Last October, Madison Superintendent Jen Cheatham signed a resolution agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights regarding OCR’s compliance review of access to advanced coursework by Hispanic and African-American students in the District. The resolution agreement was presented at the December 5, 2016 Instruction Workgroup meeting (agenda item 6.1):
http://www.boarddocs.com/wi/mmsd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=AFL2QH731563

The description of the resolution agreement by Dylan Pauly & Jen Cheatham starts around 2 (h) 16 (m)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaW0YclXc8c&feature=em-share_video_user

The OCR resolution agreement was included on the agenda (item 9.3) of the December 12, 2016 full board meeting as part of the Instruction Workgroup “report out” without discussion.

When OCR does a compliance review, it issues a resolution letter to the subject institution which describes OCR’s review and OCR’s findings. The resolution agreement (signed by the institution) then sets forth what the institution agrees to do to address the issues in the resolution letter.

Adele Rapport (PDF), via a kind reader:

According to the Superintendent, the District did not have a unified cuniculum prior to the 2013-201 4 school year. The Distiict recently reported to OCR that it is implementing “a multi-year, multi-phased plan to engage in course alignment. The end result will be courses that share a common course plan, common titles and course descriptions in the high school course guides, syllabi using common templates and common end-of-course summative assessments.” As summarized below. the District’s cum~nt approach to AL services is the product of several programs and initiatives as well as a recently concJuded audit by WDPI.

In 2008 The District received a $5.3 million Smaller Learning Communities grant from the Department. With these funds the District began, in its words, “to rethink and reconceptualize the high school experience.” As a result of this process, the Distri<.:t in October 2010 announced the "Dual Pathways Plan," with goals that included aligning the curriculum among all four high schools: closing the achievement gap between white students and students of color: and remedying what the District concedes was unequal access for students to advanced courses. The District proposed we meet these goals by implementing two different pathways for high school students: a "preparatory pathway" and an "accelerated pathway". In March, 2011, The WDPI concluded an investigation of the District's TAG program by determining that the District had failed to comply with four State of Wisconsin requirements for TAG programs: (1) establish a TAG plan and hire a TAG coordinator: (2) identify TAG students in multiple domain areas, including intellectual, academic, creative. leadership and the arts: (3) provide access to TAG programming without cost and allow parents to participate in identification and programming. The District subsequently adopted and implemented a corrective action plan to address findings of WDPI's audit. On February 6, 2015, WDPI concluded monitoring the implementation of the District's corrective action plan, finding the District in compliance with all relevant statutory requirements for TAG programs in Wisconsin. Also in 2011, in response to unfavorable feedback from parents and community members regarding the Dual Pathways proposal, the District modified the proposal and enacted a more modest series of reforms focusing on curriculum alignment. The District began to scale back its use of prerequisites for advanced high school courses, implementing a system of "recommended skills and experiences." The District also increased its advanced course offerings for the ninth and tenth grade, and expanded its assessment of elementary and middle school students for advanced kaming opportunities by broadening its reliance on qualitative factors like teacher recommendations. ...... The District offers honors ond AP courses to provide enriched academic opportunities for students. The District does not offer an International Baccalaureate program. Students can take honors courses at the middle school level, and both honors and AP courses at the high school level. None of the high schools offers weighted grades or credits for honors or AP courses. The District's offoring of honors and AP courses varies among schools, and neither the alternative high school (Shabazz City High School) nor the non-traditional high school (Innovative and Alternative Education) which focuses on expeliential learning, offers such courses. The District offored 13 different AP courses in multiple sections during the 2013-14 school year and 24 different AP courses during the 2015-16 school year. Recognizing that its AP course offerings vary across its four high schools, the District recently completed a three-year plan for course vetting and course alignment that includes AP coursework. Pursuant to this plan, the District plans to standardize across all four high schools AP courses that do not have prerequisites. In addition, the Dist1ict's Director of CuITiculum and Instruction said the District has the goal to have a standard set of AP courses across all four high schools: the schools will not necessarily offer all of the same courses, but the AP courses each offers will be drawn from the same set of AP courses. The District will gauge student interest in AP courses in deciding where to offer the courses. However, the District will ensure that core AP courses such as Physics and English will be offered at all four high schools. The AL Direclor noted that a first step in offering higher level math courses at all high schools is to ensure that Algebra 1 is the same at all school. The Director of Curriculum and Management confirmed that the District is realigning the math curriculum. ...... The magnitude of the racial disparity in AP enrollment is worse for math and science AP courses. There were only 18 math and 17 science AP enrollments by African-American students, a rate of 1.2 math and 1.1 science AP enrollments per 100 African-American students. There were only 44 math and 38 science AP enrollments by Hispanic students, a rate of 3.9 math and 3.3 science AP enrollments per 100 Hispanic students. By comparison, there were 526.5 math and 368 science AP enrollments by white students, a rate of 14.9 math and 10.4 science AP enrollments per 100 white students. Thus, in the 2013-14 school year, enrollments by white students in AP math and AP science courses were 12.4 and 9.5 times greater respectively, than enrollments by African-American students, and 3.8 and 3.2 times greater, respectively, than enrollmentw by Hispanic students. ...... Further the data provided by the District show that there was underepresentation of African American and Hispanic students in AP courses at each high school in the District. During the 2013-2014 school year, the disparity between African-American students' participation and all other students' participation was statistically significant in 12 of 15 AP courses offered at East High School, 5 of 13 courses at LaFollette High School, 13 of 17 courses at Memorial High School and 9 of 14 courses at West High School. The disparity between Hispanic student enrollment and all other students' enrollment was statistically significant in 2 of 15 AP courses offered at East High SchooL 0 of 13 courses at LaFollette High School. 6 of 17 courses at Memorial High School and 8 of 14 courses at West High School. In addition. African-American students underrepresentation in AP math ws statistically significant in all 12 of the AP math offerings that were offered at every District high school (in the three courses of Calculus AB, Calculus BC and Statistics) and Hispanic students underrepresentation in AP math was statistically significant in 3 of the same 12 AP math offerings. As for participation in AP science, African-American students' underrepresentation was statistically significant in 8 of 12 offerings of AP science (in the three courses of Physics C, Chemistry, Biology and Environmental Science), and Hispanic students' underrepresentation was statistically significant in 3 of the same 12 AP science offerings.

Related:

TAG Complaint

Small Learning Communities English 10

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Reading Recovery

Math Forum Math Task Force

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

Madison’s Long Term, Disastrous Reading Results.

Bruce Vielmetti:

A violent arrest of an unarmed man in West Allis — made possible by a secret police spy plane with night vision — is now the subject of a civil rights lawsuit on claims of excessive force.

Reynaldo Narvaez, 22, drove away from police early one morning in 2018 and thought he’d lost them when he parked the car in an alley and walked away.

But police were waiting for him, at rifle point. According to Narvaez, he was then beaten, stomped and Tased, despite immediately raising his hands and kneeling after the first command to do so. The attacks left him unconscious and he was taken to a hospital.

The same aerial surveillance that led police to Narvaez recorded his arrest, video that could become key evidence if the case ever goes to a ju

Caitlin Emma::

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she is “returning” the Office for Civil Rights “to its role as a neutral, impartial, investigative agency.”

In a July 11 letter to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, DeVos asserted that the department’s civil rights arm under the Obama administration “had descended into a pattern of overreaching, of setting out to punish and embarrass institutions rather than work with them to correct civil rights violations and of ignoring public input prior to issuing new rules.”

As part of the changes she is implementing, the civil rights office would no longer issue “new regulations via administrative fiat,” as the Obama administration did, she wrote.

DeVos’ letter, which lays out a far less activist philosophy for the civil rights office, came in response to a letter sent late last month by 34 Senate Democrats, who blasted her for a series of actions they said had “diminished” civil rights enforcement. The lawmakers asked DeVos for a host of information by July 11, including a list of civil rights investigations that have been closed or dismissed since the Trump administration began. DeVos didn’t provide any of the information in her response.

Murray sent DeVos another letter on Friday repeating her request for the information. She did not address DeVos’ assertions about the actions taken by the Obama-era civil rights office.

DeVos wrote that the agency is “unwavering in its commitment” to defend students’ civil rights. But during the Obama administration, the office “all too often handled individual complaints as evidence of systematic institutional violations,” she wrote. Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, told the office’s regional directors in June to stop doing just that.

Ilya Somin:

Today is Martin Luther King Day. One of King’s most important legacies was his advocacy of civil disobedience as a strategy for resisting injustice. In 2022, I wrote a Martin Luther King Day post addressing some common misperceptions about King’s views on this topic. I built, in part, on a piece on King by Georgetown Prof. Jason Brennan, author of an important book on the morality of resistance to government power.

Contrary to popular perception, King did not categorically oppose all violent resistance to injustice. His views also don’t imply that practitioners of civil disobedience have a categorical obligation to accept punishment. In the case of the US civil rights movement, he advocated both nonviolence and acceptance of punishment for primarily tactical reasons. But the reasons for doing so don’t always hold true in other cases. On the other hand, King did strongly oppose rioting, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. And his reasoning does imply a strong presumption against violence, even if not a categorical bar.

A few excerpts from the 2022 post:

Emilia David:

The US Copyright Office is opening a public comment period around AI and copyright issues beginning August 30th as the agency figures out how to approach the subject. 

As announced in the Federal Register, the agency wants to answer three main questions: how AI models should use copyrighted data in training; whether AI-generated material can be copyrighted even without a human involved; and how copyright liability would work with AI. It also wants comments around AI possibly violating publicity rights but noted these are not technically copyright issues. The Copyright Office said if AI does mimic voices, likenesses, or art styles, it may impact state-mandated rules around publicity and unfair competition laws. 

Written comments are due on October 18th, and replies must be submitted to the Copyright Office by November 15th. 

The copyright status of AI training data and the output of generative AI tools has become a hot topic for politicians, artists, authors, and even civil rights groups, making it a potential testing ground for coming AI regulation. The Copyright Office says that “over the past several years, the Office has begun to receive applications to register works containing AI-generated material.” It may use the comments to inform how it decides to grant copyright in the future.

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) following a troubling incident that occurred at Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD), where an 18-year-old biological male exposed himself to four female girls in the shower and stated “I’m trans, by the way.” Following the school’s failure to sufficiently address the incident, and their stonewalling of an open records request, WILL is seeking an investigation and remedies from the Department of Education under the Biden Administration.

The Quotes: Cory Brewer, WILL Associate Counsel, stated, “Parents and students should feel safe and have peace of mind when kids go back to school this fall. But, the Sun Prairie Area School District has frankly been dismissive in how it has handled the alleged sexual harassment towards these four freshman girls. The Department of Education Office of Civil Rights should promptly investigate the allegations made in this complaint, then act swiftly to remedy unlawful policies and practices.”

Richard Hanania:

That’s a lot of material. When I started writing for a public consumption, I was 35. That means I’d spent two decades thinking about American culture and politics, so I was brimming with insights. Inevitably, I’ve said many of the things I wanted to say, and continuing to write on the topic will be unlikely to produce material anywhere as good. Now is a good time to branch out a bit. 

Finally, for reasons I’ll expand on below, I’m becoming more alienated from conservatives, and therefore less interested in trying to promote total victory for one side in the culture war. The continuing and growing power of the anti-vaxx movement is perhaps the clearest demonstration that something has gone horrifyingly wrong on the Right. And yes, I know the smarter among them say they’re just “anti-mandate,” but the culture is clearly anti-vaxx, with Trump getting booed at rallies for telling his old and overweight fans to do the responsible thing and conservative influencers proudly talking about how they avoided the jab and making fun of those that didn’t.

Republicans may be generally preferable, but when the next great technological breakthrough comes, I’m confident that if it turns into a salient political issue it’ll be the Right that wants to ban it. On the vaccine issue specifically, the odds of us having another Operation Warp Speed if a Republican is in office when the next pandemic hits are low. There’s no way to justify this – every other right-wing scam, up to and including even (maybe) election denial, could at least theoretically be defended as serving some greater good. But this one is simply a tragedy, and reveals that when you build a movement that caters to low IQ and paranoid people you can’t hope to control the results. If the next pandemic is even worse than covid, those who’ve promoted anti-vaxx could be responsible for millions of lives lost. And of course public health is evil and deserves all the hate it gets and much more, but the issue of pandemics is too serious to answer their failures with mindless demagoguery.

Matt Taibbi:

But, they say, don’t worry, we’re not using any of those secrets, you can trust us. After all, we’re United States Attorneys. (And their paralegals. And legal assistants. And, perhaps, a few IRS or DEA or FBI agents, whose only job is to make cases against the types of people in those files. But still, don’t worry). Just because the whole concept of attorney-client privilege, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments — guaranteeing rights to free speech, against unreasonable searches, and to due process and legal counsel, respectively — were created to bar exactly this kind of behavior, they insist the state would never abuse this authority.

Taint team targets are unpopular. They’re accused drug dealers, terrorists, corporate tax cheats, money launderers, Medicare fraudsters, and, importantly of late, their lawyers. You can add Trump administration officials to the list now. In cases involving such people government prosecutors have begun making an extraordinary claim. As a citizen cries foul when the state peeks at attorney communications, the Justice Department increasingly argues that affording certain people rights harms the secret objectives of the secret state. 

The Trump case is almost incidental to this wider story of extralegal short-cuts, intimidation, improper searches, and especially, a constant, intensifying effort at discrediting the adversarial system in favor of an executive-branch-only vision of the law, in which your right to stand before a judge or jury would be replaced by secret bureaucratic decisions. “Trump has become the way they sell this,” says one defense attorney. “But it’s not about Trump. If you focus on Trump, you’ll miss how serious this is. And it started a long time ago.” When? “Go back to 9/11,” he says. “You’ll see.” 

What follows is a brief history of the cases leading to the controversial decisions in Donald J. Trump v. United States of America, as told by some of the key figures in those episodes. TV experts have told you Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a Special Master in Trump’s case is an “atrocious,” “shady as fuck,” “utterly lawless” ruling by a “stupid” and “profoundly partisan” jurist, placing Trump “above the law.” Have you noticed these analyses almost always come from ex-prosecutors, that you’ve been trained to not even blink at headlines like, Ex-CIA officer calls judge’s ruling in Trump case “silly,” and that defense attorneys on television are rarer than pearls?

Alexa L. Gervasi and Daryl James:

Defense attorneys must wait to hear decisions from the bench, but retired prosecutor Ralph Petty avoided the suspense during his career in West Texas. He often knew what judges would say in advance because he wrote the script.

