Critical Race Theory policy in hiring at UT

[Nivek 16923]

3 hours ago, YChang said:

Our education system k-12 and higher ed is broken. I think we can all agree on this. STEM isn't going to be a magic bullet even for the segment of population you've referenced.

If anything it's going to be a mix of:

• Funding from govt
• Funding from colleges/unis (endowment building like what Ohio State is doing to help 1st gen students, low-income student, hell all students)
• Better training, continue education for K-12 educators
• STEAM for in K-12
• Revision to K-12 curriculum
• Trade school (partner with Junior Colleges) & apprenticeship track for kids who don't have the aptitude or desire at that moment in their life to pursue higher-ed
• Proper counseling of college kids that, hey be aware there's not a lot of jobs for medieval feminist French lit unless you want to teach and that one prof at Swarthmore or Bowdoin hasn't croaked yet. Consider double majoring or minor in general business. 
• Internships
• Work-programs in govt for a few year post graduation as a way to work off student loan debt
• Mix in a few liberal arts credit hours for hard science majors
• Mix in a few credit hours in business and hard sciences for lib art majors

 

I'm sure I'm missing plenty of other stuff...

I don't think our schools are broken.   I think this is just rhetoric that is proposed by people with an agenda and many of the attempts to 'fix' it seem to siphon off dollars or add more division and bureaucracy.    The largest correlation with academic success is economic status.   None of those suggestions address this.   

[elfenix 34232]

conservatives say schools are broken and get elected to prove it

[Pancho 44759]

And instead of answering the question of "why would you want to get rid of Black and Brown American history," Treaty Oak just runs away and claims he's being attacked. 

[Satchel 6938]

Yep. Florida mom pretended to be left out of the decision making process by the school attended by her trans child, and had her rage codified into Florida law. 

[Captainant 27656]

1 minute ago, Pancho said:

And instead of answering the question of "why would you want to get rid of Black and Brown American history," Treaty Oak just runs away and claims he's being attacked. 

Well to @Nivek's point, your question put him on the defensive so I guess you're really the unreasonable one here

[Judge Roybeanbag 11819]

I’m not a person of color and I can’t pretend I walked in anyones shoes except my own.   I can say there is a shitton of value to be learned at looking at how we did or didn’t get from point A to point B. History is an uncomfortable subject.   It should be.  

[jimmyjazz 45903]

I haven't read every post on the thread, and I'm not really sure if this makes a difference, but when did @TreatyOak claim to be a minority?

I got a strong "white guy helping the minorities" merit badge vibe from his posts.

[YChang 3443]

19 minutes ago, Nivek said:

I don't think our schools are broken.   I think this is just rhetoric that is proposed by people with an agenda and many of the attempts to 'fix' it seem to siphon off dollars or add more division and bureaucracy.    The largest correlation with academic success is economic status.   None of those suggestions address this.   

If it’s not broken, it def isn’t working for everyone. Lol, if you squint you can’t really see how any of what I listed fixes someone’s economic status? Really? I find that hard to believe. I mean talk about something that has to be addressed from multiple sources. Education is only one area. And as an immigrant… getting a good education is a key factor to seeing one generation improve from the other. 

[TreatyOak 16313]

4 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

That starts at home. 
 

My understanding is he was talking high school prep, to be easier admitted into STEM college. 

Correct. 

[TreatyOak 16313]

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

I haven't read every post on the thread, and I'm not really sure if this makes a difference, but when did @TreatyOak claim to be a minority?

I got a strong "white guy helping the minorities" merit badge vibe from his posts.

Full Mexican American on both sides. Guess that doesn't fit the narrative here, but truth. 

[YChang 3443]

I mean as Avenue Q hilariously put it, “everyone’s a little racist!”

[Nivek 16923]

14 hours ago, Pancho said:

And instead of answering the question of "why would you want to get rid of Black and Brown American history," Treaty Oak just runs away and claims he's being attacked. 

I am not certain this is an accurate representation of what happened.  From my perspective, TO is advocating or the de-emphasizing of  certain subjects because he sees more value in practical skills which have direct market value.    

14 hours ago, YChang said:

If it’s not broken, it def isn’t working for everyone. Lol, if you squint you can’t really see how any of what I listed fixes someone’s economic status? Really? I find that hard to believe. I mean talk about something that has to be addressed from multiple sources. Education is only one area. And as an immigrant… getting a good education is a key factor to seeing one generation improve from the other. 

Can you define how it is not working for everyone?   Can you define how the immigrant experiences and motivations are different and how that relates to people who were systematically disenfranchised?   And no, I do not see how the list you made addresses the economic status of the family which is directly related to the academic achievement of the student.    Unless you are hoping that this improves the economic status of these students that carries over to their kids?   

To be clear, I simply do not know the definitions I asked above.   I also do not know how the immigrant life is different from a non-immigrant or from a minority or how different immigrants experiences vary.  

Edited April 8, 2022 by Nivek

[Pancho 44759]

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

 

Define how it is not working for everyone?   Define how the immigrant experiences and motivations are different and how that relates to people who were systematically disenfranchised?   And no, I do not see how the list you made addresses the economic status of the family which is directly related to the academic achievement of the student.    Unless you are insinuating that we just hope this improves the economic status of these students and then hope that carries over to their kids?   

This has nothing to do with what I posted, so I’m not sure why my reply was included.

[YChang 3443]

30 minutes ago, Pancho said:

This has nothing to do with what I posted, so I’m not sure why my reply was included.

I think he agrees with you and... yikes somehow lumped my opinion/response in with TO? Hmm...

[YChang 3443]

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

Define how it is not working for everyone?   Define how the immigrant experiences and motivations are different and how that relates to people who were systematically disenfranchised?   

Ok, I'll give it the old college try. And by the way if there's information or resources you think that I'm missing, please share.

I define that it's not working for everyone in that the quality isn't the same for all students. Especially for minority kids and kids in lower social economic levels in our country. It's not working for everyone because of the history and reality of educational inequality. 

Is the immigrant experience exactly the same as people who were systematically disenfranchised? No. But in my opinion there are similarities. It's not like a poor Asian immigrant in this country has it easy either.  

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

And no, I do not see how the list you made addresses the economic status of the family which is directly related to the academic achievement of the student.

I believe it's one way to address a family's economic status. And maybe this is cultural but family to me is multi-generational. Not only in the present. For example.. school located in central cities are typically funded well below those in suburban districts. You don't think improved facilities at school (a safe space), after school programs (so parents can keep working), free school lunch programs that extend past school hours (busy paying the rent, can't afford) helps out the family out? 

 

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

Unless you are insinuating that we just hope this improves the economic status of these students and then hope that carries over to their kids?   

I find this slightly insulting. Hope? Yeah I guess there's a bit of that. But everything is connected. You don't think the success of the kid has an impact... can have generational impact on their family? And personally this is where I have witnessed this happening as an immigrant and other immigrant families that started out poor. 

 

But what are your thoughts? And I'm not trying to be difficult. But so far all you've really expressed is that you disagree and basically told me that I'm wrong. One of the great things about this community is there's a lot of folks with unique backgrounds, training, education or lived experiences. What can you share to help improve my understanding of all this?

[TwiceHorn 31452]

20 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

We really don't. The number of people graduating with "bullshit degrees" (as you'd characterize them) are a fairly small percentage of total college graduates. Two seconds on Google turned up this list of the most popular majors. Of the top 25, I'd guess maybe you'd consider anthropology and sociology bullshit, but that comes in at 10. After that, you'd probably consider art at 18 bullshit, foreign languages at 21 bullshit, design at 22 bullshit. But all combined those barely exceed psychology at 3 and are less than half of the number of business majors. And as a percentage of total degrees, you can add all the lower "bullshit" degrees that each award a few thousand per year and we're still talking about a very small percentage of total degrees awarded. 

