It’s Monday, June 26th, 2023…but before we begin, if you thought throwing money at America’s failing public education establishment would fix the problem, this item from The Daily Signal should disabuse you of that notion, as…
“As America’s public education system reports the worst literacy and math performance in decades, its schools dedicate increasingly immense portions of their time to lessons on the supposed virtues of racial and gender segregation.
With only eight hours per day and 180 school days per year, one would think that everyone from the newest teacher’s aide to the tenured administrators would call “all hands on deck” to spend every moment trying to close the enormous performance gaps inflamed by COVID-19 lockdowns. Instead of utilizing data-proven methods to close gaps in literacy and math, like many private and microschools do, most public schools have centered on a different tactic: political distraction.
As parents around the country began demanding answers for the lack of results from those they entrusted their children to, schools began presenting scapegoats to deflect the culpability in the mess they helped to make. Teachers unions, school “equity officers,” and administrators began proclaiming that historic racial inequities were responsible for the massive gaps in black and Hispanic students’ reading scores. They claim “white supremacy” is responsible for students’ disengagement—that “students of color” would learn far more if they were “allowed” to read books by black authors under black teachers.
This is, of course, highly misleading. Students respond more to the quality of the text and the educator than to the race of the teacher. The “racial inequities” claim also ignores that the highest-performing demographic, Asian students, aren’t reading books by predominantly Asian authors and studying under Asian teachers.
Nevertheless, major metropolitan districts have doubled down on the need for a focus on racially-driven education—often implementing the tenets of critical race theory and citing its so-called scholars.
Indianapolis Public Schools and its over 30,000 students languish in illiteracy, but you won’t hear superintendent Aleesia Johnson apologize for a lack of results. Instead, she flocks to media outlets to praise the school’s third gallant push towards “racial equity” (because apparently, the first two didn’t succeed).
Instead of hosting emergency training sessions to bring Indianapolis teachers up to speed on proven reading instruction pedagogy, Indianapolis brought critical race theory scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in for an emergency “all staff required” session on racial equity. One Indianapolis middle schoolrequired students to attend so-called racial equity sessions in which Black Lives Matter activists told them that crime was a “made up” term by “the white people.” In undercover interviews with several Indiana schools, Accuracy in Media captured several administrators admitting to consistently wasting reading instruction time with racially segregationist activism—even if they had to hide it from parents.
In 2021, Chicago Public Schools boasted only a 17% literacy rate for Hispanic students and an 11% literacy rate for black students. Rather than assist black and Hispanic students in improving the single greatest factor in adult success, Chicago launched another racial equity initiative and hired additional “Office of Equity” staff.
While racial equity is most often the distraction touted by inner-city metropolitan schools—from New York City and Washington, D.C., on the East Coast to Los Angeles and Seattle on the West Coast—the suburban school districts surrounding them usually tout LGBTQ activism as a school focus.
Several California suburban public school districts reported abysmal reading and math performances in 2022 but have spent little time attempting to provide remediation since. Instead, these California districts threw their time and resources into celebrating LGBTQ activism. Hollywood and Glendale schools chose to implement curriculum on the history of “LGBTQ+ activists” in place of additional reading and math instruction. Hispanic and Armenian parents flocked to school board meetings to protest what many called “a waste of time.” “Why can’t you just focus on teaching our children to read?” a parent of elementary school children asked the Glendale Unified board.
The grassroots advocacy organization Parents Defending Education cites dozens of suburban school districts in over 40 states that have launched LGBTQ initiatives in the last five years, with district after district replacing an academic focus with hour after hour of learning about racial and sexual activism.
The British newspaper the Daily Mail gained access to a private online meeting of a group of midwestern public school teachers discussing ways to spend time encouraging students to engage with LGBTQ activism and to consider “transitioning” kids (calling them by different names and pronouns and letting them dress as members of the opposite sex) during the school day without telling their parents—even in the face of recently passed laws forbidding sexually explicit discussions with students in class.
Florida—which has enacted legislation to forbid racial and sexual activism in the classroom—along with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to keep public schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic, has shown greater reading and math score improvement than any other state in the country.
Education reform advocates for years have been touting the positive data regarding keeping schools open during the pandemic and keeping the focus on academics. Consistent reports from Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children, Robert Pondiscio and Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Bedrick and Lindsey Burke of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy prove what common sense suggests: Students who focus on reading and writing in the classroom fare better than those who don’t. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
While The New York Times may suggest it’s “breaking news” for math and reading scores among 14-year-olds to be the “lowest levels in decades, with a sharp drop since the pandemic began,” it really isn’t news—and it’s not breaking. When a school wastes eight hours a day on political activism instead of academic instruction, literacy and math competency don’t improve. Political activism isn’t preparing students for the challenges of their future career and for adulthood, and public schools’ attempts to convince parents that it does are losing their luster.”
