After business hours on Wednesday, the Portsmouth school Superintendent Tom Kenworthy sent an email to the parents of children in the Portsmouth school system:
Hello Members of the PSD Community,
This fall the Portsmouth School Department will be working with the Equity Institute to conduct an Equity Root Cause Analysis to inform our district work related to our Strategic Plan goal of “providing equitable opportunities to prepare each and every student for college and/or career”. Before starting their data collection process the Equity Institute will be conducting two community feedback sessions on October 5 and 6, 2021, to gather input on proposed survey and focus group questions. If you are interested in participating in one of the community feedback sessions please fill out the interest form that can be found in this letter.
Parents who haven’t been following the controversy around critical race theory (CRT) and “anti-racism” might think these sessions have something to do with “college and/or career” readiness for their children. They do not. That sort of misleading phrasing is only how proponents advance their goals of indoctrinating children into a radical belief system.
Sound conspiratorial? Dig just a little more deeply, and you’ll see that it is not. The first step is the letter that Kenworthy mentions. If your idea of a “community feedback session” is that members of the community can meet with a government contractor and offer feedback about the direction they want for the town in which they live, you might find the Equity Institute’s offerings strange. Both scheduled at 4:00 p.m., before many working people could attend, the sessions are strictly limited. The first is for 15 children (five each from elementary, middle, and high school) with five “family members.” The second is restricted to five administrators and five employees of the district.
According to the sign-up form, however, access is even more restrictive. Here, we learn that the numbers for the first session are just three from each group, while the second session will involve 12 people, three school committee members, three teachers, three staff members, and three principals. The form claims that participants will be “randomly selected,” but that is false, because the Equity Institute will “validate” that “there is equitable representation.” So, if 100 parents apply to participate, but only one fits the “equity” mold, then that parent is sure to be selected.
So, what is “equity”? Here, again, the language is misleading. Kenworthy’s presentation to the school committee, shared at its September 14 meeting, compares “equity” with “equality.” The latter “is achieved when students are all treated the same and have access to similar resources.” That may sound like a fair approach, but “equity” goes farther and “is achieved when all students receive the resources they need so they graduate prepared for success after high school.” This, also, may sound fair, simply ensuring that Portsmouth’s education system adequately prepares all students, even if some of them require more help. The presentation states that “equity has been the goal of federal education policy since the No Child Left Behind Act.”
One word that does not appear in any of the materials reviewed so far is “race.” Yet, if you search the internet for “Equity Institute,” you’ll find that the very link of the organization’s website sets its mission as “Racial Equity and Justice. Now.” That doesn’t seem like college readiness; it seems like hard-core activism. Click through to the site, and you’ll discover the top-line goal of “transforming communities through collective action.” The institute wants to “reimagine education” in order to “cultivate antiracist, people-centered communities for all learners.”
It’s important to note that concepts like “justice now” and “anti-racism” change the meaning of the words around them. In that framing, “people-centered communities for all learners” does not mean everybody is important and everybody is a priority. It means that some children already have “privilege” — which is to say, more than they deserve — and “justice” requires “collective action” to make sure that “students are not all treated the same,” but rather, that privilege is taken away from some and given to others.
On the Equity Institute’s About Us page, “educational equity” is defined as including such changes as “modifying or eliminating biased academic standards,” rewriting them along anti-racist lines. In fact, “interventions may even fall outside of the traditional boundaries of our education systems, such as promoting housing security, improving food access, and addressing poverty through economic policy.”
Keep digging. On a graphic meant to show you where you fall on the educational equity spectrum, step 6 involves “lifting students’ identities to the forefront of my work.” Not their abilities. Not their talents. Not their particular educational needs. But their identities. In a promotional video, Equity Institute Board Member Christina Turner adds in the goal to “dismantle systems.”
Parents in the East Bay of Rhode Island have long held up Portsmouth as being among the best schools in the state, allowing families to avoid the private-school tuitions that other parents in the area find necessary. Superintendent Kenworthy’s engagement of the Equity Institute is not about taking that achievement and making it even better — perhaps to compete with schools like Barrington and East Greenwich at the very top of statewide rankings. It’s about labeling that status as “privilege” and dismantling it along the lines of radical anti-racist ideology.
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Matt Brown and his progressive friends are trying something new and bold with their 50-person slate, who pay money into the co-op to be a part of it. Ryan Grim of The Intercept seems to think they “look to take over Rhode Island,” but we’ll see. Something like this comes with a lot of conflict. Patrick Anderson in the Providence Journal wonders if “RI’s left [is] turning on itself.” Some of the targeted primaries are against other progressives. The state Democrat Party has already voiced opposition. I’ve even seen progressive darling Aaron Regunberg having heated twitter exchanges with a member of the co-op’s team.
