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First Kentucky Derby (1875)

The Kentucky Derby // is a Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbreds, held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, on the first Saturday in May, capping the two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival. The race is one and a quarter miles (2 km) at Churchill Downs. Colts and geldings carry 126 pounds (57 kilograms) and fillies 121 pounds (55 kilograms).[1] The race is known in the United States as "The Most Exciting Two Minutes In Sports" or "The Fastest Two Minutes in Sports" for its approximate duration, and is also called "The Run for the Roses" for the blanket of roses draped over the winner. It is the first leg of the US Triple Crown and is followed by the Preakness Stakes, then the Belmont Stakes. Unlike the Preakness and Belmont Stakes, which took hiatuses in 1891-1893 and 1911-1912 respectively, the Kentucky Derby has been run every consecutive year since 1875. A horse must win all three races to win the Triple Crown. The attendance at the Kentucky Derby ranks first in North America and usually surpasses the attendance of all other stakes races including the Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes and the Breeders' Cup.[2]

History

In 1872, Col. Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr., grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, traveled to England, visiting the Derby, a famous race that had been running annually since 1780. From there, Clark went on to Paris, France, where in 1863, a group of racing enthusiasts had formed the French Jockey Club and had organized the Longchamps, which at the time was the greatest race in France.

Returning home to Kentucky, Clark organized the Louisville Jockey Club for the purpose of raising money to build quality racing facilities just outside of the city. The track would soon become known as Churchill Downs, named for John and Henry Churchill, who provided the land for the racetrack.[3] Officially, the racetrack was incorporated as Churchill Downs in 1937.

The Kentucky Derby was first run at 1 1&fras1;2 miles (2.4 kilometres), the same distance as the Epsom Derby. In 1896, the distance was changed to its current 1 1&fras1;4 miles (2.0 kilometres). On May 17, 1875, in front of an estimated crowd of 10,000 people, a field of 15 three-year-old horses contested the first Derby. Under jockey Oliver Lewis, a colt named Aristides, who was trained by future Hall of Famer Ansel Williamson, won the inaugural Derby. Later that year, Lewis rode Aristides to a second-place finish in the Belmont Stakes.

Although the first race meet proved a success, the track ran into financial difficulties and in 1894 the New Louisville Jockey Club was incorporated with new capitalization and improved facilities. Despite this, the business floundered until 1902 when Col. Matt Winn of Louisville put together a syndicate of businessmen to acquire the facility. Under Winn, Churchill Downs prospered and the Kentucky Derby then became the preeminent stakes race for three-year-old thoroughbred horses in North America.

Derby participants are limited to three-year-old horses. No horse since Apollo in 1882 has won the Derby without having raced at age two.

Thoroughbred owners began sending their successful Derby horses to compete a few weeks later in the Preakness Stakes at the Pimlico Race Course, in Baltimore, Maryland, followed by the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, New York. The three races offered the largest purse and in 1919 Sir Barton became the first horse to win all three races. However, the term Triple Crown didn't come into use for another eleven years. In 1930, when Gallant Fox became the second horse to win all three races, sportswriter Charles Hatton brought the phrase into American usage. Fueled by the media, public interest in the possibility of a "superhorse" that could win the Triple Crown began in the weeks leading up to the derby. Two years after the term was coined, the race, which had been run in mid-May since inception, was changed to the first Saturday in May to allow for a specific schedule for the Triple Crown races. Since 1931, the order of Triple Crown races has been the Kentucky Derby first, followed by the Preakness Stakes and then the Belmont Stakes. Prior to 1931, eleven times the Preakness was run before the Derby. On May 12, 1917 and again on May 13, 1922, the Preakness and the Derby were run on the same day. On eleven occasions the Belmont Stakes was run before the Preakness Stakes.