Any parent who was ever convinced teaching their children nonsensical theories of racism and the benefits of diversity instead of the basic skills necessary for their future isn’t worthy of being a parent.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Since we’re on the subject of the nonsensical, Best of the Web offers…
Customers dissatisfied with Amazon Prime—the $14.99 monthly subscription service that includes free shipping and unlimited access to Amazon’s streaming television service—must jump through an unreasonable number of hurdles to cancel their memberships, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday against Amazon, the FTC explains that consumers must click “a minimum of six times” to navigate from Amazon.com’s main page through the entirety of the cancellation process. . . . Ah, but do you know how many clicks it would take to submit your feedback to the FTC about its decision to file this lawsuit? Seven.
That tally, courtesy of Patrick Hedger, executive director of the fiscally conservative Taxpayers Protection Alliance, sums up the silliness of the FTC’s latest attack on Amazon.
As regulatory actions often do, this one has us thinking of the old saying that markets don’t have to work perfectly—they only have to work better than government.
And, with very few if any exceptions, they do!
In a related item, writing at NRO, Noah Rothman accurately observes…
“On Sunday, June 11, a section of overpass highway on Interstate 95 near North Philadelphia collapsed, disabling both sides of this major roadway. The structural failure occasioned bouts of serious apprehension about the logistical disruptions that would follow in the “months” officials said it would take to fully repair one of the most critical arteries in the Northeast.
What the collapse did not occasion was any indication that this highway’s collapse represented a test, not just for the Pennsylvania-based custodians of this section of interstate but for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quickly took ownership of this disaster and has quite a lot to prove. That trepidation on the part of political observers contrasted with the “test” they imposed on Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Because DeSantis passed his “test” rather easily, I posited at the time that the American political class didn’t want to risk inviting potentially unflattering comparisons between the Florida governor’s post-disaster performance and Buttigieg’s or, for that matter, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s. It turns out that we were all too pessimistic.
The compounding series of disasters experts assumed would follow that roadway failure never happened. The freight disruptions, supply-chain problems, and stalled traffic patterns stretching back miles didn’t materialize. Drivers quickly learned to take alternate routes around the collapse, and over-the-road truckers adjusted. Moreover, Governor Shapiro announced on Tuesday that construction crews working round the clock had completed temporary repairs to the point that I-95 will reopen to traffic this weekend. Though the circumstances are distinct and repairing this small section of I-95 is a more modest challenge than rebuilding the Pine and Sanibel Island bridges, the alacrity with which these works were completed is impressive, given the usual sluggish pace of construction.
“This is what it looks like when the ingenuity of Delco meets the grit of Philly,” Shapiro said on Tuesday. “This is what happens when we all come together.” That’s true in more ways than one. This impressively speedy repair work is indicative of how fast things can get done in this country when a consensus forms around the criticality of a particular project. Florida’s experience and now Pennsylvania’s attest to the degree to which the slow pace of construction in the United States is both a choice and a luxury.
It’s tempting to attribute the speed with which these roadways were repaired to the extent to which a disaster focuses the minds of policy-makers. But these achievements are more revealing of the priorities that make construction in the U.S. on a non-emergency basis a wildly expensive, multi-year proposition.
“So the lesson is why don’t we apply some of these same things to the other projects?” asked Bob Pishue, an analyst with the transportation-analytics company Inrix, in an interview with Vice reporter Aaron Gordon. “And I think that’s a completely fair question.” So fair, in fact, that it goes unanswered in that report. It is not because the process of design, acquisition, surveying, and engineering is more complicated today than it was a century ago, when American skyscrapers sprouted up like mushrooms. Nor is that entirely attributable to the additional complexities surrounding funding and contract negotiation for big projects. It is a question of values.
Recent experience suggests there are more political rewards available to public figures who reject the managerial sclerosis that has become so typical of big public and private works that it’s not even scandalizing anymore. It doesn’t have to be that way. These are choices. We don’t have to make them.”