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Watching the reaction to Governor Dan McKee’s extremely mild adjustment to his dictatorial mandate that all healthcare workers must be vaccinated against COVID-19 has been disconcerting. Here’s the upshot of his change, per Alexa Gagosz and Brian Amaral in the Boston Globe:
Rhode Island will allow health care workers who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19 to work even after Oct. 1 if there’s a risk to quality of care in their absence, the state Department of Health announced Tuesday. …
The reprieve comes with a number of caveats: Health care facilities would have to demonstrate that unvaccinated health care workers are critical to patient needs. Anyone who’s not complying is subject to enforcement on Oct. 1. And if an unvaccinated worker has to work beyond Oct. 1 to address that risk to quality of care, their employer would have 30 days to ensure the role is filled by a fully vaccinated health care worker, the state said. They’ll also have to ensure that new hires are vaccinated against COVID-19.
In short, if the hardline mandate would create a dangerous situation in a specific position, the employer can have an extra 30 days to fulfill a plan to prevent that outcome. That’s it. Attempt to discuss the topic with those who’ve pounced on the governor, however, and one gets the impression of either an ideological blitzkrieg or the panic of fanatics. There is no moderate ground. They see COVID-19 as a deadly (and mysterious) threat that sweeps away all presumptions of personal choice and vaccines as the only satisfactory tool.
Socialist state senator Sam Bell, for instance, responded to the news in his characteristic fashion:
Extremely disappointing to see @GovDanMcKee cave to the anti-vax lobby. He should be doubling down on vaccines, not backing down.
Note that, in Bell’s view, the governor isn’t trying to make difficult decisions at the tail end of a pandemic during which his constituents are making decisions in a highly politicized environment. Simply, he “caved to the anti-vax lobby.” Even the construct is ludicrous. There is no “anti-vax lobby.” There is no moneyed special interest that stands to gain by stopping vaccination. There are just concerned people.
The tweet is much more telling than Bell probably understands, and even people who agree with activists like him on policy should take note. If you think socialists and progressives value democracy and people’s input, look at what he’s done here. Grassroots people object to a government action, and Bell writes them off as a lobby and insists the governor should “double down,” not “back down,” against them.
There is much more than simple concern about a disease going on here… enough that it should give even the (relatively moderate) governor pause.
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This article in Epoch Times by Patricia Tolson is an important one to read in order to understand what’s going on with critical race theory in our schools. The bottom line is that advocates who think they’re bringing “social justice” won’t respect laws or the wishes of parents. They’re on a mission. When people catch on to what they’re doing, they’ll change the language. Meanwhile, if they’re kept in positions of power, they’ll hire like-minded people and push their ideology wherever they can.
Scroll down in the article to the section about “The Equity Collaborative.” This is a boilerplate plan they’re implementing everywhere.
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The connections one discovers while looking into emerging powerful organizations are intriguing. NowThis is an online media company creating short, sharable news videos. It’s clear that the target is a younger audience, and it’s also obvious that NowThis is a mainstream organization, which is to say, left-wing Democrat.
When I began looking at the political donations of its employees for an article for Accuracy in Media, though, I noticed something more significant:
Its most generous political donor, Judy McGrath, also exposes the platform as an attempt to recapture the power of MTV News in securing the youth vote for Democratic candidates.
McGrath was the president of MTV in the ’90s, a time during which its MTV News wing, along with the “Choose or Lose” campaign, was heavily involved with politics, with the obvious goal of securing the youth vote for Democrats. Aligning McGrath’s political contributions with the content promoted by NowThis, as well as the benefit that Democrats enjoyed thereafter, shows how this new-media paradigm works for political activists.
The story is both a warning to the Right and an example of what Republicans should be trying to do.
Featured image by Chris Benson on Unsplash.
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A July episode of the Econtalk podcast is worth your time. University of Chicago Economist James Heckman (a Nobel Laureate) and host Russ Roberts discuss the former’s research on social mobility in Denmark, a country with frighteningly detailed data on all of its citizens. Here’s a key point worth teasing out, from Heckman (emphasis added):
… Denmark started expanding programs in the rural areas and targeting towards disadvantaged children that didn’t have education.
And so, for a while, those targeted programs operated in a way that actually promoted educational attainment. So, there was a big rise in the early part of the 20th century for Danish children to have much more education than that of their parents.
Well, suddenly then–and this is an interesting part of it–around the middle of the 20th century–… the educational policies became universal.
So, instead of going after the disadvantaged, they became across the board.
And, what happened was, the social mobility that had been witnessed in the first half of that century, started to vanish. And, the reason why it vanished is very interesting, and that is: Universal policies give a tableau. They give you a check. You can go out and cash this check; you can go to this school.