You can find different lists that rank things a little differently (apparently due to different classifications for certain majors), but you'll see pretty much the same thing using any list you look at. The common boomer "kids these days all go to college for bullshit degrees and graduate with no skills" take is basically nonsense based on a couple of anecdotes from their friends bitching about their kids. 

I was stunned to see that that was based on degrees granted rather than majors initially selected. Interdasting.

[Poe It Up 126]

19 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

That starts at home. 

Something like 70% of black children are born into single parent households, it’s very difficult to wrap my head around that number honestly. 
That’s entirely unsustainable long term. 

Emphasizing STEM makes sense, getting rid of humanities does not. Still, inserting malice into Treatyoak’s point seems silly. He’s shown deference in dealing with counterpoints, which goes a long way in these conversations. 

[Nivek 16923]

16 hours ago, Captainant said:

Well to @Nivek's point, your question put him on the defensive so I guess you're really the unreasonable one here

Is this helpful?  Did you really need to prove my point on how poor communication, snark, and sarcasm is not part of legitimate discourse?  It works in certain circumstances but it shouldn't be a default mode.      

[Macanudo 12976]

There's a great article in Salon about how all this CRT stuff was just cover to get to the real bogeyman of public schools.  

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/08/the-guy-brought-us-crt-panic-offers-a-new-far-right-agenda-destroy-public-education/

Earlier this week, the man who's been widely credited with single-handedly willing the "critical race theory" panic into existence (even if the truth is a bit more complex), laid out a new set of marching orders for the right: Defund public universities, discard academic freedom, remove credentialing requirements for K-12 teachers and generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education. 

The man in question is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Since he helped elevate CRT into a national culture war in 2020, Rufo has frequently been cast (or cast himself) as the new master strategist of the right, playing three-dimensional chess as he lays out his battle plans publicly and counts every media mention of them as a win. In the spring of 2021, he famously crowed on social media that he'd "successfully frozen" the CRT "brand" as the overarching ideology behind almost everything conservatives dislike. This January he tweeted about his new goal to "bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] 'transparency,'" in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide. 

On Tuesday, he broadcast his plans again in a speech at Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that, as a three-part Salon investigative series described last month, has assumed a vastly outsized role in conservative movement politics, with its heavy Washington footprint, its dense web of connections to political and intellectual right-wing leaders, and its national network of charter schools that use taxpayer funds to teach conservative ideology. Rufo had spoken at the college before, when he delivered an early version of his anti-CRT arguments in a March 2021 speech subsequently adapted as an essay for Hillsdale's monthly publication Imprimis, which claims a circulation of more than six million. And for the last week, Rufo has also been guest-teaching a short-term journalism class at the college. 

 

Now, speaking to a school organized around the idea that the political war will be won in education, Rufo issued a new strategy he called "Laying Siege to the Institutions." This means waging a "narrative and symbolic war" against both publicly-funded entities like K-12 schools and government agencies, as well as private corporations and the concept of academic freedom itself.

Rufo began his talk with a narrative that's become depressingly commonplace among the right: In the mid-20th century, leftists discouraged by the failure of the socialist revolution to spread worldwide shifted their aspirations to creating a top-down revolution of the elite, organized around cultural and identity politics rather than class consciousness. These days that narrative is often shorthanded as "cultural Marxism," which until recent years was widely considered a disreputable conspiracy theory strongly associated with antisemitism, alt-right web forums and the most marginal figures of the far right. But now, as with so much else, the idea has migrated into the conservative mainstream, as just a slightly harder-core means of expressing the right's sense that they "lost the culture" years ago.

Although Rufo has used the term in the past, he didn't repeat it Tuesday. Instead he offered a closely-related narrative: that leftists disillusioned after the social revolutions of the 1960s petered out had transferred their hopes to academia, hoping to spread their ideas more gradually by embarking on a "long march through the institutions." 

In Rufo's words, leftists who realized the proletarian revolution wasn't coming instead dedicated themselves to "a revolution of the intelligentsia, a revolution of the elites, by seizing control not of the means of production…but through the means of culture and knowledge production." What followed, he said, was the repackaging of the radical ideas of 1968 into ideologies that have trickled down into nearly every institution in society, albeit often through "postmodern" euphemisms like "diversity" or "equity." Today, he argued, "every elite institution in the country that has dominance over knowledge, dominance over culture, dominance over, even, in many cases, material production, has converged on a unitary ideology." 

The first stage for conservatives who want to fight back, Rufo said, lay in convincing the public that such a long-game infiltration had taken place, educating everyday conservatives that benign-sounding ideas like diversity and inclusion were actually codewords for radical leftist ideology, and offering a set of "moral" arguments and language in opposition. Now, he said, it was time for conservatives to move to a new stage of the fight, using the tools of popular outrage and government force to punish institutions that offend conservative sensibilities. 

It's not an entirely new argument. On the first day of the Biden presidency, Rufo vowed to build a coalition to "wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions." Last November, speaking at the highbrow National Conservatism conference, just before the CRT backlash he'd engendered helped sweep Glenn Youngkin into Virginia's governor's mansion, he urged conservative intellectuals to recognize that "politics is downstream from institutions," and that they should use government power to shape entities like public universities as a means of eventually crafting a more powerful conservative movement. The same month, Rufo told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that, having "unlocked a new terrain in the culture war," he was now "preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions" in part by promoting "school choice."

But over the last week, Rufo said, he'd pioneered a new application of the model. That was through his new crusade against the Walt Disney Company, the latest target of conservative outrage after the company publicly opposed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' "don't say gay" bill, which prohibits discussion, or even acknowledgment, of LGBTQ people in elementary school classrooms. 

---

 

In a series of posts and articles, Rufo used a leaked internal video to argue that Disney wasn't just making its employees take diversity training seminars but was inserting a covert agenda into its programming that sought to "fundamentally change the relationship between kids and sexuality in the United States." 

When the resultant furor sparked a number of proposals for political retaliation from conservative officials, including threats to rescind the company's tax breaks in Florida or to reject its copyright extension applications in Congress, Rufo described it as a "perfect example" of how conservatives can do battle with institutions that lie outside their direct control. 

Praising DeSantis for recognizing that "our corporations should ultimately be serving the common good, should be serving the country," Rufo called for wielding similar government penalties against other companies that anger conservatives. 

"I think you also wield power, for example, against a company like Disney if Disney is actively undermining the families and voters of, say, Florida," he said. "There's a feeling right now that we can tap into…where we want to have free enterprise, we want to have free competition, but what we don't want is to have cartel organizations, ideological and economic cartels, dictating the terms from up on high down to the average citizen." 

But aside from this perhaps-surprising conservative willingness to use government power to regulate private companies' speech, the primary institutions Rufo focused on were educational. 

At one point, he suggested that much of his work to heighten public outrage around schools' handling of everything from U.S. racial history to the pandemic to gender and sexuality could serve a larger goal: "creat[ing] the conditions for fundamental structural change."

"For example," he said, "to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust." 

"To get universal school choice," Rufo told listeners, "you need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust."

That admission is remarkably similar to the diagnosis that progressive public education advocates have made. Last month, former Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Salon that she saw "all the controversy about critical race theory" as a deliberate strategy to alienate communities from their local schools. The education privatization movement, she said, "is a billionaire's movement," and the only way it can "gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system. That's what all of this is about." 

Rufo didn't stop with K-12 education, going on to describe public universities as a "monopoly" that has too long been handed a "blank check" by legislators even in conservative states. Conservative legislators who don't like what's happening at those schools, Rufo said, should use their budgetary power to enact the changes they want to see. 