On May 16, 1925, the first live radio broadcast of the Kentucky Derby was originated by WHAS and was also carried by WGN in Chicago.[4] On May 7, 1949, the first television coverage of the Kentucky Derby took place, produced by WAVE TV, the NBC affiliate in Louisville. This coverage was aired live in the Louisville market and sent to NBC as a kinescope newsreel recording for national broadcast. This broadcast was the first time Zoomar lenses were used on a broadcast TV sports show. On May 3, 1952, the first national television coverage of the Kentucky Derby took place, aired from then-CBS affiliate WHAS-TV.[5] In 1954, the purse exceeded $100,000 for the first time. In 1968 Dancer's Image became the first (and to this day the only) horse to win the race and then be disqualified after traces of phenylbutazone, an analgesic and anti-inflammatory drug, were found in the horse's urinalysis; Forward Pass won after a protracted legal battle by the owners of Dancer's Image (which they lost). Forward Pass thus became the Eighth winner for Calumet Farm. Unexpectedly, the regulations at Kentucky thoroughbred race tracks were changed some years later, allowing horses to run on phenylbutazone. In 1970 Diane Crump became the first female jockey to ride in the Derby, finishing 15th aboard Fathom.

The fastest time ever run in the Derby (at its present distance) was set in 1973 at 1 minute 59 2/5 seconds when Secretariat broke the record set by Northern Dancer in 1964. Not only has Secretariat's record time stood for 40 years, but in the race itself, he did something unique in Triple Crown races: each successive quarter, his times were faster. Though times for non-winners were not recorded, in 1973 Sham finished second, two and a half lengths behind Secretariat in the same race. Using the thoroughbred racing convention of one length equaling one-fifth of a second to calculate Sham’s time, he also finished in under two minutes. Another sub-two-minute finish, only the third, was set in 2001 by Monarchos at 1:59.97.[6]

The 2004 Derby marked the first time that jockeys, as a result of a court order, were allowed to wear corporate advertising logos on their clothing.

In 2005, the purse distribution for the Derby was changed, so that horses finishing fifth would henceforth receive a share of the purse; previously only the first four finishers did so.

Norman Adams has been the designer of the Kentucky Derby Logo since 2002. On February 1, 2006, the Louisville-based fast-food company Yum! Brands, Inc. announced a corporate sponsorship deal to call the race "The Kentucky Derby presented by Yum! Brands." [7]

In 2007, HM Queen Elizabeth II, on a visit to the United States, joined the racegoers at Churchill Downs.

In 2010 Calvin Borel set a new record, being the first jockey to win 3 out of 4 consecutive Kentucky Derbys.[8]

Traditions

In addition to the race itself, a number of traditions play a large role in the Derby atmosphere. The mint julep, an iced drink consisting of bourbon, mint and a sugar syrup, is the traditional beverage of the race. The historic drink can be served in an ice-frosted silver julep cup, but most Churchill Downs patrons sip theirs from souvenir glasses (first offered in 1939 and available in revised form each year since) printed with all previous Derby winners. Also, burgoo, a thick stew of beef, chicken, pork and vegetables, is a popular Kentucky dish served at the Derby.

The infield, a spectator area inside the track, offers general admission prices but little chance of seeing much of the race. Instead, revelers show up in the infield to party with abandon. By contrast, "Millionaire's Row" refers to the expensive box seats that attract the rich, the famous and the well-connected. Women appear in fine outfits lavishly accessorized with large, elaborate hats. As the horses are paraded before the grandstands, the University of Louisville Marching Band plays Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," a tradition which began in 1921.[9]

The Derby is frequently referred to as "The Run for the Roses," because a lush blanket of 564 red roses is awarded to the Kentucky Derby winner each year. The tradition originated in 1883 when New York socialite E. Berry Wall presented roses to ladies at a post-Derby party that was attended by Churchill Downs founder and president, Col. M. Lewis Clark. This gesture is believed to have led Clark to the idea of making the rose the race's official flower. However, it was not until 1896 that any recorded account referred to roses being draped on the Derby winner. The Governor of Kentucky awards the garland and the trophy. Pop vocalist Dan Fogelberg composed the song "Run for the Roses" which was released in time for the 1982 running of the race.

