Education

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their…

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their…

In the September 3 episode of HBO's Insecure, "Hella Disrespectful," Issa (Issa Rae) is forced to face up to some unpleasant truths, including the fact that a black coworker is racist. In the ensuing confrontation, the show makes the unexpected argument that All Lives Matters is the movement advocating for equality.

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran an article titled "U.S. Rights Unit Shifts to Study Antiwhite Bias" on its front page. The article says that President Donald Trump's Justice Department's civil rights division is going to investigate and sue universities whose affirmative action admissions policies discriminate against white applicants. This is an out-and-out lie. 

This week, the August 20th episode of HBO's Insecure went from a-little-too-political to being over-the-top in a way that is just lazy. In this episode, Hella Shook, main character Issa (Issa Rae) and Frieda (Lisa Joyce), her coworker at an after school program school, revisit their previous argument over whether or not white people have a responsibility to say something when they see a person of…

In his column this week at The Root, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson made his latest launch into hyperbole as he claimed that the Trump administration "wants to return America" to the days of "white grievance, violence and discrimination" against blacks, referring to the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944 in which white workers opposed the promotion of blacks to better jobs. Johnson also coined…

On Wednesday, NPR’s Illinois affiliate WGLT promoted a claim without pushback by a McLean County, IL superintendent named Mark Daniel that, if the state passed a school vouchers program, the Land of Lincoln would plunge back half a century into “segregation.” Illinois is in a heated battle led by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner to enact a voucher program to allow students to succeed, individuals…

August is the month when parents bid farewell to not only their college-bound youngsters but also a sizable chunk of cash for tuition. More than 18 million students attend our more than 4,300 degree-granting institutions. A question parents, their college-bound youngsters and taxpayers should ask: Is college worth it?

NPR aired a completely one-sided segment on Wednesday's Morning Edition that targeted the Attorney General Jeff Sessions's leadership of the Justice Department. Carrie Johnson played up that a possible Justice Department initiative targeting colleges' affirmative action policies on admissions was " just part of a broader rollback of Obama-era priorities in civil rights, from protecting LGBT…

The New York Times ran an astonishingly ignorant op-ed on Monday by writer Katherine Stewart, using historical fallacies to smear today’s critics of public schools as rooted in racism: “What ‘Government School’ Means.” The text box got to the point: “A phrase rooted not in libertarian economics but in Confederate rage.”

Journalist Lisa Miller has a hostile 5,500-word profile of "bully" Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in the July 24 edition of New York magazine, complete with cloying, cutesy “portraits” of DeVos (none particularly gentle-looking) “commissioned” from schoolchildren. The headline selection serves as a reliable CliffsNotes summary of the text: “Who Is Betsy DeVos? And how did she get to be head…

What is a social justice warrior to do when confronted with racism between minorities? According to HBO's Insecure, just ignore it. In the July 30th episode, "Hella Questions," Issa (Issa Rae) and Frieda (Lisa Joyce) are faced with this question during their work at an after-school program. 

One of the core ideological issues that determines a person’s political philosophy is the degree to which one believes that unfavorable external circumstances can be overcome via persistence and hard work. If an individual believes that America is a place so racist, so intractably bigoted that few, if any, minorities will escape from its systemically corrupt clutches, it naturally follows that…