"These are public universities that should reflect and transmit the values of the public, and the representatives of the public, i.e., state legislators, have ultimate power to shape or reshape those institutions," he said. "We have to get out of this idea that somehow the public university system is totally independent entity that practices academic freedom — a total fraud, that's just a false statement, fundamentally false — and you can't touch it or else you're impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams." 

While many conservatives have long conceded the importance of academic freedom, he continued, lawmakers in some states were beginning to reconsider that long-cherished ideal, mulling proposals like defunding public university "diversity and inclusion" departments, which Rufo cast as a "patronage system" to support "private political activism with public dollars." 

In Florida, DeSantis signed a bill last year requiring the state's public universities to survey students and faculty on their political beliefs, to ensure students aren't being "indoctrinated," with the implication that schools where too few students or staff express conservative viewpoints might end up losing funding. In mid-February, after professors at the University of Texas passed a resolution in support of the academic freedom to teach CRT, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure for all new hires in the state, and to strip the protection from current faculty who do teach the theory.

Rufo also suggested dealing a more indirect blow to universities by having state legislators pass laws removing requirements for public K-12 teachers to hold advanced education degrees, arguing that masters programs only serve to expose future teachers to radical left-wing ideas. Bachelors degrees should be sufficient for public school teachers, he said, and while educators could opt into advanced training, such a choice should come to be seen as a red flag, with right-thinking hiring committees knowing not to "hire the ones with the masters, because those are the crazies." 

"We need to have the courage and the intelligence and the tenacity to say, 'What the public giveth, the public can taketh away," said Rufo. "So we go in there and we defund things we don't like, we fund things we do like." 

In terms of the latter, he suggested that conservative legislators use public funding to establish new, independently-governed "conservative centers" within flagship public universities, which could serve as "magnets" for right-wing professors, create a new track of conservative-minded classes and generally establish "a separate patronage system" for conservative thinkers and activists. 

British writer Mary Harrington suggests that Rufo sees himself leading a conservative "vanguard" movement, at "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism."

In many ways, the principles Rufo laid out seem to mirror what's happened in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proudly "illiberal" government — a regime that's become a model to emulate for much of the right. In the late 2010s, as a means of consolidating conservative power and disenfranchising liberal and moderate critics, Orbán launched a campaign against Hungary's institutions of higher education. He drove the elite Central European University, founded by George Soros, out of the country; solicited students to inform on professors who delivered "unasked-for left-wing political opinions"; and defunded and revoked accreditation for university gender studies programs. At the secondary ed level, as The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reported, Orbán's government cut two years off the country's compulsory education requirements, centralized curriculum and instituted new standards for a "patriotic education," under which students learn, for instance, that ethnic homogeneity is a Hungarian value. 

At Hillsdale, Rufo denied that he wanted to see conservatives enact their own "march through the institutions" — he couldn't imagine that many conservatives aspiring to run district diversity and equity departments, he joked. But much of what he suggested seems strikingly similar to the supposed progressive strategy of institutional infiltration he's waging a war against. Even his conservative admirers have noted as much. 

In November, after Rufo, speaking at the National Conservatism conference, called for using government mechanisms to "cripple the critical [left-wing] ideologies," one of his fellow speakers, the British writer Mary Harrington, wrote that his suggestions might represent "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism." 

When Rufo described his role, and that of other right-wing intellectuals at the conference, as "providing intellectual guidance, a new vocabulary of subversion, and a narrative that can direct the emotions and energy of the public against the right targets," Harrington diagnosed that as an idea borrowed "from the Leninist idea of 'vanguardism': the idea that an elite whose consciousness has already attained greater revolutionary heights should lead and mobilize the masses in transforming the world for the better." Under that model, Rufo seemed to propose that the only solution to an elite "cultural revolution" abetted by the state is an elite counterrevolution that seizes state power and wields it to fight back. 

[Nivek 16923]

1 hour ago, Pancho said:

This has nothing to do with what I posted, so I’m not sure why my reply was included.

Sorry for the disjointed posting.   Life got in the way of a proper posting and it took a long time to get it right (including errands for much needed allergy medicine).

It should be better.

[Captainant 27656]

Back on topic:

Kentucky governor vetoes bill incorporating ‘anti-critical race theory,’ calling it a step backward

Quote

CNN — 

Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has vetoed a bill that contains elements of an “anti-critical race theory” bill that he says “tries to police classroom discussions on topics such as race.”

Beshear vetoed the bill with a veto letter saying, “Senate Bill 1 tries to police classroom discussions on topics such as race. These are discussions our children are having with or without adults in our schools. Prescribing a rigid approach to what must be ‘taught’ in those discussions will lessen if not erase them.”

SB1 states in part that public schools shall provide instructions that align with certain concepts including: “An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race or sex;” and “The understanding that the institution of slavery and post-Civil War laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination were contrary to the fundamental American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but that defining racial disparities solely on the legacy of this institution is destructive to the unification of our nation.”

In his letter, Beshear said that children and adults must be able to exercise their First Amendment rights and have important discussions free of government censorship.

The bill received final passage from the state Senate last month, according to the Kentucky General Assembly page on SB 1.

Although the legislation does not implicitly use the term critical race theory, the bill’s language shares similarities with other measures passed in Republican-controlled states.

Samuel Crankshaw, communications manager for the ACLU of Kentucky, said Wednesday that SB 1 is “part of a nationwide strategy to whitewash history, perpetuate white supremacy, and erase marginalized people – particularly people of color and LGBTQ people. They would also deny educators and students their First Amendment right to free speech.”

Beshear notes that the bill would require teachers to incorporate “a specific set of historical documents and speeches” into lectures.

“These texts were not selected by historians or scholars, but by a political body.”

One of the required texts is Ronald Reagan’s 1964 political campaign speech “A Time For Choosing,” Beshear said. “the fact that this text is included over others like Dwight Eisenhower’s statement to troops in advance of the D-Day invasion suggests the bill is aimed more at politics than at history.”

tldr: Beshear calls bullshit on the attempt to legislatively shape the discourse and mandate to study reagan campaign speeches 

[WhatTheBuck 28777]

1 hour ago, Nivek said:

Is this helpful?  Did you really need to prove my point on how poor communication, snark, and sarcasm is not part of legitimate discourse?  It works in certain circumstances but it shouldn't be a default mode.      

Maybe I’m mistaken but I think your sarcasm meter might need a tune-up. 

[WhatTheBuck 28777]

Since we’re talking about education in general, and since it’s Friday, I’ll post a link to one of my favorite short stories by Isaac Asimov. It’s titled Profession and I think it’s relevant. Read if you want. It won’t take long.

https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

[Nivek 16923]

36 minutes ago, YChang said:

Ok, I'll give it the old college try. And by the way if there's information or resources you think that I'm missing, please share.

I define that it's not working for everyone in that the quality isn't the same for all students. Especially for minority kids and kids in lower social economic levels in our country. It's not working for everyone because of the history and reality of educational inequality. 

Is the immigrant experience exactly the same as people who were systematically disenfranchised? No. But in my opinion there are similarities. It's not like a poor Asian immigrant in this country has it easy either.  

I believe it's one way to address a family's economic status. And maybe this is cultural but family to me is multi-generational. Not only in the present. For example.. school located in central cities are typically funded well below those in suburban districts. You don't think improved facilities at school (a safe space), after school programs (so parents can keep working), free school lunch programs that extend past school hours (busy paying the rent, can't afford) helps out the family out? 

 

I find this slightly insulting. Hope? Yeah I guess there's a bit of that. But everything is connected. You don't think the success of the kid has an impact... can have generational impact on their family? And personally this is where I have witnessed this happening as an immigrant and other immigrant families that started out poor. 

 

But what are your thoughts? And I'm not trying to be difficult. But so far all you've really expressed is that you disagree and basically told me that I'm wrong. One of the great things about this community is there's a lot of folks with unique backgrounds, training, education or lived experiences. What can you share to help improve my understanding of all this?