Yet we keep putting those responsible for such costly, counterproductive policies in positions of power. This is precisely why the cost and time to construct facilities which produce the most efficient, cleanest and cheapest source of energy on the planet…
“First of all, my son has done nothing wrong,” President Joe Biden told MSNBC last month. It was but one of a litany of such statements from Biden, who has behaved as if any question from the press about his son’s criminal activity—and there haven’t been many—is an affront, an indignity, and an insult to the office.
Well, he lied.
The younger Biden owed more than $1 million in taxes over several years, and over $200,000 for the years in which he struck the plea deal. Even then, his celebrity lawyer pal didn’t fork over the money to the federal government on his behalf until the Department of Justice started investigating him. He also copped to owning a gun while he was coked up, and lying about it when he bought the firearm in 2018. That’s a felony, but Hunter is getting off with a slap on the wri—uh, probation and enrollment in a “diversion program.”
Democrats, very much including Biden, love to talk about the two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and well-connected, the other for racial minorities and the poor. When it came to his son, apart from lying to the American people, Biden’s statements about Hunter Biden’s innocence constituted presidential interference with the Justice Department probe.
So we’ll wait for the left to cry foul over this and the fact that the presidential son got off with a slap on the wrist for crimes that would have landed others behind bars.
The rank bullshit that has emanated from the White House on related issues is secondary but not unimportant. It wasn’t even a year ago that Biden signed the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act into law. In the weeks beforehand, we heard endless jawboning from administration officials about why the additional $80 billion the law is now funneling to the IRS, much of it for increased enforcement, was necessary to hold the powerful to account. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for one, pointed to “typically very high-net worth, high-income individuals and businesses that have opaque sources of income that are not paying the taxes that are due.”
The message sent by the Biden administration on Tuesday was clear: enforcement and prison for thee–but not in a million years for our president’s drug-addled, tax cheat son.
Meanwhile, commenting on whistleblower accusations of preferential treatment for Hunter Biden, Merrick Garland reiterated his previous statement that Weiss “would be permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.” However, and this is a BIG however, Garland pointedly REFUSED to say whether Weiss was told he COULDN’T bring charges.
For more on the crookedest A.G. in the nation’s history…which, given Eric Holder’s record, is saying something…we turn to the Editors at NRO, who detail…
“If confirmed, explosive whistleblower testimony by a senior Internal Revenue Service agent released by a House committee yesterday adds to evidence that President Biden was up to his neck in his family’s lucrative business of cashing in on his political influence. Given that this business involves millions of dollars in suspiciously structured payments to Biden family accounts from corrupt and anti-American regimes, prominently including the Chinese Communist Party, national security demands that Congress prioritize this investigation.
Of equally immediate concern, particularly after the sweetheart plea bargain the Biden Justice Department just announced it is giving the president’s son, Hunter Biden, to dispose of his serious tax and firearms crimes, someone in that investigation is lying. Specifically, if the testimony IRS supervisory agent Gary A. Shapley Jr. has provided to the House Ways and Means Committee is true, then the testimony Attorney General Merrick Garland provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee was false.
…In the years leading up to the 2020 election, the Biden probe was assigned to Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee whose confirmation in the president’s home state was supported by its Democratic senators (Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons). Following the transition to a new administration, Weiss was retained to continue running the investigation by the Biden Justice Department, even though other Trump-appointed district U.S. attorneys were fired. Garland refused to appoint a special counsel despite the obvious conflict of interest in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son (and, more broadly, the Biden family influence-peddling business). The attorney general’s rationale was that the case was in the capable hands of a Trump appointee and vowed that there would be no political interference.
We’ve always been skeptical about that commitment. Because the Hunter Biden matter has been categorized as a tax investigation, Justice Department rules call for involvement and sign-off by Tax Division at Main Justice, which is run by Biden appointees. Moreover, if the venue for any charges lay outside Delaware, Weiss would need permission from the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those federal districts to file them. Tax charges, for example, must be filed where the taxpayer’s return is filed or prepared, or where he resides. In Hunter Biden’s case, that would be the District of Columbia or the Central District of California.
Nevertheless, Garland has repeatedly testified, most recently in questioning by Senator Grassley just three months ago, that Weiss had been instructed that he would not be interfered with, that he would not be blocked by any other district U.S. attorney, and that Garland would personally grant him any authority he needed to bring cases in any district Weiss believed was necessary. (See here, beginning at the 58-minute mark, or here.)