For 20 years, as USA Today reported last year, Mr. Petty spent his days prosecuting criminal cases and opposing prisoners’ appeals for the Midland County District Attorney’s Office. In the evenings he moonlighted as a law clerk for the judges presiding over those same cases. The conflict of interest allegedly allowed Mr. Petty to shape judicial thinking behind the scenes, draft court documents in his favor, gain access to defense materials generally unavailable to prosecutors, and earn more than $250,000 in the process. He did this on hundreds of cases, and without defendants’ knowledge or consent, while county and court officials kept the arrangement quiet among themselves.

Mark Perry:

I was informed last Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that another of my (now) 231 complaints (probably the most ever filed by a single individual) alleging Title IX violations in higher education has been successfully resolved in my favor. That brings the total number of Title IX complaints to date that have been resolved in my favor to 27 and there are more than 80 ongoing OCR investigations based on my complaints that I expect to also be successfully resolved in my favor (given the clarity of Title IX above and the clear violations of that law). Successful resolutions are illegal Title IX violations involving sex-specific female-only programs that are corrected with one of three outcomes: 1) the discriminatory program is discontinued, 2) the discriminatory female-only program is offset with an equivalent male-only program, or 3) the discriminatory female-only program is converted to a program open to all genders.

US Department of Education:

We have been deeply affected by the recent events that have contributed to racial discord and strife throughout our country. Like so many of you, we continue to be concerned about the impact of these events on our children and on the future of our country. Racism has no place in our nation or in our schools. In each generation, ordinary Americans have fought to secure equality in our laws and in our lives. Their hard- earned victories enshrined equal protection in our Constitution and banned discrimination in our schools, workplaces, and public facilities. Next week, on July 2nd, we commemorate one of those landmark achievements as we celebrate the 56th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This anniversary is a timely reminder to mark our society’s progress and to strengthen our resolve to realize the law’s full promise: racial equality for all.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) prohibits entities receiving federal funds, including our nation’s schools, from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. For decades, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has worked to investigate race discrimination faced by students. Each day, we work to ensure all students have equal educational opportunities regardless of race, color, or national origin.

Now, more than ever, OCR is committed to ensuring that no student is treated differently because of the color of their skin. In the last three fiscal years alone, OCR has entered into 520 resolution agreements requiring schools to make changes to address racial discrimination concerns (a 16% increase as compared to the three prior fiscal years). Of these resolution agreements, 164 addressed racial harassment (a 27% increase as compared to the three prior fiscal years), and 50 resolved racial bias in school discipline (a 108% increase as compared to the three prior fiscal years).

Colin Kalmbacher:

Former Republican Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) and progressive Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have joined forces to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity for police officers.

“As part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Congress allowed individuals to sue state and local officials, including police officers, who violate their rights,” a joint letter released by both representatives late Wednesday notes. “Starting in 1967, the Supreme Court began gutting that law by inventing the doctrine of qualified immunity.”

The original Civil Rights Act provided such redress via the federal statute now codified at 42 U.S.C. §1983known as a “civil action for deprivation of rights.” Initially passed as a court-based enforcement mechanism for provisions of the 14th Amendment, the statute was rarely subject to judicial scrutiny until the 1950s and 1960s.

In the case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court used the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement to severely limit 1983’s applicability.

Fifteen black and white Episcopal clergy attempted to desegregate “White Only” bus terminals in Jackson, Mississippi. and were arrested for breach of the peace and for refusing “to move on when ordered to do so by a police officer.” The protestors ultimately beat those charges and later sued the cops and the trial judge under 1983, alleging they were falsely arrested and imprisoned.

In an 8-1 decision, the doctrine of qualified immunity was created by “activist” judges on the typically liberal “Earl Warren Court.” Since then, the doctrine has grown and been embellished by subsequent court decisions which make it exceedingly difficult for plaintiffs to even bring police officers to trial for alleged constitutional violations.

“Under qualified immunity, police are immune from liability unless the person whose rights they violated can show that there is a previous case in the same jurisdiction, involving the exact same facts, in which a court deemed the actions to be a constitutional violation,” Amash and Pressley said. “This rule has sharply narrowed the situations in which police can be held liable–even for truly heinous rights violations–and it creates a disincentive to bringing cases in the first place.”

Seth Harp:

In retrospect, I was naive about the kind of agency CBP has become in the Trump era. Though I’ve reported several magazine stories in Mexico, none have been about immigration. Of course, I knew these were the guys putting kids in cages, separating refugee children from their parents, and that Trump’s whole shtick is vilifying immigrants, leading to many sad and ugly scenes at the border, including the farcical deployment of U.S. troops. But I complacently assumed that wouldn’t affect me directly, least of all in Austin. Later, I did remember reading a report in February about CBP targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers for scrutiny at ports of entry south of California, but I had never had a problem before, not in a lifetime of crossing the Texas-Mexico border scores of times on foot, by car, by plane, in a canoe, even swimming. This was the first time CBP had ever pulled me aside.

When asked to comment on specific details in this story, a CBP spokesperson responded with a canned statement replete with the sort of pseudo-military terminology that betrays the agency’s sense of itself not as a civil customs service but as some kind of counterterrorism strike force. “CBP has adapted and adjusted our actions to align with current threat information, which is based on intelligence,” the statement reads in part. “As the threat landscape changes, so does CBP.” The agency declined to put me in touch with Moncivias and the other officers named in this account or to make an official available for an interview, but a CBP source mentioned that the “port director” had reviewed “the tape” of the encounter. I found that very interesting, because I had specifically asked Moncivias and the other officers if I was being videotaped or recorded, and they had categorically denied it.

Annie Waldeman:

Under federal law, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Office for Civil Rights is responsible for ensuring equal access to education and investigating allegations of discrimination in the country’s schools and colleges. Families and students can file complaints with the office, which then investigates and determines whether a college or school district may have violated federal law. If violations are substantiated, the office typically negotiates a settlement or prescribes corrective changes, which it sometimes oversees. For some complaints, the office may mediate a resolution. It receives more than 10,000 complaints annually, and has a target of resolving 80 percent of them within six months.

As the Obama administration tackled more complicated investigations, the cases took longer to resolve. From 2010 to 2015, time spent on the average sexual violence investigation increased from 289 to 963 days; on a school discipline case, from 198 to 451 days; and on a harassment probe, from 200 to 287 days. At the department’s request, Congress boosted the office’s budget.

Locally, the Simpson Street Free Press has covered the office of civil rights investigation into the Madison school District.

I’ve not seen substantive mention of this in the traditional media.

Madison, despite spending more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2006: they’re all rich white kids and they will do just fine, not!

Small Learning communities.

English 10

Talented and gifted lawsuit

Taylor Kilgore:

Jim Bradshaw of the Office for Civil Rights’ Washington D.C. office confirmed in an email that “the process is ongoing.”

Greg Jones, president of the NAACP says it is important to know “what the district has done to comply with their agreement with Office for Civil Rights.”

“Given the urgency of education outcomes in Dane County, the local NAACP branch will monitor the agreement as it relates to our mission. The NAACP thinks it is very important to keep the public informed,” Jones said.

Chris Gomez Schmidt a local education advocate with the Madison Partnership for Advanced Learning, agrees with Jones.

“The Office for Civil Rights resolution and the work being done to meet these requirements should be part of the community conversation and our work on closing achievement gaps. More can be done to make this a transparent process.”

“The importance of this Civil Rights resolution process cannot be emphasized enough,” Gomez-Schmidt says. “This work cannot continue to fly under the radar if Madison is truly interested in closing achievement gaps,”

An Advanced Learning Advisory Committee required to comply with the Resolution Agreement has met several times but questions remain about what is being accomplished. Only five parents attended the committee’s most recent meeting on May 23, 2018.

Mark Walsh:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the at-large voting system for the school board covering Ferguson, Mo., where the police shooting of an African-American man sparked weeks of racial unrest in 2014, violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The seven-member board of the Ferguson-Florissant school district, which serves all or part of 11 municipalities in suburban St. Louis, is elected at large. The district’s student population of 11,200 students is about 80 percent black and 20 percent white.

The school board was all white until 2014, the same year that Michael Brown was shot and killed in an altercation with a white police officer in Ferguson, sparking widespread street protests that focused on police and city policies. (A state grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown and the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the officer had acted in self-defense.)

Education Week’s Denisa R. Superville visited Ferguson one year after the Brown incident and last year examined efforts to bring greater racial diversity to school boards.

There was one African-American member of the Ferguson-Florissant board in 2014 before the state chapter of the NAACP, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the district alleging that black voters’ votes were being diluted by the at-large voting system in violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. There are now three black members on the board.

Madison features at large seats (not the case years ago). Changing this would be very useful for competitive and less costly elections.

Annie Waldman:

Beside a highway in Bryan, Texas, tucked between a motorcycle bar and the county jail, stands a low-slung, sprawling complex with tinted windows, sandstone walls and barbed wire lining parts of its roof. A roadside sign identifies it as the Brazos County Juvenile Justice Center.

One Friday afternoon last October, after an incident at nearby Arthur L. Davila Middle School, a police officer arrested 13-year-old Trah’Vaeziah Jackson and brought her to the juvenile detention facility. She cried as employees patted her down, cut off her hair extensions, and took her photo and fingerprints. She was served dinner — chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes and an apple in a styrofoam box with a carton of milk — but had no appetite.

In the shower room, guards applied thick anti-lice shampoo to Trah’Vaeziah’s hair. As she washed and combed it, clumps fell out. Afterwards, she reluctantly changed from her school clothes, a T-shirt and jeans, into the detention uniform, an orange shirt with matching shorts. Then she was locked in her cell, which contained a sink, a toilet, and, instead of a bed, a stuffed blue mat atop a brick base. High on the wall was a sliver of a window, but she wasn’t tall enough to see outside.

Jessica Huseman and Annie Waldman

The Department of Education has laid out plans to loosen requirements on investigations into civil rights complaints, according to an internal memo sent to staff on June 8 and obtained by ProPublica.

Under the Obama administration, the department’s office for civil rights applied an expansive approach to investigations. Individual complaints related to complex issues such as school discipline, sexual violence and harassment, equal access to educational resources, or racism at a single school might have prompted broader probes to determine whether the allegations were part of a pattern of discrimination or harassment.

The new memo, sent by Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, to regional directors at the department’s civil rights office, trims this approach. Jackson was appointed deputy assistant secretary for the office in April and will remain as the acting head of the office until the Senate confirms a full-time assistant secretary. Trump has not publicly nominated anyone for the role yet.

The office will apply the broader approach “only” if the original allegations raise systemic concerns or the investigative team argues for it, Jackson wrote in the memo.

A trove of documents created during a federal investigation into Princeton University offers an unprecedented glimpse at how elite college admissions officers talk about race.

Outsiders have long debated how the secretive Ivy League admissions system considers the race of its applicants. Within the schools, such discussions form one of the most closely guarded elements of a process that has remained remarkably opaque for decades.

But documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show Princeton’s admissions officers repeatedly wrote of Asian applicants as being difficult to differentiate, referring to them dismissively as having “very familiar profiles,” calling them “standard premeds,” or “difficult to pluck out.” The comments were noted by civil rights investigators at the Education Department as they probed allegations of racial bias in the school’s admissions system.

Nathan Hansen:

Despite collecting the information, by law, for more than 40 years, public schools continue to struggle to report accurate and comparable civil rights data to the Department of Education.

“The issue is whether different districts are providing the same type of data and working on the same definition,” said outgoing Sparta Superintendent John Hendricks, when asked about comparing his district’s attendance data with other districts.

+3
Sparta Superintendent John Hendricks
Hendricks

He said it was only valid to compare Sparta attendance figures among district schools, not across district lines.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been collecting data on the nation’s public school districts since 1968 when Congress passed the first laws mandating the reporting. The office collects information broken down by race and gender on such topics as advanced placement enrollment, student and teacher absenteeism, disciplinary action and bullying, producing almost 2,000 variables in the process.

Wisconsin DPI link.

Justin Fenton and Kevin Rector:

Seven Baltimore police officers who served in a high-profile gun unit were indicted Wednesday on federal racketeering charges — allegations that throw into question scores of cases aimed at getting weapons off the streets.

The officers are accused of shaking down citizens, filing false court paperwork and making fraudulent overtime claims, all while Justice Department investigators were scrutinizing the department for what they concluded was widespread civil rights violations.

Sarah Phillips

The state of Texas recently threatened to pull out of the federal refugee resettlement program over security concerns related to Syrian refugees, a move that the Texas Civil Rights Project has condemned as furthering suffering of populations of the world.
On Sept. 21, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced its intention to withdraw from the resettlement program if the Office of Refugee Resettlement cannot assure security.
“Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people,” Abbott said in a statement. “Therefore, Texas will withdraw from the refugee resettlement program. I strongly urge the federal government to completely overhaul a broken and flawed refugee program that increasingly risks American lives.”

Ursula Wolfe-Rocco:

This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.

Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:

I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.

Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students—and all the rest of us—should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.

Jacob Gershman:

group of law professors are accusing the civil rights office of the U.S. Education Department of taking “unlawful actions” that have led to “pervasive and severe infringements” of speech rights and due-process protections on college campuses.

An open letter signed by Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz and 20 other legal scholars blasts a series of directives issued by the federal office to schools on dealing with sexual misconduct and harassment complaints from students.

Pat Schneider:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has an image problem with teachers of color, says a consultant who recommends using the district’s mission of creating an environment where all students thrive to recruit a more diverse workforce.
The number of minority teachers in the district, while growing, is not keeping pace with the growing proportion of minority students, consultant Monica Rosen told Madison School Board members Monday.
“You’ll never catch up at the rate you’re going. I think there needs to be something more aggressive,” said Rosen, a partner in the national firm Cross & Joftus.
The gap between the number of students of color and the number of teachers of color has been brought into sharp focus as the school district works to close a persistent academic achievement gap between students of color and their white classmates.
A leader in the African-American community in November filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, charging that the district was discriminating against people of color in its hiring.
And nearly all the school district personnel interviewed as part of Cross & Joftus’ review mentioned their own concerns about the lack of diversity among school district staff, Rosen reported.

