack proficiency in civics..................

 There are some voices calling to abolish the Constitution. Ryan Cooper, a national correspondent at The Week, called the American Constitution “a piece of junk” and suggested throwing it out. Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown University, argued that the Constitution is outdated and advised to give it up. Dozens of students at the University of Florida signed a petition to abolish the Constitution.

But Dreyfuss told The Epoch Times he would ask those who want to replace the Constitution for a better alternative to it. No one has laid out the structure of the federal government—and the way for the states and the federal government to work together—better than the Constitution, Dreyfuss argued..............

Editor's Note:  Here's what's infesting our educational institutions.  RK

Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools By David Mikics - Angela Davis was a dedicated fangirl of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev and cult leader Jim Jones. So why is she presented to children as a hero? Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.

I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.......

673 university professors sign letter opposing courses on America's founding, Constitution UNC professors say requiring courses on American history violates 'academic freedom' - Hundreds of professors at the University of North Carolina signed a public letter Tuesday opposing legislation that would require university students to take courses on America's government and founding documents. The 673 UNC Chapel Hill professors revealed the public letter Tuesday, arguing the new courses and another bill in the North Carolina House of Representatives would constitute an infringement on the university's "academic freedom." The first piece of legislation, House Bill 96, would require students to take a 3 credit-hour course covering America's founding and history. Required reading for the course would include the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, at least five essays from the Federalist Papers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Gettysburg Address.............

Tarheels Dig in on the Constitution- Oh, the preening of some academic scholars. Advanced degrees, tenure, and insulation from market-based competition create within them a sense of superiority which to challenge is like questioning the rotation of the earth around the sun. Occasionally, though, the scholastic earth can be thrown off its axis. This is occurring today in North Carolina, where House Bill 96 would mandate all college students in the state to take a three credit-hour class in which students would read the following texts:

“The Constitution of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence. The Emancipation Proclamation. At least five essays from the Federalist Papers, as determined by the instructor. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The Gettysburg Address. The North Carolina State Constitution.”

In other words, reading and interacting with texts central to American history, government, and political philosophy would be required by students who will, as college and university graduates, go on to help lead in their fields — in America.

Yet this simple obligation to teach the Declaration, et al, apparently would be too much for many of the Tarheel State’s educators to fulfill. “History courses are necessary, but I think politicians need to stay out of our universities,” according to history professor Jürgen Buchenau of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “They don’t want history to be taught. They want a certain type of history to be taught.”..............

 

America's Crime Problem Began in College

By Daniel Greenfield April 13, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 The pro-crime movement that swept America began in part with an article by Angela Davis, "Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition." Davis, a UCLA academic, started by quoting Michel Foucault, a French academic with the Collège de France. 

Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish', which Davis described as "arguably the most influential text in contemporary studies of the prison system" remains widely studied on college campuses along with Davis’ racial spin that long since entered politics and pop culture in the form of police defunding and other allied efforts to eliminate prisons, prosecutions and the justice system.

The two activist academics were not really interested in crime and the penal system as a field of research. They were bent on fomenting a civil war that would put the Left in power.

Foucault, a Marxist-trained philosopher, had been a co-founder of the Prison Information Group to support the Maoists imprisoned over the radical violence in France in 1968. Foucault had credited the riots with stimulating his interest in “the direction of penal theory”.

Angela Davis had bought the guns used in a murderous terrorist attack on a Marin County courthouse by the Black Panthers. The attack roughly coincided with Foucault’s visit to the United States during which he “investigated” the American prison system and the death of George Jackson: the Panther leader whom the Marin County attack had been meant to free.

Police defunding and the pro-crime movement came out of universities not out of an abstract interest in social justice, but to aid the leftist domestic terrorists trying to overthrow free nations.

The French Maoists and Black Panthers bonded by their shared experiences of being locked up for their crimes came to see prisons as “not only Marxist universities,but training camps” and criminals as the vanguard of the revolution. Like most Marxist ideas, it was academic radicals who developed these ideas into an ideology that could be popularized and mainstreamed.

The violence of the Black Lives Matter riots, founded by “trained Marxists” who viewed Davis as a role model, and the even more catastrophic wave of death spurred on by implementing their policy demands, defunding police, ending prosecutions and freeing criminals, cost thousands of lives. Those deaths, like the movement behind them, came out of universities.

Despite her Communism and domestic terrorism, Davis is a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz. But she’s not alone. Other former leftist terrorists have taken up academic positions including Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg. Ayers taught at the University of Chicago until he retired and he has promoted police defunding. Susan Rosenberg, on her release, was offered a position at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and co-chaired the fiscal sponsor of BLM.

Rosenberg has been described as an “anti-prison activist”. John Jay College, a formerly prestigious institution whose alumni include New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and whose students go on to serve in the FBI, the NYPD, and the Secret Service, endorsed its own version of police defunding. The public college partners on fellowships with the Vera Justice Institute committed to “ending mass incarceration”. Students are asked to envision the institute in terms of Foucault’s critiques of the prison system.