Thank you for the reply.   First, I should address that when I posted earlier it was very disjointed, poorly edited and while the thoughts were there, it was not in the correct format and may come out wrong.  I intended no insult and apologize for the poor wording.   I should note that I am not an educator, not in the business of education or have any real insight.  I am a complete outsider with zero expertise on the subject.  But I did attend some horrible schools.   I do not claim to have the answers nor are any of my thoughts more valid.   (I tend to think this last statement is implicitly understood, but I felt this discussion warranted it being expressed).

I guess I just need more definition on what defines education quality and how to gauge that.  I know my kids are at one of the better HISD schools, and they are having trouble helping the kids with LD/SPED, and they often pull the SPED teachers to assist with the regular class testing, shortchanging the SPED kids.   With regards to how the SPED kids are being serviced in other neighborhoods, I have no information as I simply cannot keep up, but I believe this issue is what helped bring about the TEA involvement.    I am skeptical about just throwing money at a school district will have the desired effect to improve scores.  Link - more money smartly invested equals more success  Link- Money sometimes helps, sometimes doesn't    These are two examples where they look at money but they both seem to be a bit incomplete.  A book I read a while ago (How Children Succeed) touches on this a bit but the large takeaway (relative to this discussion) was the correlation to academic success is based on the parents economic status.   

So it would seem to be that as we live in a society where the wealth distribution is extremely stratified (and codified to protecting the wealth of the elite and expecting the middle class to pay) the fix would be to address this situation as it has the largest impact.   Simply adding in aftercare programs might help the parents but it doesn't really address the issue but a symptom.  Our wage disparity coupled with the very real vision of haves and have nots I think exacerbates this.   

Not sure where this fits:

IIRC from the book above the kids who have a positive self identity, defined values, also tend to have goals and set about to achieve them.

Is there something to the notion of being part of a community working with a community towards a similar goal that is different from the economically depressed (and/or historically) disenfranchised people that grew up here?   So a kid from Appalachia might not have the communal support system to achieve whereas a Korean kid in Nashville might have a small supportive community to keep them motivated (if not a little competitive)?  What do you think?  

 

 

[Nivek 16923]

3 hours ago, Macanudo said:

There's a great article in Salon about how all this CRT stuff was just cover to get to the real bogeyman of public schools.  

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/08/the-guy-brought-us-crt-panic-offers-a-new-far-right-agenda-destroy-public-education/

Earlier this week, the man who's been widely credited with single-handedly willing the "critical race theory" panic into existence (even if the truth is a bit more complex), laid out a new set of marching orders for the right: Defund public universities, discard academic freedom, remove credentialing requirements for K-12 teachers and generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education. 

The man in question is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Since he helped elevate CRT into a national culture war in 2020, Rufo has frequently been cast (or cast himself) as the new master strategist of the right, playing three-dimensional chess as he lays out his battle plans publicly and counts every media mention of them as a win. In the spring of 2021, he famously crowed on social media that he'd "successfully frozen" the CRT "brand" as the overarching ideology behind almost everything conservatives dislike. This January he tweeted about his new goal to "bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] 'transparency,'" in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide. 

On Tuesday, he broadcast his plans again in a speech at Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that, as a three-part Salon investigative series described last month, has assumed a vastly outsized role in conservative movement politics, with its heavy Washington footprint, its dense web of connections to political and intellectual right-wing leaders, and its national network of charter schools that use taxpayer funds to teach conservative ideology. Rufo had spoken at the college before, when he delivered an early version of his anti-CRT arguments in a March 2021 speech subsequently adapted as an essay for Hillsdale's monthly publication Imprimis, which claims a circulation of more than six million. And for the last week, Rufo has also been guest-teaching a short-term journalism class at the college. 

 

Now, speaking to a school organized around the idea that the political war will be won in education, Rufo issued a new strategy he called "Laying Siege to the Institutions." This means waging a "narrative and symbolic war" against both publicly-funded entities like K-12 schools and government agencies, as well as private corporations and the concept of academic freedom itself.

Rufo began his talk with a narrative that's become depressingly commonplace among the right: In the mid-20th century, leftists discouraged by the failure of the socialist revolution to spread worldwide shifted their aspirations to creating a top-down revolution of the elite, organized around cultural and identity politics rather than class consciousness. These days that narrative is often shorthanded as "cultural Marxism," which until recent years was widely considered a disreputable conspiracy theory strongly associated with antisemitism, alt-right web forums and the most marginal figures of the far right. But now, as with so much else, the idea has migrated into the conservative mainstream, as just a slightly harder-core means of expressing the right's sense that they "lost the culture" years ago.

Although Rufo has used the term in the past, he didn't repeat it Tuesday. Instead he offered a closely-related narrative: that leftists disillusioned after the social revolutions of the 1960s petered out had transferred their hopes to academia, hoping to spread their ideas more gradually by embarking on a "long march through the institutions." 

In Rufo's words, leftists who realized the proletarian revolution wasn't coming instead dedicated themselves to "a revolution of the intelligentsia, a revolution of the elites, by seizing control not of the means of production…but through the means of culture and knowledge production." What followed, he said, was the repackaging of the radical ideas of 1968 into ideologies that have trickled down into nearly every institution in society, albeit often through "postmodern" euphemisms like "diversity" or "equity." Today, he argued, "every elite institution in the country that has dominance over knowledge, dominance over culture, dominance over, even, in many cases, material production, has converged on a unitary ideology." 

The first stage for conservatives who want to fight back, Rufo said, lay in convincing the public that such a long-game infiltration had taken place, educating everyday conservatives that benign-sounding ideas like diversity and inclusion were actually codewords for radical leftist ideology, and offering a set of "moral" arguments and language in opposition. Now, he said, it was time for conservatives to move to a new stage of the fight, using the tools of popular outrage and government force to punish institutions that offend conservative sensibilities. 

It's not an entirely new argument. On the first day of the Biden presidency, Rufo vowed to build a coalition to "wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions." Last November, speaking at the highbrow National Conservatism conference, just before the CRT backlash he'd engendered helped sweep Glenn Youngkin into Virginia's governor's mansion, he urged conservative intellectuals to recognize that "politics is downstream from institutions," and that they should use government power to shape entities like public universities as a means of eventually crafting a more powerful conservative movement. The same month, Rufo told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that, having "unlocked a new terrain in the culture war," he was now "preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions" in part by promoting "school choice."

But over the last week, Rufo said, he'd pioneered a new application of the model. That was through his new crusade against the Walt Disney Company, the latest target of conservative outrage after the company publicly opposed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' "don't say gay" bill, which prohibits discussion, or even acknowledgment, of LGBTQ people in elementary school classrooms. 

---

 

In a series of posts and articles, Rufo used a leaked internal video to argue that Disney wasn't just making its employees take diversity training seminars but was inserting a covert agenda into its programming that sought to "fundamentally change the relationship between kids and sexuality in the United States." 

When the resultant furor sparked a number of proposals for political retaliation from conservative officials, including threats to rescind the company's tax breaks in Florida or to reject its copyright extension applications in Congress, Rufo described it as a "perfect example" of how conservatives can do battle with institutions that lie outside their direct control. 

Praising DeSantis for recognizing that "our corporations should ultimately be serving the common good, should be serving the country," Rufo called for wielding similar government penalties against other companies that anger conservatives. 

"I think you also wield power, for example, against a company like Disney if Disney is actively undermining the families and voters of, say, Florida," he said. "There's a feeling right now that we can tap into…where we want to have free enterprise, we want to have free competition, but what we don't want is to have cartel organizations, ideological and economic cartels, dictating the terms from up on high down to the average citizen." 

