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education and schooling ideological culture

Kids Paid to Propagandize

“You get paid good.” 

So said one student when asked “Why should students join CFJ?”

How well-paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.” 

Parrot left-wing propaganda, that is.

The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.

The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.

One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”

Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices. . . . They’re teaching them parroting . . . the exact opposite of how you empower children.” 

The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only “of color”?

The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.

The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Hope for Campus Free Speech

The Understatement of the Month Award goes to David Lat, who says in a recent post that “when it comes to free speech and intellectual diversity, U.S. law schools continue to face challenges.”

One Big Challenge, more like: the contempt university policymakers routinely show for the speech of members of disfavored groups, if and when they say things that members of favored groups dislike.

Lat points to a decision, last month, by the Law School State Senate of Columbia Law School. The organization denied official recognition to a group formed to combat antisemitism, Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Reason: some pro-Palestinian students objected to LSAA’s definition of “antisemitism.”

The objection is cause for debate, sure, but not for preventing an organization from formally operating. Fortunately, after much attention was paid to the Senate’s decision by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and others, the Senate reversed itself.

In addition to bad publicity, one thing that may help improve prospects for free speech on campus is a new rule issued by the American Bar Association, Standard 208.

Standard 208 requires law schools that want to be accredited by the ABA to “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular.” This requirement is more encompassing than existing (if often ignored) protections of academic freedom for faculty members.

The ABA’s action is a big step, but not sufficient, Lat says. The cultures of our schools must change too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

The De-Frocking of Jordan Peterson

The Canadian psychologist fighting for the right to opine without having to submit to “social media training” — reeducation — has lost a court battle.

An Ontario court has dismissed Jordan Peterson’s appeal of a decision that had ruled in favor of the autocratic College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO).

A year ago, Dr. Peterson’s livelihood was jeopardized because, on social media, he challenged “consensus” determinations on matters like climate change, sex-change operations on minors, and COVID-19 policies.

That’s when CPO, a regulatory body established by legislation, told Peterson that he must either submit to degrading “training” as the penalty for participating in public discourse or forfeit his right to practice.

With the new ruling, “There are no other legal avenues open to me now,” he says on Twitter. “It’s capitulate to the petty bureaucrats and the addlepated woke mob or lose my professional licence.”

The setback pertains only to “this round,” though. And: “There is nothing you can take from me that I’m unwilling to lose.”

In a recent National Post column, he says that he can either comply with the reeducation and confess his ideological sins or “tell my would-be masters to go directly to the hell they are so rapidly gathering around themselves and everyone else.”

If you read Dr. Peterson’s warnings to fellow Canadians about the precarious state of their liberties and interpret his tone accurately, I think you’ll agree that he’s going with the go-to-hell option.

Peterson has made millions off the fame he garnered by opposing the compelled speech aspect aspect of Canada’s Bill C-16. Thanks to the marketplace of ideas, he has more go-to-hell money than most folks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling ideological culture scandal

The “Racial Animus” Gambit

Among the deflections littering former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation letter is the claim that major criticisms of her conduct are “fueled by racial animus.”

The controversies have made Gay, a black woman, very visible. She may have been subjected to racial attacks in emails or on somebody’s blog. I haven’t seen reports of such. It’s possible.

But her letter makes it seem as if she feels all of it, all the criticisms of her understanding of policies regarding the treatment of Jews on campus and criticisms of her own treatment of the words of others in her published work, were “fueled by racial animus.”

If only blacks alone were ever charged with ambiguity about antisemitism or committing plagiarism, the implication might be at least superficially plausible. 

But it’s not.

Yesterday, I discussed the considerations that properly affect campus speech policies (“The Resignation”).

Here let me note, first, that scholars of all hues and sexes have been plausibly accused of plagiarism. Example: historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, white woman. Male example: Steven Ambrose.

And, second, that Harvard’s backing and filling and own animus in response to documented charges of plagiarism have converted the matter from a problem mostly for Claudine Gay personally to a problem for Harvard as an institution. By violating its own policies for dealing with the charges and by attacking the messenger, Harvard seemed to be saying that standards of scholarship like “Don’t plagiarize” don’t matter.

But they do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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The Resignation

The fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay is not exactly the triumph we were looking for. 

Her resignation letter focused on the recent congressional hearings in which she found herself in the uncomfortable position of selectively defending free speech against a Republican politician slinging charges of “genocide” and “racism.” 

It was all very . . . the opposite . . . the upside-down . . . of how Democrats and Republicans had been dealing with free speech these last few years.

And that is the most important context. Her letter’s evasion of discreditable cases of academic plagiarism — at Harvard, no less! — while not honorable, was at least politically apt. One administrator’s fraudulent academic history is no match for the issue of freedom of speech.

Which, as a legal matter, is as Ms. Gay said it was, a matter of context. You have the right to advocate genocide or say racist things on your property or on hired property. You do not have the right to shout such things just anywhere.

But college campuses aren’t just anywhere. They are allegedly places for intellectual debate. The practice of academic freedom means that the property and customs of universities and institutions of higher learning allow differing opinions to be aired. 

In classrooms; in papers; in auditoriums. 

Still, these student academic free-speech norms don’t extend anywhere and everywhere, in all campus contexts. No student may hide behind “free speech” or “academic freedom” to corner and scream hatred of Israel at every Jew on the quad. That’s where Ms. Gay’s answers in congressional hearings were so unsatisfactory. Especially since Harvard and other major higher education institutions have been disallowing some speech from academic contexts and celebrating other quite threatening speech in the university’s public places.

Gay’s resignation reminds us of Al Capone’s imprisonment for tax evasion: a work-around at best. The underlying issues remain unresolved.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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