David DesRoches, via a kind reader:

Darien’s issues have highlighted a special education flaw that exists across the state and nation. The question over what is appropriate has drawn a deep divide among residents. Parents from several states and Connecticut towns have contacted The Times, saying that Darien’s problems happen everywhere, and in most cases, the problems are worse.
Sue Gamm, the Chicago attorney hired by the Board of Education to investigate how deep the special education problems went, told The Darien Times that her work in town was the most difficult job in her 40-plus year career. Gamm formerly was a top administrator for Chicago Public Schools and a division director for the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. She has performed similar duties in more than 50 school districts across the United States.
John Verre, the man charged with overhauling Darien’s special education program, has also noted the difficult challenge Darien presents.
“Darien is a particularly challenging combination of problems,” Verre told The Times shortly after he was hired in October. “It compares to the most challenging situation I’ve ever found.”
A number of people have resigned from their top-earning positions, including the schools’ superintendent, Steve Falcone, along with Matt Byrnes, a former assistant superintendent, Dick Huot, the finance director, and Antoinette Fornshell, the literacy coordinator. Most recently, one of the people who has been consistently named as having contributed to the illegal special education program, Liz Wesolowski, announced to fellow staff members she was leaving Darien for a position with Shelton Public Schools.
Fornshell and Wesolowski played key roles in the implementation of the district’s SRBI program, which Gamm criticized for its lack of data and poor implementation due to staff being poorly trained. There was also no manual for SRBI, which is an intervention program designed to give children extra help if they fall behind in their class work. It’s intended to prevent children from needing more expensive special education services, but critics say it is more often used to delay providing special ed to children with legally-defined disabilities.

Jane Porter:

The federal government has begun investigating a complaint that Durham Public Schools suspends black and disabled students at disproportionately high rates, a group that filed the complaint said Thursday.
Advocates for Children’s Services, a project of Legal Aid of North Carolina, and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA filed the complaint against DPS in April with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
In the 2009-2010 school year, 14.1 percent of black students were suspended while 3.3 percent of white students were; 17 percent of disabled students were suspended while 8.4 percent of non-disabled students were, according to the complaint.
It describes the experiences of two students identified only as “N.B.” and “T.H.” Both are black and both spent years in DPS; both were suspended from school repeatedly.
“N.B.,” a 17-year-old student diagnosed with several mental health issues, wasn’t evaluated for her eligibility for special education and related services by DPS until she was well into high school. “T.H.” has been diagnosed with behavioral disabilities; instead of addressing those issues which the complaint says contributed to his falling behind in school, “(his school) responded punitively with out-of-school suspension.”

Esther Cepeda:

Every few months, a handful of education reform advocates push the idea that the public education system’s woes could be fixed if only there were more black or Hispanic teachers in classrooms.
You’ll surely hear this in the wake of the U.S. Department of Education’s alarming data, published last week by the Office of Civil Rights, showing that though Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of public school populations, they account for 56 percent of students expelled under zero-tolerance school discipline policies.
Worse, black students are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white peers, and more than 70 percent of students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement are Hispanic or African-American.

The New York Times:

Distressing new federal data on the disciplinary treatment of black students adds urgency to investigations into the treatment of minority children in a dozen school districts around the country by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. The agency, which is negotiating policies with some of these districts, needs to push for procedures that keep children in school.
The new 2009-10 federal data, drawn from more than 72,000 schools, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students, covers a range of issues, including student discipline and retention.
Black students made up only 18 percent of those in the sample but 35 percent of those suspended one time and 39 percent of all expulsions. Blacks, in general, are three-and-a-half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers, and more than 70 percent of the students who were involved in arrests or referred to law enforcement agencies were black or Hispanic.

William Jacobson:

The Equal Protection Project (EPP)(EqualProtect.org) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation has challenged numerous racially discriminatory programs done in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This discrimination comes in a variety of ways, but the overarching theme is to exclude or diminish some people, and promote others, based on race, color, or ethnicity.

The latest iteration is the “Joey Lee Garmon Undergraduate Multicultural Student Scholarship” at Kansas State University (K-State). To be eligible, applicants “must be of an ethnic group that has been historically and traditionally oppressed in the achievement of academic and leadership endeavors,” with special preference given to “applicants of African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx American heritage”.

EPP has filed a Civil Rights Complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. As full copy is at the bottom of this post, and reads in part:

Matthew Barakat:

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is launching an investigation into one of the state’s most prestigious high schools, acting on complaints that students there weren’t properly recognized for their achievements on a standardized test.

Miyares said at a news conference Wednesday that his Office of Civil Rights is investigating the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology not only for its failure to timely notify students of a commendation they received in a scholarship competition, but also the school’s recently overhauled admissions policies.

The public high school commonly known as TJ is located in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County and regularly ranks as one of the best in the country. Admission to the school is highly competitive, and parents map out strategies to gain entry for their children years in advance.

A majority of students are Asian American and for many years African American and Hispanic students have been woefully underrepresented. In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board dramatically overhauled the admissions process, scrapping a high-stakes standardized test and setting aside a certain number of seats on a geographic basis.

The changes prompted claims of discrimination against Asian Americans who had fared well under the old system, and a federal lawsuit challenging the new procedures is going through the appeals process.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron.

Do no harm:

Why are so many medical schools violating civil rights? That’s the question Do No Harm is asking in five complaints filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. These schools offer scholarships that are eligible to people of certain races, which is incompatible with the Constitution and federal law.

The medical schools in question are affiliated with the University of Florida, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Utah, and the University of Minnesota, as well as the Medical College of Wisconsin. While more than 140 medical schools and institutions nationwide offer questionable scholarships, these five medical schools are particularly noteworthy.

Consider the scholarship at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It is available to members of certain “racial and ethnic populations.” They spell out what that means – people who are “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Naive Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” The application also asks for an applicant photograph!

KC Johnson:

‘One of the most sweeping bipartisan judicial rejections of an administration’s policy in decades,” commentator David French recently noted, involved the Obama administration using Title IX to undermine due process on American college campuses. The administration’s record, French wrote, “has been rejected by judges across the ideological spectrum and has cost universities millions.”

Given this legacy, George Mason law professor David Bernstein hoped that “legal actors responsible for rather blatant constitutional violations, such as Obama administration OCR [Office of Civil Rights] Chief Catherine Lhamon, will not in the future be rewarded with plum political appointments.” Yet the Biden administration has recently selected Lhamon to return to her old perch atop the OCR, the Education Department office with jurisdiction over Title IX — the federal law that bans gender discrimination in education — and racial-discrimination issues.

Perhaps no public figure in the past decade has done more to decimate the rights of accused students than Lhamon. No wonder that FIRE, the scrupulously non-partisan campus-civil-liberties organization, denounced her nomination and urged senators to reject it unless she committed, under oath, to upholding specific due-process provisions in Title IX tribunals. Given her record, it seems extremely unlikely that she would ever do so.

In 2011, the Obama administration invoked Title IX to address what it considered a surge in campus sexual assaults. The resulting “Dear Colleague” letter mandated a series of procedural changes making guilty findings more likely to result from campus tribunals. The policy’s underlying assumption was that one-sided procedures would change campus culture and lead otherwise-reluctant victims to file reports with their schools. After taking over at OCR in 2013, Lhamon unilaterally produced a second, lengthy guidance document, taking aim at schools’ allowing accused students to conduct cross-examination (most schools already prevented students’ lawyers from doing so) and cautioning universities against prioritizing the due-process rights of the accused.

Jordan Morales:

Switching now to MPS, we see that according to the Department of Public Instruction’s 2018-19 Report Card, 71% of Black or African-American students had a “Below Basic” score in mathematics. Indeed, only 10% of Black students had either a proficient or advanced understanding of mathematics. Meanwhile, only 30% of white students scored “Below Basic,” whereas 39% had a proficient or advanced understanding in mathematics.

Looking at another statistic, Black students in MPS have a graduation rate of only 63% whereas their white counterparts had a graduation rate of 94%. The racial disparities in MPS are obvious.

The racism is also evident in the way MPS disciplines its students. Much like how MPD had to sign an agreement with the ACLU to end racially biased stop-and-frisk, MPS had to sign an agreement with the Department of Education to address racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. Like MPD, MPS has shown little progress in this agreement according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

They found that African Americans accounted for 81% of suspensions and expulsions despite making up only 51% of the student body. This isn’t because Black students are more unruly. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found that Black students were disciplined in a discriminatory manner, uncovering over 100 instances where white students weren’t punished as severely for the exact same behaviors. MPS’s response was to establish disciplinary committees to evaluate the disparities, half of which rarely meet.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Dana Ansel:

Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature decided that the time had come to understand the state of education that gifted students receive in Massachusetts. They issued a mandate for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the policy and practices of education in public schools for gifted students as well as for students capable of performing above grade level.

The challenge that this mandate presents is that Massachusetts neither defines giftedness nor collects data on gifted students. We can nevertheless review what districts report about their practices and what parents of gifted children report about their experiences. We can also report on the state’s policies toward gifted education. In addition, we can analyze the academic trajectory and social-emotional well-being of academically advanced students based on their math MCAS scores. All of this information is valuable in painting a picture of gifted education in Massachusetts, but it is nonetheless limited.

To begin, Massachusetts is an outlier in the country in its approach to gifted education. Nearly every other state in the country defines giftedness. Nor is there an explicit mandate to either identify or serve gifted students in Massachusetts. In contrast, 32 states reported a mandate to identify and/or serve gifted students, according to the State of the States in Gifted Education. In terms of preparing teachers to teach gifted students, Massachusetts used to have an Academically Advanced Specialist Teacher License, but it was eliminated in 2017 because of the lack of licenses being issued and programs preparing teachers for the license.

We do not know how many gifted students live in Massachusetts, but a reasonable estimate would be 6–8 percent of state’s students, which translates into 57,000 – 76,000 students.1 Without a common definition and identification process, it is impossible to pinpoint the precise number. According to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) 2015-16 survey, 6.6 percent of students were enrolled in gifted programs nationally. This number includes states such as Massachusetts that have very few gifted programs, and other states that enroll many more than the average. Another source of data, a nationally representative survey of school districts, found that the fraction of elementary school students nationwide who have been identified as gifted and enrolled in a gifted program was 7.8 percent (Callahan, Moon, & Oh, 2017)

Related: Wisconsin adopted a very small part of Massachusetts’ elementary teacher content knowledge licensing requirements, known as MTEL.

Massachusetts public schools lead the United States in academic performance.

However and unfortunately, the Wisconsin Department of public instruction has waived more than 6000 elementary teacher exam requirements since 2015…. (Foundations of reading)

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

T Keung Hui :

The federal government has agreed to close its long-running investigation into how the Wake County school system handles school discipline, following changes that have reduced how many students are suspended.

In 2010, the state NAACP and several other groups filed a federal civil rights complaint accusing the Wake school system of discrimination because of how black students are suspended at such high rates compared to their share of the student population.

In a voluntary settlement announced Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has agreed to close the case by 2021 if the district continues with the changes it has adopted since the investigation began and make further revisions.

“We are pleased to reach an agreement with the Office of Civil Rights in these areas and look forward to continued improvement in suspension rates,” school board chairwoman Monika Johnston-Hostler said in a written statement. “We are grateful OCR recognized the work already underway and the district’s efforts to ensure future progress.”

In the 2016-17 school year, African-American students accounted for 60 percent of Wake’s suspensions while only representing 23.5 percent of the total enrollment. But the number of out-of-school suspensions in Wake dropped 25 percent between the 2012-13 and 2016-17 school years, even as enrollment went up 9 percent.

Related: The Madison School District and the Office of Civil Rights.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The Madison School District’s new long-term plan looks vaguely similar to its predecessor, a strategic framework produced in 2013. Two of three overarching goals share similar language.

The third goal, however, stands out from its 2013 counterpart by explicitly vowing to do better for African-American students.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said she attended nearly 100 meetings over the past year, receiving input from more than 2,000 students, staff, parents and community members.

“Meeting after meeting, it was crystal clear to me that this is what our community wants,” she said. “We believe at this state we need to hold ourselves accountable to more ambitious goals” for African-American youth.

The district released a 20-page report Tuesday, outlining three goals officials hope to meet by adopting a variety of strategies and meeting a host of benchmarks in the coming years.

Locally, the Simpson Street Free Press has covered the office of civil rights investigation into the Madison school District.

I’ve not seen substantive mention of this in the traditional media.

Madison, despite spending more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2006: they’re all rich white kids and they will do just fine, not!

Small Learning communities.

English 10

Talented and gifted lawsuit

Peter Wood:

Several days ago I published an essay about a new policy on sexual harassment issued by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. The policy, which expands the definition of sexual harassment and removes various procedural protections for those accused, was presented in a letter to the president of the University of Montana. The authors, however, declare that the rules imposed on Montana are meant to be a “blueprint” for colleges and universities nationwide.

The Montana letter has prompted an outpouring of scathing criticism from nearly all points on the political spectrum, and very little in the way of public support, though there is this from ThinkProgress.

http://freebeacon.com/culture/no-touching/Bruce Fleming

Think that’s scary? What happens next is even worse. Following guidelines from the Obama administration Office of Civil Rights, you will likely be denied representation by a lawyer, forbidden from presenting exonerating evidence or asking questions of your accuser (who will invariably be referred to as the “victim” or the “survivor”), be subject to the decision of a college administrator who is under pressure to show that her (as it almost always is) institution is eagerly working with the federal government’s esoteric understanding of Title IX, and found guilty if there is a 50.01 percent chance you failed to get consent, or lost it at some point unbeknownst to you. The press will rake you over the coals and your future, now that you’re expelled and branded a sexual malefactor, will be compromised.

Gay guys, don’t breathe a sigh of relief yet. You have it just as bad, arguably worse. A case at Brandeis University that the book highlighted involves two men, one of whom was found guilty of nonconsensual sexual conduct because he looked at the other man, who he subsequently had an affair with, in the communal shower without getting consent. The looking was the misconduct, not the affair.

This is the Brave New World of sex in college under the Obama administration. Well, some colleges. Reports of sexual assault, a spectrum of acts that range from looking to touching, to what one woman interviewed (an opponent of the current rules) calls a “test kiss,” to actual rape of passed-out women or even penetration by force, are much higher at prestigious Ivy-level universities than other schools. That means it’s a problem, if it is one, of rich kids. Or their invention.

From Tammy Baldwin’s office, via email. source

Thank you for contacting me about the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is good to hear from you.

On April 19, 2024, Congress voted to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Keeping our families safe should not come at the expense of Americans’ fundamental right to privacy. From the PATRIOT Act to the creation https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/of the FISA Section 702 program, I’ve consistently opposed measures that would give the government free reign to spy on innocent, law-abiding Americans. On April 19, 2024, I stood firm with colleagues from both parties and I voted against reauthorizing FISA to prevent the warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

I cosponsored bipartisan legislation that takes a better approach to reauthorize and reform important intelligence programs to ensure we have the tools we need to fight terrorism, while also protecting the constitutional rights guaranteed to every American. Protecting Americans against our adversaries and protecting the privacy of law-abiding citizens are not mutually exclusive goals, and I remain committed to protecting both.