Records

Most wins by a jockey

Most wins by a trainer

Most wins by an owner

8 - Calumet Farm (1941, 1944, 1948, 1949, 1952, 1957, 1958, 1968)

Stakes record

Longest length to win a race

Longest shot to win the Derby

Winners of the Kentucky Derby since 1975

Kentucky Derby winners Year Winner Jockey Trainer Owner Time Grade 2013 KD Orb Joel Rosario Claude McGaughey III Stuart S. Janney III & Phipps Stable 2:02.89 I 2012 KD I'll Have Another Mario Gutierrez Doug O'Neill J. Paul Reddam 2:01.83 I 2011 KD Animal Kingdom John Velazquez H. Graham Motion Team Valor 2:02.04 I 2010 KD Super Saver Calvin Borel Todd Pletcher WinStar Farm 2:04.45 I 2009 KD Mine That Bird Calvin Borel Bennie L. Woolley, Jr. Double Eagle Ranch et al. 2:02.66 I 2008 KD Big Brown Kent Desormeaux Richard E. Dutrow, Jr. IEAH Stables / P. Pompa 2:01.82 I 2007 KD Street Sense Calvin Borel Carl Nafzger James B. Tafel 2:02.17 I 2006 KD Barbaro Edgar Prado Michael R. Matz Lael Stables 2:01.36 I 2005 KD Giacomo Mike E. Smith John Shirreffs Jerry & Ann Moss 2:02.75 I 2004 KD Smarty Jones Stewart Elliott John Servis Someday Farm 2:04.06 I 2003 KD Funny Cide Jose Santos Barclay Tagg Sackatoga Stable 2:01.19 I 2002 KD War Emblem Victor Espinoza Bob Baffert Thoroughbred Corp. 2:01.13 I 2001 KD Monarchos Jorge F. Chavez John T. Ward, Jr. John C. Oxley 1:59.97 I 2000 KD Fusaichi Pegasus Kent Desormeaux Neil Drysdale Fusao Sekiguchi 2:01.00 I 1999 KD Charismatic Chris Antley D. Wayne Lukas Bob & Beverly Lewis 2:03.20 I 1998 KD Real Quiet Kent Desormeaux Bob Baffert Michael E. Pegram 2:02.20 I 1997 KD Silver Charm Gary Stevens Bob Baffert Bob & Beverly Lewis 2:02.40 I 1996 KD Grindstone Jerry Bailey D. Wayne Lukas Overbrook Farm 2:01.00 I 1995 KD Thunder Gulch Gary Stevens D. Wayne Lukas† Michael Tabor 2:01.20 I 1994 KD Go for Gin Chris McCarron Nick Zito Condren & Cornacchia 2:03.60 I 1993 KD Sea Hero Jerry Bailey MacKenzie Miller Rokeby Stables 2:02.40 I 1992 KD Lil E. Tee Pat Day Lynn S. Whiting W. Cal Partee 2:03.00 I 1991 KD Strike the Gold Chris Antley Nick Zito BCC Stable 2:03.00 I 1990 KD Unbridled Craig Perret Carl Nafzger Frances A. Genter 2:02.00 I 1989 KD Sunday Silence Pat Valenzuela Charlie Whittingham H-G-W Partners 2:05.00 I 1988 KD Winning Colors ‡ Gary Stevens D. Wayne Lukas Eugene V. Klein 2:02.20 I 1987 KD Alysheba Chris McCarron Jack Van Berg D. & P. Scharbauer 2:03.40 I 1986 KD Ferdinand Bill Shoemaker Charlie Whittingham Elizabeth A. Keck 2:02.80 I 1985 KD Spend A Buck Angel Cordero, Jr. Cam