Written by Walter E. Williams

The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans. The study found: “The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.” For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction.

The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white professor Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris for disciplinary action over his use of the n-word while reading to his class Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that contained the expressions “when your first name becomes “n——r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are). Referring to white civil rights activists King wrote, “They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as ‘dirty n——r-lovers.'”

Boston University is considering changing the name of its mascot Rhett because of his link to “Gone with the Wind.” Almost 4,000 Rutgers University students signed a petition to rename campus buildings Hardenbergh Hall, Frelinghuysen Hall and Milledoler Hall because these men were slave owners. University of Arkansas students petitioned to remove a statue of J. William Fulbright because he was a segregationist who opposed the Brown v. Board of Education that ruled against school segregation.

The suppression of free speech and ideas by the elite is nothing new. It has a long ugly history. Galileo Galilei was a 17th-century Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes called “father of modern physics.” The Catholic Church and other scientists of his day believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo offered evidence that the Earth traveled around the sun — heliocentrism. That made him “vehemently suspect of heresy” and was forced to recant and sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition and was later commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Much of today’s totalitarianism, promotion of hate and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses. Sources that report on some of the more egregious forms of the abandonment of free inquiry, hate and stupidity at our colleges are: College Reform and College Fix.

Prof. William S. Penn, who was a Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Michigan State University in 2003, and a two-time winner of the prestigious Stephen Crane Prize for Fiction, explained to his students, “This country still is full of closet racists.” He said: “Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.”

The public has recently been treated to the term — white privilege. Colleges have long held courses and seminars on “whiteness.” One college even has a course titled “Abolition of Whiteness.” According to some academic intellectuals, whites enjoy advantages that nonwhites do not. They earn higher income and reside in better housing, and their children go to better schools and achieve more. Based on that idea, Asian Americans have more white privilege than white people. And, on a personal note, my daughter has more white privilege than probably 95% of white Americans.

As George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” If the stupid ideas of academic intellectuals remained on college campuses and did not infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment — much like a circus.

Here was the headline: “Only 33 Percent of Students Proficient in English, Math.”

Last month, IFI’s Laurie Higgins wrote: “Devilish Details in School Sexuality-Indoctrination Bill.” And in a recent IFA Spotlight podcast, Higgins discussed the Illinois state senate’s approval of the bill mandating the teaching of “Leftist assumptions about deviant sexuality” in government-run schools. It also requires that eighth grade children will have to be tested on them “in order to move on to high school.”

Let us back up for a minute — here is Higgins explaining the legislation that recently passed the state senate:

Exploiting taxpayer funds and captive audiences of children constitutes the most egregious form of propaganda imaginable. This outrageous effort to use children and public monies to advance a Leftist ideology must be opposed with the kind of fervor and tenacity usually demonstrated only by Leftists.

. . .

If passed, the ideologically-driven school sexuality-indoctrination bill—also known deceptively as the “Inclusive Curriculum” bill (SB 3249)—would require not only that k-12 teachers teach about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and those who reject their biological sex but also to tell students about the sexual predilections of those contributors. In other words, when teachers teach about the accomplishments of Sally Ride or the plays of Oscar Wilde, they would have to discuss their disordered sexual feelings and life choices as well. I wonder if Leftists will require that students be taught that Wilde’s first homosexual encounter was with a 17-year-old when Wilde was 32.

Such propagandizing is “decidedly not the role of public schools,” Higgins explained.

SB 3249 has already passed in the senate and now awaits House approval.

Okay, let us fast-forward now to the new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s NationsReportCard.gov:

About two thirds of eighth graders in American government schools do not even rank as “proficient” in reading or math, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress. In some districts, less than eight out of 100 students were proficient in either subject.

The results were hardly surprising to anyone who monitors the dismal state of what the government euphemistically refers to as “public education.” Indeed, the fact that even a third of American victims of government “schools” can be considered “proficient” in reading or math is more of a surprise. But even that minority may be attributable to the dumbed-down metrics used.

You can peruse the lousy Illinois test scores in that report as well.

Based on what you’ve just read, who could possibly think that the state of Illinois should mandate more LGBTQIA(etc.) propaganda rather than focusing on reading, math and science? Of course not! But to progressive lawmakers, there’s little that’s more important than the radical Leftist social agenda. Certainly not proficiency in the areas of study the schools are in existence to create.

This is also from the article linked at the opening of this post:

“The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news,” explained George Mason University Professor Walter Williams, a longtime critic of the abysmal failure of public “education” in America. “Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.”

Incredible!

If parents don’t get involved quickly, there will be a day when student proficiency is higher in the history of the contributions of those identifying as part of the ever-growing LGBTQIA(etc.) cabal. Forget about proficiency in math when Oscar Wilde liked boys and wrote fiction! That day may already be here.

Of course, it’s not just this legislation that causes government schools to go astray from what used be their priority:

As The Newman Report and FreedomProject Media have documented extensively, the victims of government schools will be highly proficient in believing in global-warming alarmism, gender ideology, LGBT propaganda, globalism, humanism, socialism, and more. But as the latest NAEP results show, the schools are utterly failing to teach even the basics — reading, writing, and math — that would allow students to educate themselves.

“Parents,” the article concludes, “you have been warned.”

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to urge him/her to reject SB 3249, the effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased and unproven beliefs about sexuality to young children in government schools. Contact them repeatedly!

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About two thirds of eighth graders in American government schools do not even rank as “proficient” in reading or math, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress. In some districts, less than eight out of 100 students were proficient in either subject.

The results were hardly surprising to anyone who monitors the dismal state of what the government euphemistically refers to as “public education.” Indeed, the fact that even a third of American victims of government “schools” can be considered “proficient” in reading or math is more of a surprise. But even that minority may be attributable to the dumbed-down metrics used.

Breaking the numbers down, the NAEP, more commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed that barely one third of eighth-grade students in 2017 America scored “proficient” or above in reading. Much of that failure has to do with the teaching of “sight words” in government-schools across America, a scheme that has been exposed as quackery since it was first tried over 150 years ago.

In mathematics, the numbers are even worse. The 2017 results showed that fully 67 percent of eight-grade students in America are not “proficient” in math. By the time students hit 12th grade, the situation is even more alarming. According to the NAEP, just one in four American high-school seniors was proficient in math last year.

The NAEP is a test administered by the feds every two years to what they describe as a “nationally representative sample” of students across the country. Around 150,000 students at each tested grade level take the test. Unlike other federally controlled testing schemes, the NAEP is not considered “high-stakes,” because poor results do not negatively affect teachers, students, or schools. But they nevertheless reveal some important facts.

“The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news,” explained George Mason University Professor Walter Williams, a longtime critic of the abysmal failure of public “education” in America. “Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.”

Professor Williams, who highlighted the even more disastrous proficiency rates among black students, noted that the problem goes even deeper. “It’s grossly dishonest for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic achievement,” he wrote. “At best, they certify attendance.”

That means universities are perpetrating a fraud of massive proportions by admitting all these illiterates into higher “education.” But when the obvious goal of government-controlled schools and colleges is to prepare social-justice warriors and anti-American revolutionaries — all at taxpayer expense — it should be obvious why such elaborate frauds would be used to keep Americans in the dark.

As The Newman Report and FreedomProject Media have documented extensively, the victims of government schools will be highly proficient in believing in global-warming alarmism, gender ideology, LGBT propaganda, globalism, humanism, socialism, and more. But as the latest NAEP results show, the schools are utterly failing to teach even the basics — reading, writing, and math — that would allow students to educate themselves. That is 100 percent deliberate.

Parents, you have been warned.

This article was originally published by FreedomProject.com