But, what educated parents, more affluent parents are better able to draw on that chip, to advise their children, to reinforce what is being learned in those schools.
And so, those universally-provided program actually turned out to be a vehicle for promoting social immobility–relative immobility that actually decide this idea of educate–so who was advantaged by the universal program? The most advantaged.
People who are already advantaged are better able to capitalize on resources that the government gives them. But that isn’t all. One of the ways they do that is entirely unintentional. When it comes to educational programs, they model behavior and priorities, thus making it more likely their children will make the most of what they’re given.
This has important implications when it comes not just to education, but to wealth redistribution and the idea of a baseline income. One thing Denmark does, as Heckman explains, is to ensure that outcomes are less divergent. Individuals can work harder to improve their situation, but in the spirit of “eventually you have enough,” the government shifts a big portion of their earnings to those who have less, such that everybody does okay.
Consider how that interplays with the idea of familial expectations. Parents who’ve being doing okay will be less likely to instill in their children the drive to do more than okay. The end result can be a society with a more-or-less permanent underclass that has less ability to capitalize on opportunities and less drive to do so even were it easy.
This situation may be tenable in a homogeneous population that’s doing fine economically, but as families have less in common with each other and as the economy softens, the overclass can shut doors and serve its own. So, Denmark still manages social mobility on the same level as the United States, but the U.S. approach is probably more durable.
A separate point that I’ll tack on at the end, here, because I found it so interest, is that advantage and profit will find a way. All teachers in Denmark are paid identically, so the best teachers use their talent premium to get the more-desirable jobs… which inevitably means those teaching more-affluent children.
The overarching points are that you can’t erase the value of things, you can’t eliminate human nature, and you can’t manage top-down without unintended consequences.
Featured image by Rolands Varsbergs on Unsplash.
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Between vulgar anti-Biden chants at athletic events and these billboards in Pennsylvania, a movement seems to be building.
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Somehow, this seems at odds with the strong hand Big Tech has brought to bear against people it claims are trying to undermine elections in the United States:
Following Russia’s demand that Apple and Google remove the tactical voting app, and then threats of fines, Apple and Google have dropped the “Smart Voting” app in the country.
The app, devised by imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was intended to boost candidates with the best chance of succeeding against incumbents. Apple and Google’s removal came just hours before election voting was due to begin.
The unifying principle seems to be that the tech oligarchs give preference to powerful people who prioritize the exertion of power. Not really that surprising, actually.
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Folks are debating the justification and impetus for the Biden administration to grant access to monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19 not strictly according to need. Ryan Saavedra reports for The Daily Wire:
[Biden spokeswoman Jen] Psaki then said that the treatments are used after a person becomes infected and said that the way to save more lives was to get more people vaccinated, even though vaccinated people can still sometimes become infected with the coronavirus.
Psaki then said that the administration does not have an unlimited supply of the antibody treatments and that the administration is focused on making the distribution of the treatments “equitable.”
The argument is whether Biden is doing this for entirely political purposes (to undermine his opposition) or to ensure that states that don’t press vaccination don’t monopolize treatments, making them unavailable in other states when need arises despite vaccination. The fact that this is up for debate is what I find important.
This is a warning. Putting management of healthcare in the hands of our political establishment inevitably means that politics will be a factor in the management. The only question is what politics. It’s a system for balancing interests, so what types of interest will prove dominant?
The likeliest answer is that the fairness of the decisions will be inversely related to the challenge of the management. When there are plenty of doses of something, the distribution will be entirely fair. When doses are scarce, crass politics will play a greater role. When resources are drained (as socialism tends to accomplish), winning elections (or otherwise gaining power) becomes a matter of life or death for each faction.
That approach may look attractive to people who think their faction will always be the strongest and will, therefore, offer them protection, but history suggests otherwise. Eventually, only the top of the top remain protected, and the harder they hold on to power, the worse things get.
The safest approach all around is to leave politics out of it.
Featured image by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash.
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While I’m touching on Instapundit Glenn Reynolds’s insights on the vaccine and marketing thereof, this point is interesting:
A lot of people are afraid of needles — some say it’s over 25% of the population. Does every story featuring the “jab” (maybe also bad marketing — “jab” doesn’t sound very gentle) have to feature a needle? If your goal is to encourage people to be vaccinated, does it make sense to accentuate the part of the process that lots of people fear, and that nobody really enjoys?
True enough, but the question in response is: What’s the alternative, at least for the people pushing the virus? Think of every commercial for a medicine. What’s the presentation? It’s always freedom… freedom from the suffering and anxiety of the illness. But the people pushing the vaccine don’t want to sell freedom. That’s arguably the opposite of their motivation.
So they fall back on a message that, given their personalities, they find persuasive: everybody else is doing it.
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