Gambolati Dennis Diaz 2:00.20 I 1984 KD Swale Laffit Pincay, Jr. Woody Stephens Claiborne Farm 2:02.40 I 1983 Sunny's Halo Eddie Delahoussaye David C. Cross, Jr. D. J. Foster Stable 2:02.20 I 1982 Gato Del Sol Eddie Delahoussaye Edwin J. Gregson Hancock & Peters 2:02.40 I 1981 Pleasant Colony Jorge Velasquez John P. Campo Buckland Farm 2:02.00 I 1980 Genuine Risk ‡ Jacinto Vasquez LeRoy Jolley Diana M. Firestone 2:02.00 I 1979 Spectacular Bid Ronnie Franklin Bud Delp Hawksworth Farm 2:02.40 I 1978 Affirmed † Steve Cauthen Laz Barrera Harbor View Farm 2:01.20 I 1977 Seattle Slew † Jean Cruguet William H. Turner, Jr. Karen L. Taylor 2:02.20 I 1976 Bold Forbes Angel Cordero, Jr. Laz Barrera E. Rodriguez Tizol 2:01.60 I 1975 Foolish Pleasure Jacinto Vasquez LeRoy Jolley John L. Greer 2:02.00 I 1974 Cannonade Angel Cordero, Jr. Woody Stephens John M. Olin 2:04.00 I 1973 Secretariat † Ron Turcotte Lucien Laurin Meadow Stable 1:59.40 I 1972 Riva Ridge Ron Turcotte Lucien Laurin Meadow Stud 2:01.80 1971 Canonero II Gustavo Avila Juan Arias Edgar Caibett 2:03.20 1970 Dust Commander Mike Manganello Don Combs Robert E. Lehmann 2:03.40 1969 Majestic Prince Bill Hartack Johnny Longden Frank M. McMahon 2:01.80 1968* Forward Pass Ismael Valenzuela Henry Forrest Calumet Farm 2:02.20 1967 Proud Clarion Bobby Ussery Loyd Gentry, Jr. Darby Dan Farm 2:00.60 1966 Kauai King Don Brumfield Henry Forrest Ford Stable 2:02.00 1965 Lucky Debonair Bill Shoemaker Frank Catrone Ada L. Rice 2:01.20 1964 Northern Dancer Bill Hartack Horatio Luro Windfields Farm 2:00.00 1963 Chateaugay Braulio Baeza James P. Conway Darby Dan Farm 2:01.80 1962 Decidedly Bill Hartack Horatio Luro El Peco Ranch 2:00.40 1961 Carry Back Johnny Sellers Jack A. Price Katherine Price 2:04.00 1960 Venetian Way Bill Hartack Victor J. Sovinski Sunny Blue Farm 2:02.40 1959 Tomy Lee Bill Shoemaker Frank E. Childs Fred & Juliette Turner 2:02.20 1958 Tim Tam Ismael Valenzuela Jimmy Jones Calumet Farm 2:05.00 1957 Iron Liege Bill Hartack Jimmy Jones Calumet Farm 2:02.20 1956 Needles David Erb Hugh L. Fontaine D & H Stable 2:03.40 1955 Swaps Bill Shoemaker Mesh Tenney Rex C. Ellsworth 2:01.80 1954 Determine Raymond York William Molter Andrew J. Crevolin 2:03.00 1953 Dark Star Hank Moreno Eddie Hayward Cain Hoy Stable 2:02.00 1952 Hill Gail Eddie Arcaro Ben A. Jones Calumet Farm 2:01.60 1951 Count Turf Conn McCreary Sol Rutchick Jack J. Amiel 2:02.60 1950 Middleground William Boland Max Hirsch King Ranch 2:01.60 1949 Ponder Steve Brooks Ben