But aside from this perhaps-surprising conservative willingness to use government power to regulate private companies' speech, the primary institutions Rufo focused on were educational. 

At one point, he suggested that much of his work to heighten public outrage around schools' handling of everything from U.S. racial history to the pandemic to gender and sexuality could serve a larger goal: "creat[ing] the conditions for fundamental structural change."

"For example," he said, "to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust." 

"To get universal school choice," Rufo told listeners, "you need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust."

That admission is remarkably similar to the diagnosis that progressive public education advocates have made. Last month, former Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Salon that she saw "all the controversy about critical race theory" as a deliberate strategy to alienate communities from their local schools. The education privatization movement, she said, "is a billionaire's movement," and the only way it can "gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system. That's what all of this is about." 

Rufo didn't stop with K-12 education, going on to describe public universities as a "monopoly" that has too long been handed a "blank check" by legislators even in conservative states. Conservative legislators who don't like what's happening at those schools, Rufo said, should use their budgetary power to enact the changes they want to see. 

"These are public universities that should reflect and transmit the values of the public, and the representatives of the public, i.e., state legislators, have ultimate power to shape or reshape those institutions," he said. "We have to get out of this idea that somehow the public university system is totally independent entity that practices academic freedom — a total fraud, that's just a false statement, fundamentally false — and you can't touch it or else you're impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams." 

While many conservatives have long conceded the importance of academic freedom, he continued, lawmakers in some states were beginning to reconsider that long-cherished ideal, mulling proposals like defunding public university "diversity and inclusion" departments, which Rufo cast as a "patronage system" to support "private political activism with public dollars." 

In Florida, DeSantis signed a bill last year requiring the state's public universities to survey students and faculty on their political beliefs, to ensure students aren't being "indoctrinated," with the implication that schools where too few students or staff express conservative viewpoints might end up losing funding. In mid-February, after professors at the University of Texas passed a resolution in support of the academic freedom to teach CRT, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure for all new hires in the state, and to strip the protection from current faculty who do teach the theory.

Rufo also suggested dealing a more indirect blow to universities by having state legislators pass laws removing requirements for public K-12 teachers to hold advanced education degrees, arguing that masters programs only serve to expose future teachers to radical left-wing ideas. Bachelors degrees should be sufficient for public school teachers, he said, and while educators could opt into advanced training, such a choice should come to be seen as a red flag, with right-thinking hiring committees knowing not to "hire the ones with the masters, because those are the crazies." 

"We need to have the courage and the intelligence and the tenacity to say, 'What the public giveth, the public can taketh away," said Rufo. "So we go in there and we defund things we don't like, we fund things we do like." 

In terms of the latter, he suggested that conservative legislators use public funding to establish new, independently-governed "conservative centers" within flagship public universities, which could serve as "magnets" for right-wing professors, create a new track of conservative-minded classes and generally establish "a separate patronage system" for conservative thinkers and activists. 

British writer Mary Harrington suggests that Rufo sees himself leading a conservative "vanguard" movement, at "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism."

In many ways, the principles Rufo laid out seem to mirror what's happened in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proudly "illiberal" government — a regime that's become a model to emulate for much of the right. In the late 2010s, as a means of consolidating conservative power and disenfranchising liberal and moderate critics, Orbán launched a campaign against Hungary's institutions of higher education. He drove the elite Central European University, founded by George Soros, out of the country; solicited students to inform on professors who delivered "unasked-for left-wing political opinions"; and defunded and revoked accreditation for university gender studies programs. At the secondary ed level, as The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reported, Orbán's government cut two years off the country's compulsory education requirements, centralized curriculum and instituted new standards for a "patriotic education," under which students learn, for instance, that ethnic homogeneity is a Hungarian value. 

At Hillsdale, Rufo denied that he wanted to see conservatives enact their own "march through the institutions" — he couldn't imagine that many conservatives aspiring to run district diversity and equity departments, he joked. But much of what he suggested seems strikingly similar to the supposed progressive strategy of institutional infiltration he's waging a war against. Even his conservative admirers have noted as much. 

In November, after Rufo, speaking at the National Conservatism conference, called for using government mechanisms to "cripple the critical [left-wing] ideologies," one of his fellow speakers, the British writer Mary Harrington, wrote that his suggestions might represent "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism." 

When Rufo described his role, and that of other right-wing intellectuals at the conference, as "providing intellectual guidance, a new vocabulary of subversion, and a narrative that can direct the emotions and energy of the public against the right targets," Harrington diagnosed that as an idea borrowed "from the Leninist idea of 'vanguardism': the idea that an elite whose consciousness has already attained greater revolutionary heights should lead and mobilize the masses in transforming the world for the better." Under that model, Rufo seemed to propose that the only solution to an elite "cultural revolution" abetted by the state is an elite counterrevolution that seizes state power and wields it to fight back. 

Oliver did a segment on this guy as well if someone would prefer to listen as well.  

[Captainant 27656]

22 minutes ago, Nivek said:

Oliver did a segment on this guy as well if someone would prefer to listen as well.  

It's pretty wild how central Rufo has been to this shit. Hell, it was way back on page five of this very thread and was the inciting idea for this thread lol

On 5/20/2021 at 3:40 PM, BabaYaga said:

I think the pushback of what is being "taught" is this power dynamic spilt solely down racial lines.  That racism is the driving force in society, that in order to understand power relations, in order to understand institutions such as the law, education, the Constitution, social relations, etc. you have to understand that through the lens of race.

Chris Rufo on CRT

This actually sort of loops back around on why I'm out of patience for well-meaning but utterly uninformed people. We've been over this shit before. It was bullshit then, so despite it being new to them now, it's still bullshit. The whole argument of "well lets just stick to STEM and no history" is simply a new packaging to the old idea of whitewashing the more unpleasant parts of American history. It's the desired end outcome of rufo, just another way.

And when asked a direct question that cuts to the heart of his argument, he refuses to answer or acknowledge. That's certainly not part of a legitimate discourse. Stop defending someone who isn't here in good faith and refuses to say who they are.

[Nivek 16923]

3 hours ago, Captainant said:

Back on topic:

Kentucky governor vetoes bill incorporating ‘anti-critical race theory,’ calling it a step backward

tldr: Beshear calls bullshit on the attempt to legislatively shape the discourse and mandate to study reagan campaign speeches 

Glad to see that.  Thank you.

[YChang 3443]

3 hours ago, Nivek said:

So it would seem to be that as we live in a society where the wealth distribution is extremely stratified (and codified to protecting the wealth of the elite and expecting the middle class to pay) the fix would be to address this situation as it has the largest impact.   Simply adding in aftercare programs might help the parents but it doesn't really address the issue but a symptom.  Our wage disparity coupled with the very real vision of haves and have nots I think exacerbates this.   

Cool, cool. In spirit I think we're on the same page. As a society we have to address the causes of the problem (what you're stressing) and alleviate/mitigate the symptoms as well (what I've described). Just overall from my vantage point I see it all as an interrelated system. 

 

3 hours ago, Nivek said:

A book I read a while ago (How Children Succeed) touches on this a bit but the large takeaway (relative to this discussion) was the correlation to academic success is based on the parents economic status. IIRC from the book above the kids who have a positive self identity, defined values, also tend to have goals and set about to achieve them.

Is there something to the notion of being part of a community working with a community towards a similar goal that is different from the economically depressed (and/or historically) disenfranchised people that grew up here?   So a kid from Appalachia might not have the communal support system to achieve whereas a Korean kid in Nashville might have a small supportive community to keep them motivated (if not a little competitive)?  What do you think?  