…Most disturbing, despite Garland’s sworn commitments to the contrary, Weiss is said to have acknowledged to the agents that when he pushed in 2022 to file tax-evasion charges against Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., and the Central District of California, he was rebuffed by Matthew Graves and Martin Estrada, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those districts. Weiss confessed at an October 7, 2022, meeting, “I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed.” He elaborated that the Justice Department had turned him down flatwhen he asked for special-counsel authority so he could file charges over the objections of Biden’s appointees — exactly the opposite of what Garland promised would happen.
In the course of this dithering, the statute of limitations lapsed on key charges. Investigators had gathered proof that Hunter Biden failed to register as a foreign agent for Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that put him on its board while his father was running point on Obama administration Ukraine policy. In addition, in 2014 and 2015, he evaded taxes on his lavish Burisma income. Such charges should have been the backbone of any tax and corruption prosecution against Biden; now they are time-barred.
Garland vowed that the Biden investigation would proceed independently. That investigation has implicated the president in the shady business dealings of his son, who appears to have committed serious crimes. Now, the investigating agents claim the probe has been sabotaged by Garland’s department — the same Biden DOJ that just gave away the store in the plea bargain. Garland, Weiss, Wolf, and everyone connected to this growing scandal owe the nation answers, forthwith.”
Welcome to the Biden clown car, an administration so corrupt it stinks…
Hat tip to the lovely Shannon for the FBI meme.
Moving on, here’s another sextet of special selections certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). As Larry O’Connor notes, it must be nice to live in Paul Ryan’s world where one is above the Culture War tearing at the very fabric of American society:
“…It should be noted that Ryan was asked about Republicans “pushing legislation on banning books,” and instead of immediately exposing that disgusting lie by explaining that no one is “banning books” but instead Republicans have judiciously determined that some books are not age appropriate for school libraries (you know… like the porn books that are being forced in the face of 10-year-olds), he let the slanderous lie go and preened about how he’s not “that type” of Republican.
…You see, Paul Ryan is the kind of Republican who isn’t divisive. He works with his poverty foundation to lift people to upward mobility and to focus on the threat from China. He can’t get his hands dirty in the “culture wars.”
Wow, must be nice to live in Paul Ryan’s world.
Paul Ryan’s world is a place where taxation, government spending, and inflation are way more important than children being told that they would be happier if they would take chemical castrating puberty blockers to “change” their sex.
Paul Ryan doesn’t live in a world where pornographic manuals detailing homoerotic sex acts with vivid visual aids are introduced to his children at a tax-funded, government school, but we do.
Paul Ryan’s world isn’t a place where parents are investigated by the FBI as domestic terrorists if they raise their voice at a school board meeting as they try to get their children back into a classroom after an unnecessary, devastating lockdown.
Paul Ryan can’t worry himself as a “culture war guy” because his 5-year-olds aren’t forced to dance with a drag queen at his local library…”
Ryan personifies why the Psalmist advised us, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”
(2). Republican representative Russell Fry and and Special Counsel John Durham get to the heart of why the FBI needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up:
(3). Remember one thing as you listen to the heirs of Sodom and Gomorrah: They’re telling the truth!
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
And if it was, does Yevgeny Prigozhin really believe Putin’s going to honor the terms of their arrangement?!?
(6). In an updated version of the old slip-and-fall scam, one Atalah Khalaf has filed suit against Macy’s for injuries incurred THREE YEARS AGO when a mannequin HIS TODDLER TUGGED ON fell over and struck the boy in the face. What, you might wonder, is the evidence which proves Macy’s negligence beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise? The family was “told by a security guard that it’s not the first time those mannequins have tipped over”. Hey, they’ve got us convinced!
Which brings, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Dick Mayer…
…Balls Cotton…
…Speed…
…and The Patriot Post:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of Nick and the New York Post, where a…
Here’s the juice: While we’re certainly happy a career-criminal like Rideout…
…and a psychotic such as White are off the streets, however briefly in New York these days, we find NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper’s claim their arrests were the result of…
…somewhat misleading, as White was apprehended only after jumping a turnstile, while Rideout’s arrest came as a result of him being kicked off a bus for refusing to pay the fare. So, while meaning no disrespect to law enforcement, these arrests seem more the result of the stupidity of the perps rather than top-notch police work.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Ami Horowitz is once again on the loose in Venice Beach and South Central L.A. asking whether White people not knowing what Juneteenth was before it was made a national holiday is due to racism. How is it White Liberals know SO LITTLE about how and what Blacks think?!?
Tales of The Darkside
Dave Rubin records there’s the way Socialist activists WANT it to be, then there’s the way it IS!
On the Lighter Side
An old Monty Python bit from another day and time we confess to finding amusing.
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