A. Jones Calumet Farm 2:04.20 1948 Citation † Eddie Arcaro Ben A. Jones Calumet Farm 2:05.40 1947 Jet Pilot Eric Guerin Tom Smith Maine Chance Farm 2:06.80 1946 Assault † Warren Mehrtens Max Hirsch King Ranch 2:06.60 1945 Hoop Jr. Eddie Arcaro Ivan H. Parke Fred W. Hooper 2:07.00 1944 Pensive Conn McCreary Ben A. Jones Calumet Farm 2:04.20 1943 Count Fleet † Johnny Longden Don Cameron Fannie Hertz 2:04.00 1942 Shut Out Wayne D. Wright John M. Gaver, Sr. Greentree Stable 2:04.40 1941 Whirlaway † Eddie Arcaro Ben A. Jones Calumet Farm 2:01.40 1940 Gallahadion Carroll Bierman Roy Waldron Milky Way Farm 2:05.00 1939 Johnstown James Stout Jim Fitzsimmons Belair Stud 2:03.40 1938 Lawrin Eddie Arcaro Ben A. Jones Herbert M. Woolf 2:04.80 1937 War Admiral † Charley Kurtsinger George Conway Glen Riddle Farm 2:03.20 1936 Bold Venture Ira Hanford Max Hirsch Morton L. Schwartz 2:03.60 1935 Omaha † Willie Saunders Jim Fitzsimmons Belair Stud 2:05.00 1934 Cavalcade Mack Garner Bob Smith Brookmeade Stable 2:04.00 1933 Brokers Tip Don Meade Herbert J. Thompson Edward R. Bradley 2:06.80 1932 Burgoo King Eugene James Herbert J. Thompson Edward R. Bradley 2:05.20 1931 Twenty Grand Charley Kurtsinger James G. Rowe, Jr. Greentree Stable 2:01.80 1930 Gallant Fox † Earl Sande Jim Fitzsimmons Belair Stud 2:07.60 1929 Clyde Van Dusen Linus McAtee Clyde Van Dusen Herbert P. Gardner 2:10.80 1928 Reigh Count Chick Lang Bert S. Michell Fannie Hertz 2:10.40 1927 Whiskery Linus McAtee Fred Hopkins Harry P. Whitney 2:06.00 1926 Bubbling Over Albert Johnson Herbert J. Thompson Edward R. Bradley 2:03.80 1925 Flying Ebony Earl Sande William B. Duke Gifford A. Cochran 2:07.60 1924 Black Gold J. D. Mooney Hanley Webb Rosa M. Hoots 2:05.20 1923 Zev Earl Sande David J. Leary Rancocas Stable 2:05.40 1922 Morvich Albert Johnson Fred Burlew Benjamin Block 2:04.60 1921 Behave Yourself Charles Thompson Herbert J. Thompson Edward R. Bradley 2:04.20 1920 Paul Jones Ted Rice Billy Garth Ral Parr 2:09.00 1919 Sir Barton † Johnny Loftus H. Guy Bedwell J. K. L. Ross 2:09.80 1918 Exterminator William Knapp Henry McDaniel Willis Sharpe Kilmer 2:10.80 1917 Omar Khayyam Charles Borel Charles T. Patterson Billings & Johnson 2:04.60 1916 George Smith Johnny Loftus Hollie Hughes John Sanford 2:04.00 1915 Regret ‡ Joe Notter James G. Rowe, Sr. Harry P. Whitney 2:05.40 1914 Old Rosebud John McCabe Frank D. Weir Hamilton C. Applegate 2:03.40 1913 Donerail Roscoe Goose Thomas P. Hayes Thomas P. Hayes 2:04.80 1912 Worth Carroll H. Shilling