Again we're in agreement that a family's social economic status is a big factor in their children... and their children's children's success. I think in your scenario... again it's complicated. It's not just one thing. There may be some cultural factors such as an individual family's and a community's shared value for education in East Asian culture versus say it's more important to work as soon as you're able to versus a formal education for rural folks in Appalachia (totally my assumption!). But poor is poor. And there's going to be some shared hardships for both. <shrug> Dunno where I'm going with this other than to say... it's freaking complicated. 

[Catdaddyhorn 3444]

6 hours ago, Nivek said:

Thank you for the reply.   First, I should address that when I posted earlier it was very disjointed, poorly edited and while the thoughts were there, it was not in the correct format and may come out wrong.  I intended no insult and apologize for the poor wording.   I should note that I am not an educator, not in the business of education or have any real insight.  I am a complete outsider with zero expertise on the subject.  But I did attend some horrible schools.   I do not claim to have the answers nor are any of my thoughts more valid.   (I tend to think this last statement is implicitly understood, but I felt this discussion warranted it being expressed).

I guess I just need more definition on what defines education quality and how to gauge that.  I know my kids are at one of the better HISD schools, and they are having trouble helping the kids with LD/SPED, and they often pull the SPED teachers to assist with the regular class testing, shortchanging the SPED kids.   With regards to how the SPED kids are being serviced in other neighborhoods, I have no information as I simply cannot keep up, but I believe this issue is what helped bring about the TEA involvement.    I am skeptical about just throwing money at a school district will have the desired effect to improve scores.  Link - more money smartly invested equals more success  Link- Money sometimes helps, sometimes doesn't    These are two examples where they look at money but they both seem to be a bit incomplete.  A book I read a while ago (How Children Succeed) touches on this a bit but the large takeaway (relative to this discussion) was the correlation to academic success is based on the parents economic status.   

So it would seem to be that as we live in a society where the wealth distribution is extremely stratified (and codified to protecting the wealth of the elite and expecting the middle class to pay) the fix would be to address this situation as it has the largest impact.   Simply adding in aftercare programs might help the parents but it doesn't really address the issue but a symptom.  Our wage disparity coupled with the very real vision of haves and have nots I think exacerbates this.   

Not sure where this fits:

IIRC from the book above the kids who have a positive self identity, defined values, also tend to have goals and set about to achieve them.

Is there something to the notion of being part of a community working with a community towards a similar goal that is different from the economically depressed (and/or historically) disenfranchised people that grew up here?   So a kid from Appalachia might not have the communal support system to achieve whereas a Korean kid in Nashville might have a small supportive community to keep them motivated (if not a little competitive)?  What do you think?  

 

 

Years ago, I read the very same book during my lead up to becoming a new father and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't remember whether that book is where I first came across Nikole Hannah-jones or if reading that book led me to her This American Life series on schools, but that book spurred a lot of curiosity in me. Specifically on the cascading hormonal effects of early childhood stress on learning and even the body's capacity to deal with stress later in life.

[bolverk 29670]

3 hours ago, YChang said:

Again we're in agreement that a family's social economic status is a big factor in their children... and their children's children's success. I think in your scenario... again it's complicated. It's not just one thing. There may be some cultural factors such as an individual family's and a community's shared value for education in East Asian culture versus say it's more important to work as soon as you're able to versus a formal education for rural folks in Appalachia (totally my assumption!). But poor is poor. And there's going to be some shared hardships for both. <shrug> Dunno where I'm going with this other than to say... it's freaking complicated. 

First off, I'm not a minority nor am I an immigrant so I may well be off base in the following hypothesis:

While the socioeconomic status of immigrants and minority populations might be similar, I think there's a key difference. Immigrants come to the US based on the hope of a better life and a fresh start. It's an action based off the optimistic belief that their lives can and will change for the better in the land of opportunity. Lower income Americans, especially those from minority backgrounds and/or multigenerational poverty, probably don't suffer those beliefs and have been beaten down by inequality and/or discrimination.

I think it's somewhat safe to assume that the children of these two groups (recent immigrants vs. long-suffering poor & minorities) are influenced by the degree to which their parents have an optimistic hope for the future or have been beaten down by lived experience. In the latter case, we're relying on the education system or shear will of extraordinary parenting to break the cycle. In the former, a cycle has already been broken by the parents.

Clearly, the above doesn't cover everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does hold some truth.

[YChang 3443]

46 minutes ago, bolverk said:

First off, I'm not a minority nor am I an immigrant so I may well be off base in the following hypothesis:

While the socioeconomic status of immigrants and minority populations might be similar, I think there's a key difference. Immigrants come to the US based on the hope of a better life and a fresh start. It's an action based off the optimistic belief that their lives can and will change for the better in the land of opportunity. Lower income Americans, especially those from minority backgrounds and/or multigenerational poverty, probably don't suffer those beliefs and have been beaten down by inequality and/or discrimination.

I think it's somewhat safe to assume that the children of these two groups (recent immigrants vs. long-suffering poor & minorities) are influenced by the degree to which their parents have an optimistic hope for the future or have been beaten down by lived experience. In the latter case, we're relying on the education system or shear will of extraordinary parenting to break the cycle. In the former, a cycle has already been broken by the parents.

Clearly, the above doesn't cover everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does hold some truth.

Yeah I don’t disagree with you. And I hope that’s not what you took from my posts that I’m equating them as the same. I’m merely suggesting there are similar struggles. Which good god—the whole genesis of my participation in this thread was to talk about how a well balanced education helps out society.

But for your consideration. It’s not as if everyone comes off the boat so to speak are all chipper and ready to tackle the American dream and presto, they’ve done it! I mean you make it sound like it’s easy. Do immigrants not face discrimination? Not every immigrant family succeed, many struggle and will do so for multiple generations. And then… hey, guess who else falls into generations of feeling beaten down.

Anyway, super complex/interesting topic for discussion.

[bolverk 29670]

1 minute ago, YChang said:

Yeah I don’t disagree with you. And I hope that’s not what you took from my posts that I’m equating them as the same. I’m merely suggesting there are similar struggles. Which good god—the whole genesis of my participation in this thread was to talk about how a well balanced education helps out society.

But for your consideration. It’s not as if everyone comes off the boat so to speak are all chipper and ready to tackle the American dream and presto, they’ve done it! I mean you make it sound like it’s easy. Do immigrants not face discrimination? Not every immigrant family succeed, many struggle and will do so for multiple generations. And then… hey, guess who else falls into generations of feeling beaten down.

Anyway, super complex/interesting topic for discussion.

No, that's not all I took from your post, and I do indeed realize that not all immigrants succeed. I was simply trying to postulate one (of many) potential factors. And, yeah, it's complicated as hell. One thing I recall reading at some point on one of these education threads, for example, was a study on the academic success of children of immigrants.

For whatever reason, I think it was focused on the children of immigrants from Latin America. I'm paraphrasing the findings from memory and may have well been on crack, but it supposedly showed that first generation kids tended to do better academically against their peers in school but subsequent generations slowly began to progressively backslide if still in a place of poverty as they were increasingly assimilated into their communities.

I could very well be stating that wrongly and therefore be full of shit. I'd also like to emphasize that I don't believe that all immigrants have the same experiences, but I was only focusing on one potential piece in the whole perplexing puzzle.

[Catdaddyhorn 3444]

 

 

[Nivek 16923]

On 4/8/2022 at 6:58 PM, Catdaddyhorn said:

Years ago, I read the very same book during my lead up to becoming a new father and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't remember whether that book is where I first came across Nikole Hannah-jones or if reading that book led me to her This American Life series on schools, but that book spurred a lot of curiosity in me. Specifically on the cascading hormonal effects of early childhood stress on learning and even the body's capacity to deal with stress later in life.

I think the part about the mental illness rates among traditional schools vs. non-traditional programs (e.g. Montessori) was also rather eye-opening.   