Additionally, I am deeply troubled by previous revelations regarding the unacceptable domestic electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. As someone who voted against the original USA PATRIOT Act (P.L.107-56) because of its clear potential for government overreach, I believe Congress needs to take action to rein in activities that clearly violate Americans’ civil liberties. Indeed, laws like the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendments Act (P.L.112-238), which I also opposed, permit the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of communications entering and exiting the United States, without any individualized review, without any finding of wrongdoing and without serious court oversight.

In 2020, the Senate passed its reauthorization of the USA FREEDOM Act. I opposed the passage of this bill because it did not go far enough to reform government authorities and protect Americans’ privacy. I was particularly disappointed that the Senate rejected an amendment I cosponsored that would have prohibited the government from using Section 215 to obtain U.S. individuals’ internet search and browsing history.

I had hoped that the Senate would instead adopt more of the FISA reforms included in the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act, of which I was a cosponsor. This bill would have put a permanent end to the NSA’s call data records program and removed all authority for the collection of phone records without a warrant. It also would have reformed the FISA court process and created new public reporting requirements for any information collected under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

I appreciate knowing your views on the reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA. Please be assured that I will continue to fight to protect the privacy and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

Once again, thank you for contacting my office. It is important for me to hear from the people of Wisconsin on the issues, thoughts and concerns that matter most to you. If I can be of further assistance, please visit my website at www.baldwin.senate.gov for information on how to contact my office. Sincerely,

Tammy Baldwin
United States Senator

Luke Rosiak and Christopher F. Rufo:

Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed “revolutionary suicide.”

Why has the school charted this course? One reason is its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. UCLA has a DEI program called “Cultural North Star,” and at the medical school, it is led by Natalie J. Perry. Her official biography says her job is to “embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value [sic] in our organizational DNA.” UCLA honored Perry last month for teaching students to “do what’s right,” saying her “empathy and radical listening” are to thank for her “success as an educator and a leader.”

According to a Daily Wire and City Journal investigation, however, Perry’s academic career is based on fraud. Perry has published a single paper, a 2014 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Virginia about how colleges should create larger DEI programs. An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without citations. The scale of the plagiarism suggests that Perry lacks both ethics and competence and raises questions about academic programs that push DEI.

Joshua Dunn:

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education has long been known for its tendency to overstep in its rulemaking. Many federal agencies are tempted to avoid the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) by fabricating administrative law in the form of “clarifications” and “guidance”—but no agency has succumbed to that temptation more than OCR. As Shep Melnick has pointed out (see “Rethinking Federal Regulation of Sexual Harassment,” features, Winter 2018), OCR has used “Dear Colleague” letters (DCLs) to rewrite Title IX and wade into hot-button issues such as bathroom access for transgender students, school resources, and racial disparities in school discipline. In fact, playing fast and loose with administrative procedures seems to be part of the office’s DNA. When OCR was first obligated to create rules for enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it published them not in the Federal Register but in TheSaturday Review of Literature.

Rachel Bowman:

A Wisconsin school district has been criticized for offering a whites only racism class that encourages participants to explore their ‘privilege, whiteness and racism.’

In an email shared on social media, Director of Student, Family and Staff Engagement at Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, Mr. Tony R. Dugas, invited the community to participate in a ‘powerful’ 10-week ‘Witnessing Whiteness’ series ‘meticulously crafted for white individuals committed to anti-racism work.’

Parents Defending Education is now filing a discrimination complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District for offering the course.

The complaint claims the class violates Title VI and the 14th Amendment because it uses federal funding for discrimination on the basis of race and national origin.

Parents Defending Education Vice President Caroline Moore told DailyMail.com: ‘Specifically targeting students based on race or sex is blatant discrimination and has no place in public schools.’

Wall Street Journal:

The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.

This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”

It’s also illegal. According to Do No Harm, a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare,” the practice violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.

Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.”

Sean O’Driscoll

An internal report found that a third-placed job applicant, who was Black, was given a tenure-track assistant professor job last April, above white and Asian candidates who were ranked higher in the selection process.

Other violations included excluding white staff from meetings with job candidates, deleting a passage from a hiring report to hide discrimination, and discussing ways to “think our way around” a Supreme Court ruling that barred affirmative action in colleges.

A UW spokeswoman told Newsweek on Thursday that the case was exposed when “the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, responding to an internal whistleblower, requested an internal review of this process by what was then called UCIRO (University Complaints, Investigation and Resolution Office) and is now the Civil Rights Investigation Office.”

The psychology faculty has been barred from hiring tenured staff for two years as a result.

Ilya Somin:

My wife, Alison Somin (an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, and former special assistant at the US Commission on Civil Rights) has an article about anti-Asian discrimination in education, and how federal agencies have mostly ignored it:

Discrimination against Asian-American students in admissions at selective universities has been an open secret for decades. An entire cottage industry even coached ambitious applicants on how to be less Asian. Data produced in litigation showed that for applicants with academic credentials in the top 10 percent of Harvard’s pool, the odds of admission were 56.1 percent for African Americans, 31.3 percent for Hispanics, and 15.3 percent for whites, but only 12.6 percent for Asian Americans. In emails uncovered in the parallel lawsuit against the University of North Carolina, admissions officers were candid about preferring applicants of other races over Asian Americans. One representative exchange: “perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th” “Brown?!” “Heck no. Asian.”

Yet the federal agencies charged with enforcing civil rights laws prohibiting this discrimination largely have done nothing in response. These agencies could have issued guidance emphasizing that such discrimination is forbidden or pursued targeted investigations against universities widely suspected of discrimination. But they have not….

Christopher Rufo

Last week, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into New College of Florida, where I serve as a trustee, regarding alleged “disability discrimination.”

The investigation was prompted by a complaint by ACLU attorney Jennifer Granick, alleging that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing “gender neutral” signage from bathrooms, defunding the DEI and gender studies programs, and “misgendering” the former DEI director and a former student, who use “ze/zir” and “they/them” pseudo-pronouns, respectively. According to the complaint, these actions constitute discrimination “based on perceived disability and gender prejudice.”

As a tactical matter, the complaint is a clear attempt to disrupt the conservative reforms at New College, which represent a threat to the Left’s hegemony over higher education. Since January, when the new board of trustees was announced, New College has secured record funding from the state legislature, begun a campus-wide renovation, launched a new core curriculum, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history. For left-wing activists, who had previously considered New College as an outpost for social-justice activism, this state of affairs—conservative leaders implementing conservative reforms—was intolerable. They might chant for “democracy” in theory, but, in practice, they are more than willing to use anti-democratic tools to restrict any democratic action that might undermine their cultural power.

Christopher Rufo

The fight for New College of Florida has taken another turn. Earlier today, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Sarasota-based university, where I serve as a trustee, for alleged “discrimination on the basis of disability.”

The investigation stems from a complaint by unnamed “students, faculty, and staff” alleging, in part, that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing “gender neutral” signage from bathrooms, defunding the DEI and gender studies programs, and “misgendering” the former DEI director, who uses “ze/zir” pseudo-pronouns.

This is a brazen attempt to subvert the democratic governance of New College and entrench left-wing ideological programs under the guise of civil rights law. Although the complaint is wholly without merit, this does not mean it will automatically fail. The Biden Administration has demonstrated repeatedly that it is willing to weaponize the federal law enforcement apparatus against school board parents and other conservative reformers.

We are ready for the fight. When Governor DeSantis appointed the new board of trustees, he told us: “If the media isn’t attacking you, you’re not doing your job.” The same could be said of the Biden Administration.

Wall Street Journal:

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

In June it labeled Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment.” It stated in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” that the organization’s “primary goals” are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”

….

“The reading proficiency rates we have in America right now pose the greatest national-security threat of anything for the future of this country.

Federalist

During President Obama’s second term, the U.S. Education Department began sharing studies indicating that black students were disciplined at higher rates than their white peers. These data were viewed as evidence of racial bias, and, in 2014, the Education and Justice Departments jointly published a resource package to help American schools “…promote fair and effective disciplinary practices that will make schools safe, supportive, and inclusive for all students,” (DOJ). Supporters applauded these steps from the federal government saying they reduced schools’ racial disparities in disciplinary decisions thereby curtailing the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Critics countered that the guidance misstated federal civil rights law, encouraged racial discrimination in the allocation of school discipline to produce demographic parity, and left classrooms less functional.

Jonathan Butcher:

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, calls itself “the world’s learning company.”1 The British publishing giant produced the exam that was once administered to students in 24 U.S. states and Washington, DC, as part of the Common Core national standards; it has contracted with the U.S. government to produce assessments for federal employees; it remains the largest publisher of U.S. college textbooks; and, at one point, had a financial stake in The Economist and owned the Financial Times and the Penguin publishing house.2 Today, Pearson still owns one of the largest virtual charter school networks in the U.S., Connections Academy, and recently released Pearson+, an online subscription service that provides subscribers with access to thousands of textbooks and instructional videos.3

This behemoth company maintains significant influence in the education-publishing world. So, when the publishing giant’s editorial guidelines say that the company will make radical ideas, such as “antiracism,” “colorism,” “colonial discourse,” “genderism,” and “intersectionality,” part of everything it does, parents should know what this influential publisher is producing for students and adults everywhere.4

In December 2022, the company announced that it purchased Personnel Decisions Research Institutes (PDRI), a business that produces “workforce assessment services” for federal agencies.5 With the acquisition, Pearson now controls the company that operates USA Hire, a website operated by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Applicants for positions in the federal government use this website to submit their application materials and then complete assessments as a part of the application process for federal positions. Some 40 federal agencies use the platform, and more than 500,000 applications are reviewed each year.6

Local, state, and federal K–12 education officials, as well as federal hiring managers across the U.S. government, must be aware of the radical race-related and “gender”-related content produced by Pearson because such materials may violate state and federal civil rights laws by promoting unlawful discrimination. Pearson created content based on Marxism-inspired ideas, such as critical race theory (CRT) and critical gender theory. These “woke” philosophies promote racial preferences, including in college admissions. Critical race and gender theories promote prejudice in public programs and education instruction and abandon biology by replacing biological sex with “sexual orientation and gender identity.” Public officials should protect students, teachers, and federal employees from discrimination and reject the use of Pearson’s material that advances critical theory in K–12 public schools and across federal employment programs.

Jeff Goldstein:

Covington Catholic High School’s Nick Sandmann never tried to stare down a phony Native American activist. Smugly or otherwise. And we all should have known it.

Morgan Bettinger never threatened to run over BLM protesters, nor did she make any of the supposedly racist remarks Zyahna Bryant claimed she did. Bryant — a “social justice” activist and Marxian race hustler — can perhaps be trusted to review a new Applebee’s dessert pie, but on all other subjects, the wise move would be to adopt a skeptical pose when engaging with her, if not simply dismiss out of hand anything spilling from her mouth save maybe a tasty fruit filling. 

Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot!” Jacob Blake is not a hero or a civil rights icon — nor should be George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.

Christian Cooper did indeed threaten to take Amy Cooper’s dog. Justin Neely was a crazed homeless man and career criminal who absolutely threatened people on a subway train. Daniel Penny has never been a white supremacist.

Time and time again, the left creates its own mythology, then repeats it until the rest of us just kind of accept it as at least somewhat fairly described. And that’s a fatal mistake, both intellectually and practically.

Lom3z

The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

Richard Hanania has shown how the ascendance of the Civil Rights legal regime, and its transformation into the HR bureaucracy that manages nearly all of our public and private institutions, enforces the distinctly feminine values of its overwhelmingly female workforce. Thomas Edsall makes a similar case in the New York Times, emphasizing how female approaches to conflict and competition have become normative among the professional class. Edsall quotes evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson’s summary of those approaches:

Stanley Goldfarb and Mark J. Perry:

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is no conservative bastion. Staffed mostly by liberal career attorneys, and situated within one of the government’s most aggressively woke departments, it is charged with upholding federal antidiscrimination laws in education, including Title VI and Title IX. OCR is required by law to investigate complaints of discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal financial assistance. The office is rejecting much of what higher education is attempting to do at the behest of woke ideologues.

Consider so-called racial affinity groups, a common woke initiative. These segregated entities, which many campuses have attempted to introduce, are open only to students of a specific race. An April article in the New England Journal of Medicine praised the separation of medical students by race while calling for the establishment of white-only affinity groups whose members would be “held accountable.” The authors also cast affinity groups for black medical students as protecting them from “otherwise-common denial, gaslighting . . . and White fragility.” This toxic language harks back to segregationists’ claims that separating whites and blacks benefitted both groups.

Such blatant racial discrimination is precisely what Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws—and what OCR was created to stop. In October 2022, we filed a complaint challenging the racial affinity groups at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine, the institution at the heart of the New England Journal of Medicine article. OCR opened an investigation, prompting the university to cancel its racial affinity groups before the investigation could conclude. OCR pressured the university to agree that if affinity groups return, they will be open to medical students of all races. Something similar happened when we submitted a Title VI complaint against Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In both cases, OCR effectively ruled that racial affinity groups are illegal.

Tom Knighton

Over at Reason, they have a story about just how much of an issue this really is.

In 2014, [James] King was walking from one job to the next when [FBI agent Douglas] Brownback and [Grand Rapids detective Todd] Allen, who were not in uniform, accosted him without identifying themselves as law enforcement. “Are you mugging me?” King asked. He then ran. The two officers, who were part of a police task force, responded by tackling him to the ground, beating his face to a pulp, and choking him unconscious. But they were looking for someone named Aaron Davison, who had been accused of stealing alcohol from his former employer’s apartment, and who, perhaps more importantly, looked nothing like King.

Even still, police arrested King and handcuffed him to a hospital bed as he received treatment, despite the fact that the only malfeasance here was committed against, not by, King.

What followed in the proceeding years is a case study in the level of protection given to rogue government actors and the byzantine obstacle course that victims of government misconduct have to navigate should they want the privilege of achieving any sort of recourse. Indeed, King’s case has ricocheted up and down the ladder of the U.S. legal system, from the bottom to the top and back again.