Frank M. Taylor Henry C. Hallenbeck 2:09.40 1911 Meridian George Archibald Albert Ewing Richard F. Carman 2:05.00 1910 Donau Frederick Herbert George Ham William Gerst 2:06.40 1909 Wintergreen Vincent Powers Charles Mack Jerome B. Respess 2:08.20 1908 Stone Street Arthur Pickens J. W. Hall C. E. & J. W. Hamilton 2:15.20 1907 Pink Star Andy Minder W. H. Fizer J. Hal Woodford 2:12.60 1906 Sir Huon Roscoe Troxler Pete Coyne Bashford Manor Stable 2:08.80 1905 Agile Jack Martin Robert Tucker Samuel S. Brown 2:10.75 1904 Elwood Shorty Prior Charles E. Durnell Mrs. C. E. Durnell 2:08.50 1903 Judge Himes Hal Booker John P. Mayberry Charles R. Ellison 2:09.00 1902 Alan-a-Dale Jimmy Winkfield Thomas C. McDowell Thomas C. McDowell 2:08.75 1901 His Eminence Jimmy Winkfield Frank B. Van Meter Frank B. Van Meter 2:07.75 1900 Lieut. Gibson Jimmy Boland Charles Hughes Charles H. Smith 2:06.25 1899 Manuel Fred Taral Robert J. Walden A. H. & D. H. Morris 2:12.00 1898 Plaudit Willie Simms John E. Madden John E. Madden 2:09.00 1897 Typhoon II Buttons Garner J. C. Cahn J. C. Cahn 2:12.50 1896 Ben Brush Willie Simms Hardy Campbell, Jr. Mike F. Dwyer 2:07.75 1895 Halma Soup Perkins Byron McClelland Byron McClelland 2:37.50 1894 Chant Frank Goodale H. Eugene Leigh Leigh & Rose 2:41.00 1893 Lookout Eddie Kunze William McDaniel Cushing & Orth 2:39.25 1892 Azra Alonzo Clayton John H. Morris Bashford Manor Stable 2:41.50 1891 Kingman Isaac Murphy Dud Allen Jacobin Stable 2:52.25 1890 Riley Isaac Murphy Edward Corrigan Edward Corrigan 2:45.00 1889 Spokane Thomas Kiley John Rodegap Noah Armstrong 2:34.50 1888 Macbeth II George Covington John Campbell Chicago Stable 2:38.00 1887 Montrose Isaac Lewis John McGinty Labold Brothers 2:39.25 1886 Ben Ali Paul Duffy Jim Murphy J. B. A. Haggin 2:36.50 1885 Joe Cotton Erskine Henderson Abe Perry James T. Williams 2:37.25 1884 Buchanan Isaac Murphy William Bird William Cottrill 2:40.25 1883 Leonatus Billy Donohue Raleigh Colston Chinn & Morgan 2:43.00 1882 Apollo Babe Hurd Green B. Morris Morris & Patton 2:40.00 1881 Hindoo Jim McLaughlin James G. Rowe, Sr. Dwyer Bros. Stable 2:40.00 1880 Fonso George Lewis Tice Hutsell J. Snell Shawhan 2:37.50 1879 Lord Murphy Charlie Shauer George Rice Darden & Co 2:37.00 1878 Day Star Jimmy Carter Lee Paul T. J. Nichols 2:37.25 1877 Baden-Baden Billy Walker Edward D. Brown Daniel Swigert 2:38.00 1876 Vagrant Bobby Swim James Williams William Astor, Jr. 2:38.25 1875 Aristides Oliver Lewis Ansel Williamson Hal P. McGrath 2:37.75