[George Clooney 378]

Very good insights by many in this thread, including but not limited to, @Pancho, @Nivek, @Captainant, and @YChang. Unfortunately Chris Rufo is on a meteoric rise rn and aligns almost perfectly with DeSantis.

[Bama Chick 28596]

Ya wanna know why a liberal arts educational foundation is important???

So we don’t elevate math clogged tech bros to an even higher pedestal than we already do and end up with dumbasses like this -

He did get absolutely COOKED in the replies though.

[wildcat09 29349]

2 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

Ya wanna know why a liberal arts educational foundation is important???

So we don’t elevate math clogged tech bros to an even higher pedestal than we already do and end up with dumbasses like this -
 

 

He did get absolutely COOKED in the replies though.

 

There is apparently something deeply wrong with people who like math.

[Nivek 16923]

Ya wanna know why a liberal arts educational foundation is important???

So we don’t elevate math clogged tech bros to an even higher pedestal than we already do and end up with dumbasses like this -




He did get absolutely COOKED in the replies though.

Meh, Yang is a thoughtful guy. Twitter is not a format for communicating anything but simple messages. It is hard enough to communicate effectively on here where we can ramble on and on.


There is nothing wrong with math guys or tech bros or liberal arts people. Y’all just invent shit to divide you.

[TwiceHorn 31452]

On 4/8/2022 at 10:28 AM, Macanudo said:

There's a great article in Salon about how all this CRT stuff was just cover to get to the real bogeyman of public schools.  

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/08/the-guy-brought-us-crt-panic-offers-a-new-far-right-agenda-destroy-public-education/

Earlier this week, the man who's been widely credited with single-handedly willing the "critical race theory" panic into existence (even if the truth is a bit more complex), laid out a new set of marching orders for the right: Defund public universities, discard academic freedom, remove credentialing requirements for K-12 teachers and generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education. 

The man in question is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Since he helped elevate CRT into a national culture war in 2020, Rufo has frequently been cast (or cast himself) as the new master strategist of the right, playing three-dimensional chess as he lays out his battle plans publicly and counts every media mention of them as a win. In the spring of 2021, he famously crowed on social media that he'd "successfully frozen" the CRT "brand" as the overarching ideology behind almost everything conservatives dislike. This January he tweeted about his new goal to "bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] 'transparency,'" in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide. 

On Tuesday, he broadcast his plans again in a speech at Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that, as a three-part Salon investigative series described last month, has assumed a vastly outsized role in conservative movement politics, with its heavy Washington footprint, its dense web of connections to political and intellectual right-wing leaders, and its national network of charter schools that use taxpayer funds to teach conservative ideology. Rufo had spoken at the college before, when he delivered an early version of his anti-CRT arguments in a March 2021 speech subsequently adapted as an essay for Hillsdale's monthly publication Imprimis, which claims a circulation of more than six million. And for the last week, Rufo has also been guest-teaching a short-term journalism class at the college. 

 

Now, speaking to a school organized around the idea that the political war will be won in education, Rufo issued a new strategy he called "Laying Siege to the Institutions." This means waging a "narrative and symbolic war" against both publicly-funded entities like K-12 schools and government agencies, as well as private corporations and the concept of academic freedom itself.

Rufo began his talk with a narrative that's become depressingly commonplace among the right: In the mid-20th century, leftists discouraged by the failure of the socialist revolution to spread worldwide shifted their aspirations to creating a top-down revolution of the elite, organized around cultural and identity politics rather than class consciousness. These days that narrative is often shorthanded as "cultural Marxism," which until recent years was widely considered a disreputable conspiracy theory strongly associated with antisemitism, alt-right web forums and the most marginal figures of the far right. But now, as with so much else, the idea has migrated into the conservative mainstream, as just a slightly harder-core means of expressing the right's sense that they "lost the culture" years ago.

Although Rufo has used the term in the past, he didn't repeat it Tuesday. Instead he offered a closely-related narrative: that leftists disillusioned after the social revolutions of the 1960s petered out had transferred their hopes to academia, hoping to spread their ideas more gradually by embarking on a "long march through the institutions." 

In Rufo's words, leftists who realized the proletarian revolution wasn't coming instead dedicated themselves to "a revolution of the intelligentsia, a revolution of the elites, by seizing control not of the means of production…but through the means of culture and knowledge production." What followed, he said, was the repackaging of the radical ideas of 1968 into ideologies that have trickled down into nearly every institution in society, albeit often through "postmodern" euphemisms like "diversity" or "equity." Today, he argued, "every elite institution in the country that has dominance over knowledge, dominance over culture, dominance over, even, in many cases, material production, has converged on a unitary ideology." 

The first stage for conservatives who want to fight back, Rufo said, lay in convincing the public that such a long-game infiltration had taken place, educating everyday conservatives that benign-sounding ideas like diversity and inclusion were actually codewords for radical leftist ideology, and offering a set of "moral" arguments and language in opposition. Now, he said, it was time for conservatives to move to a new stage of the fight, using the tools of popular outrage and government force to punish institutions that offend conservative sensibilities. 

It's not an entirely new argument. On the first day of the Biden presidency, Rufo vowed to build a coalition to "wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions." Last November, speaking at the highbrow National Conservatism conference, just before the CRT backlash he'd engendered helped sweep Glenn Youngkin into Virginia's governor's mansion, he urged conservative intellectuals to recognize that "politics is downstream from institutions," and that they should use government power to shape entities like public universities as a means of eventually crafting a more powerful conservative movement. The same month, Rufo told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that, having "unlocked a new terrain in the culture war," he was now "preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions" in part by promoting "school choice."

But over the last week, Rufo said, he'd pioneered a new application of the model. That was through his new crusade against the Walt Disney Company, the latest target of conservative outrage after the company publicly opposed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' "don't say gay" bill, which prohibits discussion, or even acknowledgment, of LGBTQ people in elementary school classrooms. 

---

 

In a series of posts and articles, Rufo used a leaked internal video to argue that Disney wasn't just making its employees take diversity training seminars but was inserting a covert agenda into its programming that sought to "fundamentally change the relationship between kids and sexuality in the United States." 

When the resultant furor sparked a number of proposals for political retaliation from conservative officials, including threats to rescind the company's tax breaks in Florida or to reject its copyright extension applications in Congress, Rufo described it as a "perfect example" of how conservatives can do battle with institutions that lie outside their direct control. 

Praising DeSantis for recognizing that "our corporations should ultimately be serving the common good, should be serving the country," Rufo called for wielding similar government penalties against other companies that anger conservatives. 

"I think you also wield power, for example, against a company like Disney if Disney is actively undermining the families and voters of, say, Florida," he said. "There's a feeling right now that we can tap into…where we want to have free enterprise, we want to have free competition, but what we don't want is to have cartel organizations, ideological and economic cartels, dictating the terms from up on high down to the average citizen." 

But aside from this perhaps-surprising conservative willingness to use government power to regulate private companies' speech, the primary institutions Rufo focused on were educational. 

At one point, he suggested that much of his work to heighten public outrage around schools' handling of everything from U.S. racial history to the pandemic to gender and sexuality could serve a larger goal: "creat[ing] the conditions for fundamental structural change."

"For example," he said, "to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust." 

"To get universal school choice," Rufo told listeners, "you need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust."

That admission is remarkably similar to the diagnosis that progressive public education advocates have made. Last month, former Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Salon that she saw "all the controversy about critical race theory" as a deliberate strategy to alienate communities from their local schools. The education privatization movement, she said, "is a billionaire's movement," and the only way it can "gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system. That's what all of this is about." 

Rufo didn't stop with K-12 education, going on to describe public universities as a "monopoly" that has too long been handed a "blank check" by legislators even in conservative states. Conservative legislators who don't like what's happening at those schools, Rufo said, should use their budgetary power to enact the changes they want to see. 