The officers first received qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that blocks victims of government misbehavior from seeking recourse in civil court if the precise way the state violated their rights has not yet been “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. In practice, that means clearly unconstitutional conduct—like, say, beating an innocent person—may not be a sturdy enough basis for a lawsuit unless the court has evaluated a case with near-identical circumstances. It is, for example, why two men in Fresno, California, were not allowed to sue the officers who allegedly stole over $225,000 during the execution of a search warrant. We should all know stealing is wrong, the thinking goes, but without a court precedent scrutinizing a similar situation and expressly spelling that out, can we really expect the government to know for sure?

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of the Biden Administration’s use of federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources against parents voicing concerns about controversial curricula and education-related policies at local school board meetings. This oversight began in October 2021 following the issuance of a memorandum from Attorney General Merrick Garland directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all U.S. Attorney’s Offices—among other Department components—to examine and address threats posed by parents at school board meetings.

Although the Biden Administration declined to cooperate with this oversight in the 117th Congress, whistleblower disclosures and a report commissioned by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) shed some light on how the Biden Administration colluded with the NSBA to create a justification to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources against parents. There were gaps in the information available to the Committee then, primarily because the Biden administration did not participate in the NSBA’s third-party report. On February 3, 2023, Chairman Jordan subpoenaed the Justice Department, FBI, and Education Department for documents necessary to advance the Committee’s oversight and inform potential legislative reforms.

From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes. The Justice Department’s own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.1 After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats. For example:

• One U.S. Attorney reported that “this issue was very poorly received” by his local law-enforcement community and “described by some as a manufactured issue.”2 He continued: “No one I spoke with in law enforcement seemed to think that there is a serious national threat directed at school boards, which gave the impression that our priorities are misapplied.”3

• Another U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that the local FBI field office in the area “did not see any imminent threats to school boards or their members . . . , nor did they ascertain any worrisome trends in that regard.”

Notes and links on the National School Board Association “weaponizing” the US Justice Department.

“It appears the administration’s actions were a POLITICAL OFFENSIVE …”
Just as we suspected, in Sept-Oct 2021, as we the parents rose in Loudoun and Fairfax counties @TerryMcAuliffe knew he had a problem. His @POTUS buddies moved to take us out.pic.twitter.com/X2YXOs8BaL

— Asra Nomani (@AsraNomani) March 24, 2023

I should put together a reading list for parent activists

"Race to The Bottom" by @lukerosiak
"Parents of the World Unite" by @iandprior
and "Woke Army" by @asranomani

I consider all three to be heroes of this new civil rights movement.

— The Virginia Project (@ProjectVirginia) March 24, 2023

Ilya Shapiro:

Many Americans despair of reforming the culture of higher education. But a substantial majority of college students attend public institutions, and these schools are subject to state law. If legislators are determined to restore free speech and academic freedom, there’s a lot they can do. In cooperation with the Goldwater Institute, we’ve developed model state legislation based on four reform proposals:

• Abolish “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies. These offices work actively against norms of academic freedom and truth-seeking, advance primarily political aims, and fuel administrative bloat that raises costs and exacerbates student debt. Administrators at public institutions should maintain official neutrality on controversial political questions extraneous to the business of educating students. Leave compliance with federal and state civil-rights laws to the university counsel’s office.

• Forbid mandatory diversity training for students, faculty and staff. Even when DEI officials claim their training is “voluntary,” it’s often required for faculty who wish to perform basic extracurricular roles, such as serving on hiring committees. Typical diversity training includes unscientific claims about “microaggressions” and “implicit bias” and rejects the basic American principle that everyone should be treated equally. It indoctrinates an ideology of identity-based grievance, guilt and division.

• Curtail the use of “diversity statements” as a means of political coercion. These serve as litmus tests in employment processes to exclude applicants who don’t adhere to critical race theory and other radical beliefs. Although the Supreme Court has long held that requiring loyalty oaths in public education is unconstitutional—as are other forms of compelled speech—universities increasingly require that applicants state their belief in the importance of DEI, cite prior personal efforts to promote DEI and pledge to integrate DEI into their teaching. Applicants for many positions have been eliminated on the basis of diversity statements alone and many universities condition their hiring decisions on the applicant’s ideological conformity.

William Jacobson:

Second, I learned about Prof. Mark Perry. I knew “of” him, but I don’t know him personally. He’s a legend for filing civil rights complaints over discriminatory campus policies and administrative conduct that is oh so politically correct, but illegal. His list of complaints he has filed notes that as of the end of 2022:

Based on resolutions with the Office for Civil Rights in 2022 resulting from my civil rights complaints, nearly 100 US colleges and universities agreed to change, discontinue, or stop promoting 170 female-only or BIPOC/Black-only programs, awards, fellowships, and scholarships to correct their Title VI and/or Title IX violations.

James Bovard:

The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations.  The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego…. it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

Asta Nomani:

“This is a victory for every parent,” said Oettinger. “In 2020, we knew that the actions that FCPS was taking were in noncompliance with IDEA. We are now vindicated, and every parents should contact FCPS to make sure that every child receives COMPENSATORY EDUCATION and other services that meet their needs.” 

The key words here are to ask for COMPENSATORY EDUCATION — for example, so many parents paid out of pocket and took on second jobs to pay for tutors and other services to meet educational needs that Fairfax County failed to provide. And so many parents couldn’t afford these extra services, and their children were left behind. 

“It’s criminal that so many children went without services and appropriate education,” said Tisler, at her dining table, as she learned the news. “The investigation must not stop with Fairfax County. Governor Glenn Youngkin should now reconsider the leadership that he inherited that allowed such an atrocity to occur under their watch. The full weight of his office must be used to hold accountable those responsible for this failure. 

The Department of Education concluded:

Jana Winter

In response to a request from Peters for more information, DHS said that it had “expanded its evaluation of online activity as part of efforts to assess and prevent acts of violence, in ways that ensure robust protections for Americans’ privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” according to the Senate report.

But the monitoring of social media reflections and reactions appears to contradict DHS’s claims.

The report also calls on agencies to develop guidance that “must comply with protections in federal law and constitutional limitations, including the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and the agencies should be transparent about what data they use regarding social media.”

Civil liberties advocates said they were alarmed to learn that DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis is monitoring protected speech.

Ian Rowe

In 1966, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned the landmark survey “Equality of Educational Opportunity” to study the “lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions.” James Coleman, who led the study, was a noted sociologist and civil-rights advocate who had been arrested for demonstrating outside an amusement park that refused to admit African Americans.

Known as the Coleman report, the 700-page study drew on data from more than 645,000 students and teachers in 4,000 U.S. public schools. Among its most controversial findings was that family background — not schools, funding, religion, or race — was the only characteristic that showed a consistent relationship with academic performance. The report summarized:

One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.

This unexpected takeaway should have changed the education-policy landscape forever. Yet it never gained widespread traction, principally because it received an unwelcome reaction from most educators, who were unwilling to accept that “schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement.” They feared that emphasizing family background (most notably parents’ marital status) as the greatest driver of a student’s academic achievement would lead to victim-blaming, finger-pointing moralizing directed at single mothers. Even worse, it would turn attention away from addressing racism, underfunding, and other, more acceptable theories of the causes of academic underperformance.

David Lat:

The nation’s capital is also the latest front in the law-school culture wars. Two law schools in D.C., American University Washington College of Law and the George Washington University Law School, have experienced free speech and cancel culture controversies in the past week. Here’s what’s going at American University (“AU”), per Karen Sloan of Reuters:

American University is investigating eight law students after a conservative classmate claimed they harassed him during an online group chat about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, one of the students under investigation confirmed Monday.

The incident followed the May 2 leak of a draft of the decision, which was released in final form on Friday and overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing a Constitutional right to an abortion.

A male law student who described himself as Republican and “deeply religious” filed a complaint with the university alleging his classmates harassed and threatened him due to his political affiliation and religion, according to a May 25 letter from the university’s Office of Equity & Title IX.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”), which is assisting one of the students under investigation, has published an article about the episode, which links to a transcript of the GroupMe chat in question. As even cursory review of the chat reveals, it contains nothing remotely “harassing” or “threatening”; it’s just a heated disagreement between law students about a controversial topic. And it’s not even that heated, to be honest; the NYU Law listserv dust-up, which led to accusations of anti-Semitism, was far more contentious.

There are no threats, explicit or implicit, in the chat. Yes, there are some comments that are rude and uncivil—e.g., “can we shut the f**k up about personal opinions while people process this,” “no one asked for your personal opinion,” “[you should] have the decency to shut up while people come to terms with the fact that they’ve just lost a constitutional right”—but none of this rises to the level of harassment or threats.

Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards:

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up a year ago, ostensibly to maintain public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s murder. But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far beyond its publicly announced scope to include expansive use of tools to scour social media, track cell phones, and amass detailed images of people’s faces.

Documents obtained via public records requests show that the operation persisted long after Chauvin’s trial concluded. What’s more, they show that police used the extensive investigative powers they’d been afforded under the operation to monitor individuals who weren’t suspected of any crime.

MIT Technology Review’s investigation includes thousands of documents and more than two dozen interviews with Minnesota state employees, policing experts, and activists. Taken together, they paint a picture of a state operation intent on identifying participants through secretive surveillance operations. Though it was undertaken by nonmilitary governmental agencies using public funds, large swaths of its inner workings have gone undisclosed. We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.

Operation Safety Net (OSN) was announced in February 2021, a month before Chauvin’s trial was set to begin. At a press conference also attended by Hennepin County sheriff David Hutchinson, Medaria Arradondo, then Minneapolis’s police chief, described the effort as a unified command that would enable law enforcement officials to mount a regional response in case protests turned violent.

Publicly, OSN acknowledged that federal agencies would assist in monitoring for threats of violence and activity by out-of-state extremist groups, and that an “intel team” would be established to help share information surrounding these threats. Our investigation shows that federal support for OSN was in fact extensive, involving the US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At least six FBI agents served in executive and intelligence roles for the program.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The request comes after the board voted unanimously to rename James Madison Memorial High School to Vel Phillips Memorial High School, in honor of the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School School, win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council, become a judge in Wisconsin and get elected to statewide office. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.

A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before the board’s Operations Work Group in November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote in October.

The high school’s name change is the latest of several decisions spurred by Black students pushing for a racial reckoning in Madison. Former Memorial student Mya Berry called on the board to rename the school in August 2020 because James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and the city’s namesake, was a slave owner.

In December 2020 a Madison School Board ad hoc committee, formed to rename Falk Elementary School, voted unanimously to recommend the building be named after Milele Chikasa Anana, a prominent civil rights activist and the first African American to be voted to a public school board in Wisconsin.

Tristan Justice:

Except the agency wasn’t dedicated to protecting MLK. In fact, the peaceful pioneer of 20th-century civil rights was targeted by the law enforcement agency as a domestic enemy. The FBI once told King in a letter to kill himself.

King, the FBI wrote in a memo highlighted by a new documentary out last fall, was “the most dangerous Negro in America,” and warranted the “use [of] every resource at our disposal to destroy him” after King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

Two months later, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps of MLK’s Atlanta residence and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices under the pretense of investigating ties to communism. In what’s become typical of agency probes, however, the bureau went on to expand its surveillance operation by tapping hotel rooms King visited. Collecting blackmail information on King’s extramarital affairs, the goal was to ruin his reputation and stifle the movement. 

As King’s rise continued to bring change to a segregated country, criticism of the FBI came with it. The SCLC president condemned the law enforcement agency for its apathy toward civil rights abuses, angering the bureau’s leaders who were eager to bring him down.

After then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called King the “most notorious liar in the country,” during a 1964 press conference over King’s criticism, the agency sent a letter to King with tape recordings of the civil rights leader’s promiscuity in a D.C. hotel. The letter said that with a 34-day deadline “before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation,” King ought to kill himself to save from embarrassment.

Edmond Ng and James Pomfret:

Hong Kong pro-democracy media outlet Stand News shut down on Wednesday after police raided its office, froze its assets and arrested senior staff on suspected “seditious publication” offences in the latest crackdown on the city’s media.

The raid raises more concerns about press freedom in the former British colony, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with the promise that its freedoms, including a free press, would be protected.

The police action prompted censure by Germany and the U.N. Human Rights Office, which said it was alarmed at the “extremely rapid closing of the civic space and outlets for Hong Kong’s civil society to speak and express themselves freely”.

Stand News, set up in 2014 as a non-profit organisation, was the most prominent remaining pro-democracy publication in Hong Kong after a national security investigation this year led to the closure of jailed tycoon Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily tabloid.

“Stand News is now stopping operations,” the publication said on Facebook, adding all employees had been dismissed.

Sedition is not among the offences listed under a sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing in June 2020 that punishes terrorism, collusion with foreign forces, subversion and secession with possible life imprisonment.

Elizabeth Beyer:

“Folks are ready to change, it’s to what extent that we’re discussing tonight,” board president Ali Muldrow said.

A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before a board committee at the beginning of November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote last month.

Scott Girard:

The process of renaming began in March, a few months after former Memorial student Mya Berry submitted a proposal to change the name to honor Phillips instead of Madison, a former president and slaveholder.

“To have a high school named after Vel Phillips would feel like a step in the right direction for the community,” Berry wrote in the email to the Cap Times in March. “Instead of honoring historical figures that oppressed and enslaved Black Americans, we will have a school respecting the life of a woman who worked toward bridging racial gaps right here in Wisconsin.

“I also think it is significant to credit a Wisconsin leader as the new name, to demonstrate the possibilities that exist to Black and Brown students specifically.”

Phillips, who died in 2018, has a University of Wisconsin-Madison dorm named after her and could soon have a statue outside the state Capitol building. She has a long list of “firsts” on her resume, as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the first female and first Black person elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, the first female judge in Milwaukee County, and the first female and first Black person elected to a statewide office in Wisconsin, becoming the secretary of state.

The district formed an ad hoc committee per its school renaming policy. The group discussed 24 initial proposalsfrom community members, including Phillips, late U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis.

The list of possible names was trimmed through a series of rankings and voting by committee members, who eventually narrowed it to four options: Phillips; former Memorial High School principal Bruce Dahmen; the first Black female principal in MMSD, Darlene Hancock; and foregoing a person’s name, instead calling it simply Memorial High School.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Chuck Ross:

House Republicans are requesting information from U.S. attorneys’ offices regarding their involvement with the Biden administration’s effort to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent letters to all 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices Monday asking for information about discussions authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland to address what he called a “disturbing trend” of violence at school board meetings. On Oct. 4, Garland directed the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and the Justice Department’s civil rights and national security divisions to join local law enforcement officials to discuss strategies to prevent the violence.