Within the span of two generations, future law enforcement personnel were being indoctrinated with the teachings of Marxist domestic terrorists and their political allies. The situation at John Jay is emblematic of what has happened to criminology departments across the country.

The country’s top criminology departments, like those at the University of Maryland, UC-Irvine and Rutgers, begin with the premise that the criminal justice system is racially biased.

The University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice has its Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network Small Grants Program, UC-Irvine’s Criminology program has a graduate emphasis on “Race and Justice Studies”, while Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice takes part in the university’s Fellows in Racial Justice program. One of those fellows brags that being a “convicted felon” who spent time in maximum security prison allows him to “empathize with the downtrodden” and led to his “fervent commitment to activism”.

That’s the state of criminology at universities, but the general state of universities is even worse. Black studies programs offer a prison abolition syllabus (which predictably includes both Foucault and Davis) tying together faculty from Harvard and Wesleyan among others. Rutgers, Notre Dame, the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, among many others, offer Black Lives Matter courses, whose villains are invariably white people and cops.

BLM protests were widely backed by 8 out of 10 college students. Many of the protests were organized on campuses and involved faculty like Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter, who has made a bid to take over the group. Abdullah, the granddaughter of a prominent German Marxist, is a black studies professor at California State University.

The fundamental message of Foucault and Davis, refracted through BLM, was broadcast through academia. The policies, police defunding, prison releases and decriminalization, and the violent riots, helped unleash an unprecedented crime wave. The ideas originally promoted by radicals in the 70s have led to a generation of progressive pro-crime DAs, many backed by George Soros, like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Los Angeles’ George Gascon and Philly’s Larry Krasner, or Biden’s US Attorney in D.C., Michael Graves, who declined to prosecute in 67% of cases, who have dismantled the criminal justice system from within.

As a result of BLM and pro-crime policies, around 5,000 more people were murdered in 2020. And the rate of black people being murdered increased more than any other group. The CDC’s research showed that, “in 2020, one out of every 1,000 young Black males (15–34) was shot and killed.” Murder is the leading cause of death for black men from 20 to 44 years old.

All of this can be traced back to academia which promoted the idea that white people are racist oppressors and that the best way to fix that is to replace the police and the criminal justice system with social workers and apologies.

Restorative Justice, which proposes to replace crime and punishment with forgiveness for the perpetrator, originated in part from Goshen College in Indiana which now offers both a major and a minor in letting criminals go unpunished. Mariame Kaba, the contemporary godmother of police defunding, teaches at Barnard University. Kaba made her views plain in an op-ed titled, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The world that Kaba would make is laid out on her site, ‘Transform Harm’, which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It features a sociologist proposing that rapists write apology letters and a professor of gender studies claiming that sending Larry Nassar, who had sexually abused some 250 girls, to prison embodies “political whiteness”.

Even in the face of growing crime and violence, academia continues to double down on a pro-crime program initially conceived in support of Marxist terrorists, but which has become a general program of supporting and enabling criminals across society.

To fight crime, we must lock up criminals, but we must also end the taxpayer funding of pro-crime universities, departments and programs. While most criminals eventually face consequences for the robberies, rapes and murders that they commit, the academics who enable them never do. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Journalist ‘Too White’ to Interview Black Writer Was Placed Under Police Protection

Chris Tomlinson 29 Apr 2022

A Belgian journalist deemed “too white” to interview far-left African-American essayist Angela Davis, required police protection after receiving serious threats from activists. Journalist Safia Kessas interviewed Angela Davis earlier this week at the National Theatre in Brussels and had to be placed under police protection during the event due to the number of threats she had received as activists claimed she was “too white” to interview the black writer.  Activists were allegedly angry that Kessas was chosen to interview Davis because, despite being part Algerian in her background, she was not black herself.

“As Black and queer activists, we strongly question the choice of Safia Kessas to have a conversation with Angela Davis. Indeed, Angela Davis has worked and is still working every day for the liberation of Black people and against the prevailing negrophobia in the West,” activists said, the Belgian newspaper 7sur7 reports.........To Read More....

 

Communist and Black Nationalist Angela Davis Speaks to K-12 Students, Calls on Them to ‘Dismantle Capitalism’

By Eric Lendrum

On Wednesday, former Communist Party activist and black nationalist Angela Davis spoke at a webinar for an elite California prep school, where she told the K-12 students watching online that it was incumbent upon them to “dismantle capitalism,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.  The “diversity and inclusion”-themed webinar, titled the CommunityEd Series, was hosted by the Heads-Royce School, a prep school that costs just over $47,000 a year in tuition.  “Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to dismantle capitalism if we really want to move in a progressive direction,” Davis said to the impressionable students on the final day of the webinar. “If we want our children and children’s children and their children to begin to move along a trajectory that is described by freedom.”.........To Read More....