"These are public universities that should reflect and transmit the values of the public, and the representatives of the public, i.e., state legislators, have ultimate power to shape or reshape those institutions," he said. "We have to get out of this idea that somehow the public university system is totally independent entity that practices academic freedom — a total fraud, that's just a false statement, fundamentally false — and you can't touch it or else you're impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams." 

While many conservatives have long conceded the importance of academic freedom, he continued, lawmakers in some states were beginning to reconsider that long-cherished ideal, mulling proposals like defunding public university "diversity and inclusion" departments, which Rufo cast as a "patronage system" to support "private political activism with public dollars." 

In Florida, DeSantis signed a bill last year requiring the state's public universities to survey students and faculty on their political beliefs, to ensure students aren't being "indoctrinated," with the implication that schools where too few students or staff express conservative viewpoints might end up losing funding. In mid-February, after professors at the University of Texas passed a resolution in support of the academic freedom to teach CRT, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure for all new hires in the state, and to strip the protection from current faculty who do teach the theory.

Rufo also suggested dealing a more indirect blow to universities by having state legislators pass laws removing requirements for public K-12 teachers to hold advanced education degrees, arguing that masters programs only serve to expose future teachers to radical left-wing ideas. Bachelors degrees should be sufficient for public school teachers, he said, and while educators could opt into advanced training, such a choice should come to be seen as a red flag, with right-thinking hiring committees knowing not to "hire the ones with the masters, because those are the crazies." 

"We need to have the courage and the intelligence and the tenacity to say, 'What the public giveth, the public can taketh away," said Rufo. "So we go in there and we defund things we don't like, we fund things we do like." 

In terms of the latter, he suggested that conservative legislators use public funding to establish new, independently-governed "conservative centers" within flagship public universities, which could serve as "magnets" for right-wing professors, create a new track of conservative-minded classes and generally establish "a separate patronage system" for conservative thinkers and activists. 

British writer Mary Harrington suggests that Rufo sees himself leading a conservative "vanguard" movement, at "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism."

In many ways, the principles Rufo laid out seem to mirror what's happened in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proudly "illiberal" government — a regime that's become a model to emulate for much of the right. In the late 2010s, as a means of consolidating conservative power and disenfranchising liberal and moderate critics, Orbán launched a campaign against Hungary's institutions of higher education. He drove the elite Central European University, founded by George Soros, out of the country; solicited students to inform on professors who delivered "unasked-for left-wing political opinions"; and defunded and revoked accreditation for university gender studies programs. At the secondary ed level, as The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reported, Orbán's government cut two years off the country's compulsory education requirements, centralized curriculum and instituted new standards for a "patriotic education," under which students learn, for instance, that ethnic homogeneity is a Hungarian value. 

At Hillsdale, Rufo denied that he wanted to see conservatives enact their own "march through the institutions" — he couldn't imagine that many conservatives aspiring to run district diversity and equity departments, he joked. But much of what he suggested seems strikingly similar to the supposed progressive strategy of institutional infiltration he's waging a war against. Even his conservative admirers have noted as much. 

In November, after Rufo, speaking at the National Conservatism conference, called for using government mechanisms to "cripple the critical [left-wing] ideologies," one of his fellow speakers, the British writer Mary Harrington, wrote that his suggestions might represent "the beginnings of a new right-wing Leninism." 

When Rufo described his role, and that of other right-wing intellectuals at the conference, as "providing intellectual guidance, a new vocabulary of subversion, and a narrative that can direct the emotions and energy of the public against the right targets," Harrington diagnosed that as an idea borrowed "from the Leninist idea of 'vanguardism': the idea that an elite whose consciousness has already attained greater revolutionary heights should lead and mobilize the masses in transforming the world for the better." Under that model, Rufo seemed to propose that the only solution to an elite "cultural revolution" abetted by the state is an elite counterrevolution that seizes state power and wields it to fight back. 

The notion that a "political war" is won through "education" is really a flabbergasting idea.

A hallmark of western classical liberalism has been education.  That the political ideas of one party or movement are so bankrupt that they cannot withstand the scrutiny of a fully educated populace and thus, for that party to obtain and maintain control, they must control education is startling.

Right-wing Leninism, indeed.

[wildcat09 29349]

I don’t think he’s particularly thoughtful, even about UBI which is supposed to be his whole thing. That Lincoln take is a new low, though and I have a hard time imagining any context or additional discussion that could help make it less stupid.

[TwiceHorn 31452]

On 4/8/2022 at 7:23 PM, bolverk said:

First off, I'm not a minority nor am I an immigrant so I may well be off base in the following hypothesis:

While the socioeconomic status of immigrants and minority populations might be similar, I think there's a key difference. Immigrants come to the US based on the hope of a better life and a fresh start. It's an action based off the optimistic belief that their lives can and will change for the better in the land of opportunity. Lower income Americans, especially those from minority backgrounds and/or multigenerational poverty, probably don't suffer those beliefs and have been beaten down by inequality and/or discrimination.

I think it's somewhat safe to assume that the children of these two groups (recent immigrants vs. long-suffering poor & minorities) are influenced by the degree to which their parents have an optimistic hope for the future or have been beaten down by lived experience. In the latter case, we're relying on the education system or shear will of extraordinary parenting to break the cycle. In the former, a cycle has already been broken by the parents.

Clearly, the above doesn't cover everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does hold some truth.

I think this is absolutely a huge factor.  As I have said multiple times, I think there's a huge psychological component, that may even rise to "clinical" mental illness affecting those in generational poverty.  It's probably initially an environmental thing, but takes on a genetic component.

[TwiceHorn 31452]

What point was Yang trying to make with that post?  Just some simple-Jack bipartisanship thing?  Am I missing context?

It's factually correct, yes?  Is there something else that indicates lack of knowledge of Johnson?

[wildcat09 29349]

He was promoting the idea of a unity ticket. This is his latest, a day later and after everyone pointing out to him how fucking bad an example he picked:

 

[VRHorn 718]

[F250 28768]

7 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

Ya wanna know why a liberal arts educational foundation is important???

So we don’t elevate math clogged tech bros to an even higher pedestal than we already do and end up with dumbasses like this -
 

 

He did get absolutely COOKED in the replies though.

Yang majored in the social sciences. That does not earn you a seat at the Tech Bro table.

[Sawbonz 27547]

7 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

Ya wanna know why a liberal arts educational foundation is important???

So we don’t elevate math clogged tech bros to an even higher pedestal than we already do and end up with dumbasses like this -
 

 

He did get absolutely COOKED in the replies though.

 

This makes no sense. Are you saying Lincoln should have picked a different running mate in case he got assassinated? Not sure I can fault him for not making that possibility a key part of his decision making process

 

Lincoln’s primary - perhaps sole -  objective was preservation of the Union, not ending slavery. 

[wildcat09 29349]

What doesn't make any sense is Yang using Andrew Johnson being added to the ticket in 1864 to support a childish argument in favor of bipartisan tickets.

[Sawbonz 27547]

7 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

What doesn't make any sense is Yang using Andrew Johnson being added to the ticket in 1864 to support a childish argument in favor of bipartisan tickets.

Why do you think Johnson was added to the ticket

[wildcat09 29349]

5 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Why do you think Johnson was added to the ticket

They thought they needed him to help shore up the vote in the border states after some radical Republicans initially refused to support Lincoln. It ended up being completely unnecessary, though.

[elfenix 34232]

8 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

I think this is absolutely a huge factor.  As I have said multiple times, I think there's a huge psychological component, that may even rise to "clinical" mental illness affecting those in generational poverty.  It's probably initially an environmental thing, but takes on a genetic component.

poverty cuts a groove in your brain that is very difficult to overcome.  that's not just supposition on your part, that's an actual thing.  the biological mechanism is your brain on stress hormones all the time.