Garland’s action came days after the National School Boards Association called on President Joe Biden to deploy the FBI to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism. The association was in contact with the White House and Department of Education in the weeks leading up to the letter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The timeline has raised questions about whether the association and White House colluded to draft the letter as a predicate to forming a federal task force to scrutinize the meetings.

Wall Street Journal:

“Nearly seven decades of Supreme Court precedent have made two things clear: Public schools cannot segregate students by race, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” says the suit filed in federal court Tuesday afternoon by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education. The suit says Wellesley Public Schools “is flouting both of these principles.”

Wellesley has promoted “affinity groups” that hold events for specific races. Parents Defending Education alleges these groups are racially exclusionary “by definition and design,” given that “certain Wellesley students” including the plaintiffs’ children “are prohibited from participating in certain school activities because of their race and ethnicity.” The parents say this violates the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The parents group raised similar concerns earlier this year in a complaint to the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, but the agency hasn’t acted. In May Wellesley superintendent of schools David Lussier and director of diversity, equity and inclusion Charmie Curry told us that no students or staff were barred from participating.

But email correspondence obtained by the nonprofit Judicial Watch and cited in the complaint adds credence to the Wellesley parents’ worries. After a March 2021 shooting in Atlanta that killed several Asian women, Ms. Curry promoted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Community.” A white teacher asked whether it was “appropriate for me to go.” Ms. Curry responded that “this time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff.”

Bradley Thompson:

Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.” Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism.” (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.

In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.

But there’s more. In conjunction with Garland’s letter, the Department of Justice issued a press release in which it announced that the DOJ will be creating a task force “consisting of representatives from the department’s . . .

• Criminal Division
• National Security Division
• Civil Rights Division
• Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys
• FBI
• Community Relations Service
• Office of Justice Programs

The purpose of this Star Chamber will be to “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes.”

America’s security state has not been mobilized like this since 9-11. Recall, for instance, that the Justice Department’s National Security Division was created in 2005 to conduct “counterterrorism and counterespionage” operations against foreign enemies threatening the United States and its citizens, enemies such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS—ya know, the kind of individuals and organizations that commit mass murder as their day job.

The Biden Regime is now turning the full apparatus of America’s security state against ordinary American citizens who are challenging the hegemony of America’s Education-Industrial Complex. Dissenting parents who are unhappy with the substance and method by which their children are being taught are now to be designated and possibly prosecuted as domestic terrorists! To wit: the FBI and the National Security Division will now be in charge of monitoring school board meetings and parent organizations around the United States.

But we need to be crystal clear about who these alleged “terrorists” really are. Have you ever wondered what the new Merrick Garland version of a “domestic terrorist” looks and sounds like? You might start by taking a good look at your mother, your wife, your sister, or your daughter. 

Where will all this lead? Should we not treat “domestic terrorists” in the same way that we treat international terrorists? (Asking for a friend.) I’m told there are now a lot of empty bunks (with a view) at Guantanamo Bay. Should America’s domestic terrorists receive the full Khalid Sheikh Mohammed treatment? 

But even if it were true that there have been a few isolated threats of physical violence, how is this an issue for the FBI and the full apparatus of the National Security State rather than for local law enforcement? It’s not. This is massive power grab and a serious threat to the rights and liberties of millions of ordinary Americans.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We all know what this is and is not about. It’s NOT about alleged threats of violence against school board members. It’s about targeting political opponents, criminalizing dissent, and weaponizing the FBI and the National Security State against parents who are protesting peacefully and lawfully against indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. It’s about turning complaining parents into domestic terrorists for the crime of being parents. It’s about turning America’s mothers into the legal equivalent of Islamic jihadists. It’s about intimidating parents. It’s about using the coercive force of the State against our First Amendment rights to free speech, to assemble peaceably, and to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It’s about silencing parental opposition to the Education Establishment. Make no mistake about it, that’s what this about.

Hans Bader:

The highlighted passages were highlighted by Professor Russell Skiba, in an attachment to his May 28, 2021 2:25 AM email to Carolyn Seugling of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and James Eichner of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The Education Department sought out Skiba’s advice.

Skiba notes that the School Safety Commission report is “highlighted with a corresponding comment” from Skiba at various places. But the Education Department failed to turn over Skiba’s comments along with the highlighted text it corresponds to, so what Skiba said in response to these passages of the School Safety Commission report is an enigma. (In withholding these comments, the Education Department violated FOIA, perhaps inadvertently. Yesterday, I asked it to turn over the comments, but have gotten no response yet.).

Skiba does not appear to have taken issue with the passage saying that “research studies reveal that black youth, in comparison with their white counterparts, are … disproportionately involved in delinquency and crime … and are more likely to behave in ways that interfere with classroom and school functioning.” Skiba has taken issue with the idea that the racial gap in suspensions is “completely accounted” for by racial differences in behavior.

But Skiba himself does not claim that “students of color as a whole” have the exact same rate of misbehavior as whites, in the emails produced by the Education Department. Indeed, in his remarks at a May 11 Education Department event, Skiba admitted that rates of student misbehavior play a role in racial disparities in school discipline rates (although he argued that rates of student misbehavior were not among the top two factors driving such disparities. He argued on May 11 that racial disparities in discipline rates are caused more by other factors, such as school-to-school differences in discipline policy (such as harsher discipline at high-poverty, heavily non-white schools), and racial bias.

Moreover, Skiba’s email approvingly encloses an academic article that undercuts the idea that “students of color as a whole” have exactly the same misconduct rate as their white peers. (See Welsh & Little, The School Discipline Dilemma, 88 Review of Educational Research 752 (2018)).

That article states:

John Londregan and Sergiu Klainerman:

The video/site includes a two-minute discourse in which classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peraltacharacterizes free speech as a “privilege,” rather than a right, and in which he disparages the speech of others with whom he disagrees as “masculine-ized bravado.” Padilla Peralta goes on to extol “free speech and intellectual discourse that is [sic] flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.”

While he is certainly entitled to his opinions, the absence of other perspectives on free speech suggests a jaundiced version of our fundamental commitment to free speech, codified in Princeton’s “Rights, Rules and Responsibilities” document.

Wesley Yang:

Some of these measures almost certainly violate the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The courts brushed them back in certain cases and will likely continue to do so as challenges emerge. But that we enacted them is a victory for those seeking the drastic expansion of what they call “race-conscious policy” beyond the relatively constrained area in which affirmative action in college admissions, government contracting, and hiring has been allowed to operate. 

Among Biden’s first acts in office was to issue an executive order that has been taken as a warrant by those keen to extend this mandate further—into the provision of medical services by race and other areas to equalize outcomes wherever statistical disparities in outcome persist. Those disparities were henceforth to be understood as the product of a foundational, pervasive, trans-historical, and unyielding racism that can only be dislodged through the overt distribution of opportunity and reward by race in pursuit of “equity”, which has displaced mere equality as the aim of racial activism. 

The installation of these policies, and the sea-change in elite consensus that they enact, happened with little public deliberation or debate. Instead, we saw the policing of contrary views out of circulation, first by administrative authorities at universities, and later through broader campaigns to stigmatize the common moral intuitions of a supermajority of the American public. What were once held to be “colorblind ideals” of impartial treatment on the basis of individual attributes have been reclassified as a form of white supremacy on the “pyramid of white supremacy” presented as dogma in now pervasive diversity, equity, and inclusion training sessions. 

It took a decade or so for the theory of “colorblind racism” to move from academia to corporate America, and another half-decade for it to be explicitly endorsed by the federal government. It amounts to a quiet overturning of the post-1964 racial consensus. “Cancel culture”, which has created a situation in which 62 percent of the American public told pollsters that they afraid to share their political opinions, was always simply a means to an end—the noisy herald of a mandated adherence to new dogmas to come. The agenda is here today, in the process of being rolled out at scale across a range of institutions, including K-12 schools. The means must therefore be judged in relation to the ends they have secured. They have already begun to transform the schools and to exert influence over law enforcement in ways that are changing the character of education and city life.

Hams Bader:

The Biden administration is expected to reinstate the Obama administration’s 2014 school-discipline guidelines, which prodded schools to suspend all racial groups at the same rate, even if there was more misbehavior among students of one race than another. In response to those guidelines, and worried about being investigated by the Education Department, some school officials adopted unconstitutional racial quotas for school suspensions, or mandated special review of any suspensions of black or Hispanic students, effectively creating special privileges based on race.

The Biden administration renewed this pressure for quotas on June 4, by issuing a notice that called for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary actions in contrast to their White peers.” It further implied that there are no racial differences in misbehavior rates, even though studies and surveys show that black students do have higher rates of misbehavior in school. It cited a controversial report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that claimed that “Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.”

But as the Washington Post noted in 2019, the Commission never showed that claim was true. The Commission’s chairwoman, who is now Biden’s nominee to head the Office for Civil Rights, “pointed to a few spots” in the Commission’s report to “claim that there are no underlying differences in student behavior. But those citations did not offer such evidence. One set of data referenced in the report showed the opposite,” noted The Post.

Robby Soave:

From 2013 to 2017, the task of enforcing Title IX—the federal statute that prohibits sex and gender-based discrimination in public education—fell to Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights within President Barack Obama’s Education Department.

Continuing the work of her predecessors, Lhamon’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) compelled colleges and universities to adopt sexual misconduct procedures that violated the due process and free speech rights of accused students and professors. Under her authority, the federal government pressured schools to adopt the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, discourage attorneys from becoming involved, and move toward an adjudication model that relied upon the testimony of a single campus bureaucrat vested with investigative powers. When Betsy DeVos became secretary of education under President Donald Trump, she swiftly moved to reverse the agency’s Title IX guidance and restore basic fairness to these proceedings.

But now that Joe Biden is in the White House, he’s giving Lhamon her old job back: Last week, the president appointed her to be assistant secretary for civil rights once again.

“Lhamon’s nomination is the latest example of the White House steering civil rights policy back toward the Obama administration’s approach and is likely to please advocacy groups for victims of sexual assault and civil rights organizations,” noted NBC News.

Assuming the Senate confirms her, Lhamon will be well-positioned to erode DeVos’ reforms. As such, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called on the Senate to vote her down.

Michael Eric Dyson:

The struggles of the Black American narrative — the arc from slavery to Barack Obama — are celebrated, contested and even sometimes disparaged. But there’s no denying that this narrative is well-known. We all grasp the importance of Black history to the American story, even if we argue over the proper emphasis.

The relationship between Asian American and Pacific Islanders and their place in American history is not, to many, nearly as obvious. The American racial conversation, in which African Americans are the default minority group, has impoverished our understanding of — and provided a poor platform for — the stories of others.

That is why, in a year with thousands of anti-Asian assaults, civil rights violations and instances of verbal harassment reported even before the Atlanta area shootings this month — in which six of the eight slain were women of Asian descent — most Americans are just beginning to engage with the Asian American struggle. That is why we sense that race is near the core of the Atlanta killings but have a harder time putting the tragedy in context or agreeing on whether these were, in a legal sense, hate crimes. That is why President Donald Trump wasn’t immediately drummed out of public life after calling covid-19 a “Chinese virus” or “kung flu” and appearing to give sanction to those who would exclude or attack people of Asian ancestry, rather than affirming Asian Americans’ place in the American family.

In our popular imagination, the snarling legacy of disenfranchisement does not as easily attach to Asian America, writ large. Asian Americans were not wiped out, like Native Americans, under the marauding imperatives of empire. A Civil War was not waged over their previous condition of servitude. There is not an Asian American figure as universally lauded for his contributions as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or, for that matter, Mexican American civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, whose likeness now sits behind President Biden in the Oval Office. But the impact of systemic racism in Asian American history is still right there: Los Angeles’s “Chinese Massacre,” a mass lynching in 1871 fueled by propaganda that Chinese Americans were “barbarians taking jobs away from whites”; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Vietnamese commercial fishermen in Texas facing racist confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s; six people gunned down at a Wisconsin Sikh temple in 2012.

James Bovard:

Federal repression got a seal of approval from an organization long renowned for its uncompromising defense of free speech. Scott Michelman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington D.C. office, told the Post:

It’s no question that closing off public spaces, even for a limited time, affects people’s ability to exercise their free-speech rights, but at the same time, the government is permitted to carry out temporary targeted closures of common areas when they have a good reason and aren’t trying to favor one viewpoint over another. If they close the Mall for the inauguration based on a threat, the First Amendment doesn’t prohibit that. If they close the Mall for all of 2021 because there was a threat in January, that is very likely to be overly restrictive.

Very likely? At least the ACLU didn’t endorse shutting down the Mall for the entirety of Biden’s presidency. But neither the federal government nor the District of Columbia government provided clear evidence of an imminent threat that would justify shutting down the Mall and effectively banning protest throughout the vast “Green Zone” that the feds had declared for the Biden inauguration. 

The ACLU sounded happy to see protests suppressed so long as pro-Trump activists were kept off of the streets and the Mall. Michelman explained: “It can be just as chilling for many would-be demonstrators to know that they’re going to be met with violent counterprotesters as it would be if they were to be met with state violence. Nobody wins when insurrectionists storm the Capitol and wanton violence plays out on the streets of the nation’s capital. That’s not free speech, and that’s not conducive to anyone’s free speech.” 

Alec Johnson:

“Of course I agree with the statement (Black lives matter),” but the Black Lives Matter organization is “not something that I as a conservative can or will ever support,” Damico wrote, adding he compared the group to the KKK. 

The comparison is one others such as a New York assemblyman and a sandwich shop owner in California have also come under fire for making.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded at the end of the Civil War, is an American hate group with Black Americans the Klan’s primary target, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, a U.S. nonprofit organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups, said the KKK was formed to intimidate Southern Blacks to prevent them from enjoying basic civil rights. 

Black Lives Matter is a global organization whose goal is to eradicate white supremacy, its website says. BLM was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in Florida. The organization is in the spotlight in the aftermath of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis, a Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while in police custody. Protesters have called for an end to racial injustice and have chanted “Black lives matter.”

Damico, who was the assistant coach for three seasons, said Germantown High School Athletic Director Sara Unertl told him the district was concerned about his Facebook posts, some of which also referenced “rioting and looting,” and “most having firearm references.” 

Jay Schweickert:

This morning, the Supreme Court denied all of the major cert petitions raising the question of whether qualified immunity should be reconsidered. This is, to put it bluntly, a shocking dereliction of duty. As Cato has argued for years, qualified immunity is an atextual, ahistorical judicial invention, which shields public officials from liability, even when they break the law. The doctrine not only denies justice to victims whose rights have been violated, but also exacerbates our crisis of confidence in law enforcement. By holding police officers to a far lower standard of accountability than ordinary citizens, qualified immunity deprives the entire law enforcement community of the public trust and credibility they need to do their jobs safely and effectively.

There was simply no excuse for the Court to decline this golden opportunity to begin addressing its mistakes in creating and propagating the doctrine of qualified immunity. The petitions before the Court plainly demonstrated both the moral injustices and practical absurdities of the “clearly established law” standard. In Corbitt v. Vickers, for example, the Supreme Court let stand an Eleventh Circuit decisiongranting immunity to a police officer who shot a ten‐year‐old child in the back of the knee, while repeatedly attempting to shoot a pet dog that wasn’t threatening anyone. And in Baxter v. Bracey, the Court let stand a Sixth Circuit decision which said that a prior case holding it unconstitutional for police to deploy a canine against a suspect who had surrendered by lying on the ground did not “clearly establish” that it was unlawful for police to deploy a canine against a suspect who had surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up.

Christy Clark:

The University of California Los Angeles has launched an inquiry into a teacher for reading aloud Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” because the civil rights document includes the n-word.

In a department-wide email obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, UCLA political science chair Michael Chwe and two other department leaders condemned lecturer W. Ajax Peris’s use of the racially incendiary word in a lecture he was delivering about the history of racism against African Americans. UCLA officials said the department referred Peris, an Air Force veteran, to the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office (DPO) and urged students to come forward with complaints. The email also faulted the postdoctoral lecturer for showing a documentary to the class in which a lynching is described and not stopping the presentation when students complained.

Patrick Jaicomo and Anya Bidwell:

The Supreme Court created qualified immunity in 1982. With that novel invention, the court granted all government officials immunity for violating constitutional and civil rights unless the victims of those violations can show that the rights were “clearly established.”

A virtually unlimited protection

Although innocuous sounding, the clearly established test is a legal obstacle nearly impossible to overcome. It requires a victim to identify an earlier decision by the Supreme Court, or a federal appeals court in the same jurisdiction holding that precisely the same conduct under the same circumstances is illegal or unconstitutional. If none exists, the official is immune. Whether the official’s actions are unconstitutional, intentional or malicious is irrelevant to the test.

Clark Neilly:

In determining the relationship between government and governed, one of the most important decisions a society can make is how accountable those who wield official power must be to those against whom that power is wielded. Congress made a clear choice in that regard when it passed the Enforcement Act of 1871, which we now call “Section 1983” after its location in the U.S. Code. Simply put, Section 1983 creates a standard of strict liability by providing that state actors “shall be liable to the party injured” for “the deprivation of any rights.” Thus, if a police officer walks up to your house and peeks inside one of your windows without a warrant—a clear violation of your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches—he is liable to you for the violation of that right.

But many conservatives do an odd thing: In their preference for a more forgiving policy that gives police and other government officials substantial leeway in the exercise of discretion, they abandon their stated commitment to textualism and embrace an “interpretation” of Section 1983 that is utterly divorced from its text. The vehicle for this conservative brand of what we might call “living statutory interpretivism” is the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity doctrine, which judicially amends Section 1983 to provide that the standard for liability will no longer be the deprivation of “any rights”—as Congress expressly provided—but rather the deprivation of any “clearly established” rights.

As documented in considerable detail on Cato’s Unlawful Shield website, those two words—“clearly established”—do an extraordinary amount of work in keeping meritorious cases out of court and ensuring that plaintiffs whose rights have been violated by police or other state actors will receive no recovery unless they can find a pre-existing case in the jurisdiction with nearly identical facts. But that is plainly not the statute that Congress wrote, nor is it the standard of accountability that Congress chose. Moreover, as Professor Will Baude demonstrates in his masterful article, “Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful?,” there is no credible textual or historical basis for the qualified immunity doctrine; it is a blatant act of pro-government judicial policymaking—activism, if you will—and nothing more.

David Kaye:

Today, Facebook announced the first panelists – the judges of what Mark Zuckerberg once, perhaps to his regret, called the Facebook Supreme Court – of its newly created Oversight Board. An external body with the power, according to its draft charter, “to reverse Facebook’s decisions about whether to allow or remove certain posts on the platform,” the group is more impressive than a skeptic could have imagined. Its participants may lean toward the United States and Europe, but there is global participation.

I know some of the panelists as friends and colleagues, several who are major figures in the world of human rights law and advocacy. As examples:

▪ Catalina Botero, one of the four co-chairs, is the former Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression in the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and a leading jurist in Colombia.

▪ Maina Kiai is a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and a leading figure in Kenyan civil society.

▪ Evelyn Aswad, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was a key member of the State Department’s legal office dealing with human rights issues and has written trenchantly about the role of human rights in content moderation.

▪ Julie Owono leads the Paris-based Internet Sans Frontiers and knows as much as anyone about digital rights, especially in Africa.

▪ Nighat Dad has fought for digital rights as a lawyer in Pakistan for years and is deservedly well-known internationally for her brave advocacy for online freedom of expression.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed a UW-Madison case in November because of the agency’s inability to contact the person who filed the complaint to get information relevant to the investigation, according to a department spokesperson.

Federal and university officials declined this week to provide details on the closed case, which was launched in May 2016.

A federal student privacy law prevents the university from sharing specifics, UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith McGlone said. She noted the university uses timely and fair policies and practices to investigate allegations of sexual assault.

A survey of UW-Madison students released last fall found that about one in four responding undergraduate women reported they had experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact during their time at the university, while 11% had been raped. The survey also showed students reporting higher levels of knowledge about sexual assault and campus resources than a similar survey conducted in 2015.

Jasmine Snow:

The University of Minnesota and other universities across the country are under fire with claims of discrimination against men in STEM programs.

The Chicago Office for Civil Rights under the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into the University last month for possible Title IX violations against men. The investigation comes after complaints were filed by University alumnus and University of Michigan-Flint professor Mark Perry.

The complaints are in regards to three female-only faculty awards — the Mullen/Spector/Truax Women’s Leadership Award, the Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Award and the Sara Evans Faculty Woman Scholar/Leader Award — that he claims are illegal under Title IX.

But some members of the University’s College of Science and Engineering say women’s awards and programs help promote diversity within the college.

Katharina Fransen, a senior majoring in chemical engineering and the treasurer of the University’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, said the issue might not be as simple as Perry makes it out to be.

Dorian Lynskey:

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World used to be seen as mutually exclusive dystopias. In 1984, however, while Neil Postman was writing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley’s biographer Sybille Bedford came to a different conclusion, describing the choice as a false binary: “We have entered the age of mixed tyrannies.” By this she meant that the modern power-seeker would assemble whatever combination of coercion, seduction and distraction proved most effective.

Effectiveness is one of the watchwords of Vladimir Putin’s mixed tyranny, or “managed democracy.” Since first becoming Russia’s president in 2000, buoyed by a craving for strength and stability after the nerve-grinding upheavals of the post-communist 90s, the former KGB officer has gradually brought back such features of the old regime as leader-worship, martial parades, mass arrests, show trials, political prisoners, territorial aggression, the one-party state, censorship, Newspeak and endemic paranoia. In 2012, Putin declared his dream of building a Russian-led replacement for the European Union, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” unbound by such bothersome concepts as human rights and free and fair elections. Inspired by the fascist thinker Aleksandr Dugin, he called it Eurasia. In 2014, Stalin’s posthumous approval rating in Russia reached a new peak of 52 percent, proving beyond doubt that Homo Sovieticus had outlived the Soviet Union.

Putin’s justification is, of course, different from Stalin’s—nationalism and cultural conservatism rather than Marxist ideology—and his execution less brutish, retaining the pretense of freedom of speech and political opposition. The aim of his brand of authoritarianism is not total control but effective control. In his last substantial interview before his death in 2005, the great reformer Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev called Russia’s weakness for strong leaders a “disease” and bemoaned its backsliding towards a centralized state at the expense of a healthy society. “If the state so wishes, the society will be civil, or semicivil, or nothing but a herd,” he said. “Look to Orwell for a good description of this.” Yes, but look to Huxley, too.

Christina Gomez Schmidt:

Why is this a problem? Earlier this year, the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board highlighted a concerning outflux of students from the Madison Metropolitan School District. Safety concerns might be partly to blame. But a glaring absence of consistent academic challenge in the typical school day no doubt contributes. Despite common knowledge of this lack of rigor, misconceptions over equity issues have limited progress in this area for decades. This has resulted in little action to address significant disparities at the highest levels of achievement.

In 2016, MMSD signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to resolve a two-year formal compliance review. This investigation focused on racial disparities in advanced coursework enrollment in MMSD high schools. The agreement requires the district to take steps to increase both access to and preparation for advanced coursework for black and Latino students. The OCR has said this must include boosting participation in any foundational courses that prepare students to be successful at an advanced level in high school.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Jim Schutze:

It’s sort of remarkable, is it not, almost as if they have a small research team somewhere in the city attorney’s office. Twice a year someone tells them, “Scour the books for something Groden isn’t doing wrong so we can charge him with it and get ourselves kicked out of court again.”

Kizzia is a major piece of the puzzle here, having stuck by Groden over many years. It was Kizzia’s cross-examination in the federal civil rights case that elicited damning testimony from a Dallas police officer. He confessed that he and his superiors knew Groden had broken no law when they jailed him six years ago.

When the arresting officer reported to his superior that Groden had been forced to go without prescribed medications in jail all night, the superior officer praised him for a job well done.

The battle between Dallas City Hall and Groden probably is not well known within our municipal borders, because the city’s only daily newspaper and other major media here have given it scant attention. But beyond our borders, the story grows. Last year Dutch documentarian Kasper Verkaik debuted his film about Groden and Dallas City Hall, Plaza Man, which has since been well received in international festivals. (Dallas City Hall is not the hero.) And in the online universe, the saga of Groden and Dallas City Hall has become Kennedy assassination equivalent of a Mexican corrido ballad.

Dallas did beat Kizzia in one round. In federal district court here, former federal District Judge Royal Ferguson ruled that Groden could not sue the city because he was unable to identify the top-most city official originally responsible for the campaign of persecution against him. But the appeals court tossed Ferguson’s ruling and sent the case back to Dallas for a fresh trial with the city as a defendant.

Hannah Adely:

The last of four students who sued Fordham University over the denial of a Palestinian rights club will graduate this month, but the court battle is not over.

Sophomore Veer Shetty has asked to join the two-year old lawsuit, and the university is going to court on Wednesday to try to stop him.

“It would be a travesty if we weren’t able to have the club on campus just because all the people suing have graduated,” Shetty said in a recent interview. “I was happy to step in.”

Led by New Jersey plaintiff Ahmad Awad, the students sued in April 2017, arguing that Fordham ignored its guidelines and practiced viewpoint discrimination when it denied them permission to start a Students for Justice in Palestine club. Fordham argued that it doesn’t have to abide by free-speech law as a private university.

The case underscores the difficulties students face when trying to organize around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian rights movement has grown on campuses across the country but faces intense opposition from pro-Israel groups. Activists have been smeared online as terrorist supporters, received threatening letters and faced pressure to shut down events.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office expanded its definition of anti-Semitism to include certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Jewish speech. Pro-Israel groups say the protections are needed because activists vilify Israel and have created a hostile environment.

Activists, though, say their free speech is being restricted.

Bob Moser:

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly.

More, here.

Brian Doherty:

From the start, lawyers and others pointed out that it was very unlikely indeed that all the arrested had committed any crimes at all, and that the initial $1 million bond for all of them charged with a blanket crime of “engaging in organized criminal activity” seemed unreasonably punitive. The police strove in the aftermath to keep a detailed account of what actually happened from reaching the public eye, or that of defense attorneys.

As the years under which those people had criminal charges hanging over their heads went by—with all the problems that come with that on top of the missed work and rent and family responsibilities that bedeviled them from their initial time in custody under that absurd bond—dozens of the arrested went unindicted as grand juries expired, and last year charges began to be dropped against many of the defendants, with not a single successful prosecution having happened yet nearly four years after the mass arrests.

Many of the bikers who had charges eventually dropped have filed civil rights suits against local police and district attorneys over the absurd arrests and incredibly long times to get any of them to trial.

This week the whole case continued its painfully slow unraveling, as three more bikers, the last still facing that first set of indictments, saw their cases dismissed. A team of special prosecutors eventually assigned to the case declared that the initial mass arrests seemed, in the words of one of them, Brian Roberts, “simply a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality….I can’t imagine what (former McLennan County DA) Abel Reyna was thinking other than this was a big case and it was somehow going to be beneficial for him or his office,” the Waco Tribune reports.

the fire:

Colleges and universities across the country are failing to afford their students due process and fundamental fairness in their disciplinary proceedings. These institutions investigate and punish offenses ranging from vandalism and housing violations to felonious acts of sexual assault, handling many cases that are arguably better left to courts and law enforcement. But their willingness to administer what is effectively a shadow justice system has not been accompanied by a willingness to provide even the most basic procedural protections necessary to fairly adjudicate accusations of serious wrongdoing.

In November 2018, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights proposed new federal regulations that would require schools to provide many procedural safeguards in sexual misconduct cases. If the regulations are enacted as proposed, a fairer status quo might be on the horizon. But for now, most institutions of higher education maintain disciplinary policies and procedures that fail all students involved.

Christina Hoff Summers:

Title IX, the 1972 legislation banning sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal financial support, was a reasonable equality-of-opportunity law in its original form. So what explains the scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports carried out in its name? Why has it been used to deny students and professors due process and free speech in sexual harassment cases? When a Massachusetts district court judge reviewed Brandeis University’s Title IX–inspired harassment proceedings, he declared them “closer to Salem 1692, than Boston 2015.”

How did we get here?

I have been reading and writing about weird applications of Title IX for years. Until now, I didn’t fully understand the source of the weirdness. In his new book, The Transformation of Title IX, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick provides the answer: the transformation happened slowly and incrementally and involved a strange symbiosis between government officials, federal judges, and activists. Melnick’s calm, lucid analysis shows how a law once intended to increase educational and athletic opportunities for girls and women came to diminish those opportunities for men and women alike.

Responsibility for administering Title IX falls to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). This small agency has the power to issue rules and regulations and to deny federal funding to schools that fail to meet them. But Congress has placed clear constraints on OCR rule making. New rules must be approved by the president after a “notice-and-comment” proceeding that allows affected parties—colleges and universities, civil liberties organizations, policymakers, activist groups, students, parents—to ask questions, raise objections, and request clarifications and revisions to proposed rules before they become binding policy.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e:

What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per se, as with our schools. Cultural meltdown afflicts both sets of institutions. But each also inflames the other.

What is the crisis in K-12 education? There is, of course, a faction within the profession that insists there is no crisis, that the schools are getting a bum rap, that they’re doing a good enough job, or as good a job as they ever did, or as good a job as our nasty, Philistine society deserves, or as good a job as they can, given the decay of parents and families, or as good a job as the money we are giving them will buy, and so on. There is a popular book in educator-land called The Manufactured Crisis which trots out all these arguments and adds that the unwarranted criticism of U.S. schools is the result of a Machiavellian rightwing plot to discredit public education in order to replace it with vouchers, for-profit schools, home schooling, and other variations.

Most Americans, though, agree that we have a crisis in K-12 education. Employers say so. College admissions officers and professors say so. Elected officials at every level say so. A number of honest educators say so. And lots and lots of surveys make plain that most of the public believes this to be the case and, incidentally, is out there busily seeking alternatives to mediocre schools for their own kids.

People highlight various aspects of the crisis. For some, discipline, violence, and drug issues are paramount. For some, it is the collapse of big city school systems. This critique is usually brought by people who (wrongly, in my view) suppose that rural and suburban schools are doing a good enough job. For some, it is character issues like cheating. For some it is dropouts and other forms of non-completion. All of these are genuine problems and they all affect the colleges. But the core of the K-12 crisis is the weak academic skills and knowledge of a huge fraction of high school graduates, the tiny fraction who are truly well educated, and the sizable fraction who are more or less illiterate at the end of twelve or thirteen years of schooling.

That is the first of ten elements of the K-12 crisis with special salience for the college curriculum. What does it mean to enroll a freshman who does not know when or why the [U.S.] Civil War was fought, who has never written a paper longer than a couple of pages, whose math goes only to algebra, whose acquaintance with literature is more apt to involve Maya Angelou and maybe Hemingway than Dickens, Faulkner, or Milton, who cannot distinguish Dred Scott from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and who could not accurately locate more than six countries if handed a blank map of the world?

What does it mean for the college curriculum? Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it means that the college curriculum is forced—like it or not—to become more like what the high school curriculum ought to be. College becomes the place to get a secondary education just as, for many young people, high school is the place for a primary education. Is it any surprise that many employers, wanting to hire people with a bona fide tertiary education, are insisting on postgraduate degrees?

Second, young people entering our colleges are unaccustomed, by virtue of their K-12 education, to serious intellectual standards. They are well accustomed to praise, deserved or not. Middle school classrooms dripping with self-esteem, something called “emotional intelligence,” and other forms of affective learning turn into grade inflation in college. Try giving these students a C or D—or even a B—and see what reaction you get. Not only have they been allowed to get by with slovenly academic work, they have also been told they’re fantastic. Which is, of course, why, in all those international comparisons our kids do so much better on the self-regard measures than on actual performance.

Third, they are not used to working hard. They got through school without rewriting papers, without doing long division by hand (they had calculators), without wrestling with difficult texts, or without burning the midnight oil at the library. Lots of them had jobs, they had boyfriends, they were on athletic teams, they partied a lot. They may have been busy as can be, but many of them minored in academics while in high school. They are used to coasting—and getting by.

Fourth, school has not nurtured their character, their virtues, their values, or their moral fiber. Lots of schooling is still self-consciously value-neutral and lots of teachers are still self-conscious about “imposing values” on their students. The curriculum encourages relativism, too. So concepts of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, noble and villainous—these distinctions may be a little murky to arriving college students, unless they picked them up in church or at home.

Fifth, they do not have good study habits. They did not need them to make a go of high school. Often they could avoid homework, cram at the last minute for tests, avoid participating in class discussions, borrow term papers from the Internet, and use plot summaries and other short cuts rather than wrestling with the textbook, much less an original text. If, like many schools, theirs emphasized group work and cooperative learning, and minimized competition and individual attainment, then they are accustomed to sharing the work, not doing it themselves and being held accountable.

Sixth, they have received an ample dose, if not an overdose, of political correctness, multiculturalism, and other ideologies before they’ve even reached the ivy-covered walls. They learned to be nice, to be sensitive, to be inclusive, and not to say anything offensive or provocative. They did not learn it only from high school, of course. As Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia made painfully clear in a brilliant Harper’s essay, much of this worldview comes from television. But today’s schooling contributes its fair share and more.

Seventh, if they went to a typical U.S. high school, they are used to a curricular smorgasbord and are probably unacquainted, or minimally acquainted, with some core subjects. They may have taken bachelor living instead of civics, consumer math instead of geometry, black history instead of ancient history, and psychology instead of physics. They very likely took some technical or vocational or “school to work” classes instead of a comprehensive program in the liberal arts. Yes, they had to satisfy certain graduation requirements, but if psychology counts as science and journalism counts as English, why take the real stuff?

Eighth, they’re accustomed to mediocre teaching. They may have had a favorite teacher, perhaps a great, inspiring, deeply knowledgeable teacher. Jaime Escalante is not the only such, after all, among 2.7 million teachers in U.S. schools. But the odds are that a number of their teachers were time-servers, not terribly sophisticated about their own fields, and perhaps more interested in whether kids are properly entertained, enjoyed the class, and were feeling good about themselves, than in how much they learned from it.

Ninth, college-bound students are not accustomed to many consequences. They are not used to feeling that it really matters in their lives whether they study hard, learn a lot, and get top marks in hard subjects, or coast along with so-so grades in fluffy courses. They know that results count in some domains—like sports—but not in class.

I have turned into something of a behaviorist. I do not believe that anything has really been taught unless it was learned, nor do I think that educational reform is real until and unless it actually boosts student achievement. And I do not expect that to happen until young people actually alter their behavior: take different courses, study harder, and rise to higher standards. But what is going to alter their behavior if their real world continues to signal that it does not make any difference, that there are few tangible rewards for learning more, and practically no unpleasant consequences for learning very little? What does that say to a sixteen-year-old faced with a choice between rewriting his lab report and studying for his history test, or going out with his friends. Sixteen-year-olds, in their own peculiar way, are rational beings. They are forever going through a crude calculus that boils down to “does it really matter?” The answer we keep giving them is no, it doesn’t, not unless they’re part of that small sub-set of the sixteen-year-old population that is gunning for admission to our handful of truly competitive colleges and universities.

This may not be well understood by intellectuals, so many of whom have kids in that little pool of aspirants to Princeton and Stanford and Amherst. For those young people, yes, it makes a difference how they spend their Tuesday evenings, and most of them know it. But what about everyone else?

Third grade teachers can fake it with eight-year-olds by handing out gold stars and threatening them with summer school. To some extent, school systems can even fake it with teenagers by telling them that they are not going to graduate unless they pass certain tests or take certain courses. More and more of that is happening around the K-12 system. But it is all a bit unreal—a bit fake—because the sprawling U.S. higher education complex keeps whispering in kids’ ears, “Never mind, we’ll be glad to have you anyway.”

Tenth, finally, our young people are thoroughly accustomed, long before they reach the university classroom, to the educational regimen that E.D. Hirsch calls romantic naturalism—a product of Rousseau and Dewey and the rest of the Teachers College faculty of eighty years ago, but still the regnant intellectual theology of the education profession. Let us abjure a long excursion into this “thoughtworld,” as Hirsch terms it, and not rehash its lack of any serious scientific moorings. Its immediate relevance is that kids are coming out of school having been told that all they need to learn is what they feel like learning, that their teachers are escorts or facilitators, not instructors, that knowledge is pretty much whatever they’d like it to be, and that their feelings and sentiments are as valid as anything that might be termed successive approximations of objective truth, if indeed there is any such thing as truth.

What are the implications of all this for the college curriculum? To reduce it to a sentence, our universities are having to build a house atop a cracked and incomplete foundation.

How much repouring of the foundation does the university undertake? At whose expense? Instead of what? Does the remedial work count for credit? If so, does it subtract from the amount of so-called college level work that is expected, or does it add to the total, thus taking more time and demanding additional resources? Or does the college give up? Or try to do something altogether different, not repairing the foundation but, let’s say, pouring a slab and proceeding to build?

I have my own view of all this, but I know it is naive, my own form of romantic utopianism. My view is that the colleges should leverage the K-12 system to make the kinds of changes that both systems (not to mention the larger society) urgently need.

Shoulder-to-shoulder the nation’s universities should stand, proclaiming as with a single voice that, starting some reasonable number of years in the future, none will admit any student (under the age of, say, thirty) who cannot demonstrate mastery of certain specified skills and knowledge. If that demand were honestly enforced, it would have a dramatic, catalytic effect on the nation’s high schools, one that would reverberate back through the elementary schools. And if major employers were to make common cause with the institutions of higher education, the effect would be more dramatic still. The second-order effects on our colleges and universities would be striking as well.

But it is not going to happen. Employers would cite legal reasons, civil rights reasons, business reasons. Interest groups and editorialists will talk about equal opportunity. As for the colleges—well, their need for students is greater than their need for standards. So the higher education system is apt instead to persist in its peculiar love-hate relationship with the K-12 system, complaining about the system’s products while contributing to and exacerbating in myriad ways the bad habits and fallacies that produced them.

The worst of higher education’s crimes against the K-12 system is the abandonment of entry standards, which of course is a corollary of the universalization of access to higher education within the United States.

Let me be clear. I am not opposed to everyone’s having a shot at a college education. I do not begrudge financial aid measures that make it possible for many people to enroll. What I oppose is the devastation that is wrought on high school standards—and thereby, on primary school standards—by the widespread understanding that all can go to college even if they do not learn a doggone thing in school. The greatest tragedy of open admissions is not what it does to the colleges but what it does to the schools and to efforts to reform them. By holding the schools harmless from their own shortcomings, and signaling that young people are welcome in our colleges—well, some colleges—regardless of what they took or how much they learned or how hard they worked in high school, the endless expansion of higher education fatally undermines the prospects of doing anything about our schools. Moreover, it contributes to what we might term the “highschoolization” of colleges themselves. (Of course, it we come to count on our colleges to provide secondary education, then it is not unreasonable to expect access to them to be universal. I think President Clinton, among others, has figured that out, though of course he never says it that way.)

Admissions standards, or their absence, have a profound effect on the schools, and are the first of five ways in which the crisis of the college curriculum adversely affects the K-12 system.

Second, the university’s intellectual and curricular fashions have a trickle down effect. Every idea that seeps down through the academic limestone eventually creates stalactites within the K-12 curriculum. The whole postmodern intellectual enterprise has infected what is taught in grade schools. Deconstructionism in the university become constructivism in fourth grade—both progeny of the same ancestors. Where do “fuzzy” math, cooperative learning, whole language reading, and “history from the victim’s standpoint” come from? Where did those wretched national history standards come from? Whence cometh the emphasis on so-called higher order thinking skills and the scorn for specific knowledge and facts? They are all gifts that higher education has bestowed on the schools.

Third, there is the disaster area of teacher training. Upwards of a hundred thousand education degrees are awarded by U.S. colleges and universities. People in the arts and sciences sometimes delude themselves into believing that the dreadful, wrong-headed content and low standards built into most of these degrees are the problem of some other wing of the university. Perhaps so. But I do not see how any serious discussion of the college curriculum can proceed to cloture without at least pondering the intellectual carnage of our education schools. Somebody in higher education has got to be responsible for that!

Consider that a new first grade teacher with twenty-five kids in her class, if she remains in the profession for thirty years, will profoundly affect the lives and educational futures of 750 youngsters. If she is a high school teacher with, say, 100 students a year, the number whose lives she will touch over the course of a classroom career rises to 3,000. Where did she get her own education? Who decided what she needs to know before being turned loose on children? Who decided when she had learned enough of it? Who trained the principals and department heads who will supervise her? Who supplies the “in service” training and “professional development” that will salt her career? Who writes the textbooks that she will use and the professional journals that she will read? These are all the responsibility of the university and its faculty. The K-12 virus that has sickened and will infect generations of future students in the university can be traced right back to the university campus itself.

Fourth, permissiveness with respect to behavior and morality also trickles down. If it is taken for granted on the college campus that it is fine for eighteen-year-olds to indulge in drugs, sex, binge drinking, class-cutting, over-sleeping, and all the rest, it is naive to think that seventeen-year-olds on the high school campus will not adopt the same practices. Which means that fifteen-year-olds, and thirteen-year-olds, and eleven-year-olds, and so on down through the grades, will do their version of the same things. If the college winks at state drinking laws, why shouldn’t the high school? If the college sophomore in the family boasts about his exploits, what do you suppose will be the effect on the high school sophomore who is his younger sister or brother? What are the effects on parents trying to bring their kids up properly?

Fifth, and finally, the university is the wellspring of such social and political values of the K-12 curriculum as multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, scorn for patriotism, affection for governmental solutions to all problems, and so forth. These creep into fourth-grade textbooks, into the videos and television programs that teachers show, into the magazines and newspapers and workbooks that they assign, and into the belief structure of the teachers themselves. Indeed, the activist groups that seek to propagate those values throughout the society are especially eager to target the young and vulnerable. Thus “peace education” has evolved into conflict-resolution courses and science and geography classes are awash in radical environmentalism. I do not say that this is entirely the fault of our colleges and universities, but if these beliefs were not firmly grounded there, their position in our schools would be a lot shakier.

Entropy describes a closed system in which everything deteriorates. Webster’s refers to “the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.” That is how I have come to see the all-but-sealed world in which the schools and the colleges deteriorate together, each worsening the condition of the other.

Is anything to be done? I see small signs of hope on the K-12 front: the movement toward standards, tests, and accountability; the spread of “charter” schools and other new institutional forms; the growth of school choice and the concomitant transfer of some authority from producers to consumers. But it is a slow process and so far not one that has yielded palpable results in terms of student achievement.

One can also point to new islands of excellence in the postsecondary seas and to other modest indicators of progress.

Perhaps it will all come together. Certainly there is evidence of mounting discontent on the part of governors and legislators and of greater willingness to take such obvious policy steps as yoking college admission standards to high school exit requirements.

But what we need most is a renaissance of the will and the spirit, a rebirth of the concept of educational quality. As Roger Shattuck put it in a grand essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “[W]e need to reexamine our fundamental beliefs about educational excellence. If we do not confront these assumptions, we shall never be able to change the ways in which our two levels conspire to lower standards.”