A † designates a Triple Crown Winner. A ‡ designates a filly.

*In 1968, Dancer's Image, ridden by Bobby Ussery, trained by Lou Cavalaris, Jr., and owned by Peter Fuller, finished first, but was disqualified after a post-race urine sample revealed traces of a banned drug in the horse. The drug in question - phenylbutazone - is now legal for use on racehorses in many states, including Kentucky.

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Review

Award

Application Process

Clarity of Information

Summary

Amazing chance for young female students.

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Established in 1993, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development’, is a French humanitarian NGO. The agency is a non-profit, non-political, and a non-governmental organization committee. This aims to support vulnerable populations around the world.

Why at the Digital Arts Academy? At this academy, aspirants will receive expert courses on coding, photo, video editing, animation, and web design as well as the opportunity to join an Alumni Network and develop their professional network in central Asia. And also gets a great chance to use their creativity and passion to shape the digital world.

Application Deadline: May 12, 2019

Eligibility

Candidates are requested to see the eligibility criteria-

The award is only available for the women between the ages of 18 and 40 from Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

They can apply for a summer school “Digital Arts Academy” project in any subjects offered by the academy.

The participant must have a strong motivation to take part in the project and be able to connect to the internet for a 1-month online course and travel to Dushanbe to attend a 1-month long training program.

For this program, you must have basic skills in photography, videography, graphic design, computer animation, game design and basic knowledge of the programmes relevant to your area of expertise.

How to Apply

How to Apply: Applicants are suggested to take part in the project at the academy by sending the application via e-mail to [email protected]ted.org and follow [email protected] with Participant for Digital Arts Academy’ in the subject line.

Supporting Documents: A complete portfolio which includes photos, videos, graphic design, web design, and 3D animation, etc along with a curriculum vitae and motivation letter should be attached with the application.

Admission Requirements: Relevant background in digital arts is required for the admission at the academy.

Language Requirement: Knowing the Tajik language is not essential but the knowledge of the English language is very important to study here.

Benefits: The education award will cover all costs of payment such as transportation, visa and registration, accommodation, and a small per diem.

Source: https://scholarship-positions.com/digital-arts-academy-program-for-female-applicants-from-tajikistan-and-afghanistan/2019/05/07/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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humorepoch9-blog · 5 years

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Tales of a Tenured Woman of Color in the Deep South – Guest Post

I am delighted to offer another guest post contributed in response to my recent call for contributions to the blog by black women and other women of color.

If you’d like to submit a post or an idea for a post for consideration, email me at [email protected]. I pay $150 for accepted posts. The posts can be anonymous or not, as you prefer. I welcome content on #MakeupMonday (the initial impetus was a Twitter follower asking for #MakeupMonday posts oriented toward women of color) as well as anything related to the academic and post-academic career.

Today’s author is a tenured scholar who has asked to remain anonymous.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am a tenured scholar at a research one university in the South and much of my career so far has been in southern US states. Most people believe I have had a charmed academic life, as I am part of a generation of academics who experienced a major shift in perspective when the recession hit in 2008, the job market all-but collapsed and the humanities went into a downward tailspin that we are still, desperately, trying to stop. While many graduates of my cohort settled for jobs outside academia after several failed bouts on the job market, I began my academic career right out of graduate school and—at least from afar—seemed to effortlessly make my way to tenure at a leading institution in the Southern USA.

The reality, however, was and is not this simple. When I was first hired at my current institution at the rank of Assistant Professor, I sought out a senior female faculty member of color within just six weeks, desperate to know if there was a support group of any sort at my institution for people of color. There was none. In my first few months on the job, I witnessed the flight of many of my colleagues who did not feel comfortable in a mostly white working environment. Needless to say, women of color struggled the most. It has taken the long path to tenure to even summon the courage to tell my story, albeit anonymously, as my own colleagues are those well-meaning ones who are full of kindness and polite platitudes when they want you to take up an administrative duty, sit on a committee or take on another undergraduate thesis. They are also the ones who leave “poisoned presents”: a card praising something I’ve done that simultaneously critiques me; an email asking me to do more or somehow insinuating that my achievements are illegitimate; hurtful comments behind my back when I least expect it. And the message always reads the same: “You are lucky to be here; you are not one of us.”

Of course, these words are never actually spoken, or written down, and what this “us” purports to mean exceeds the realities of skin pigmentation, facial features or ethno-cultural background. They are experienced in conversations about prospective graduate students or job candidates of color who are repeatedly deemed “unworthy” of our esteemed department or university. They are felt in the demeaning of current graduate students of color who are mocked for their laziness, lack of intellectual sophistication and intelligence.

They resound loudest in the alarming resistance to the most mundane of diversity trainings—a short PowerPoint presentation on implicit bias—or in the categorical refusal to consider the possible benefits of a racially and ethnically diverse academic cohort. Diversity is a chore, a recent American fad to contend with, a foolish game of numbers that must be played with enough strategy and guile to outsmart those who naively believe in its non-existent virtues. Drilled into this mentality is an honest belief that academic brilliance has no color, no race, no ethnicity, no gender, it just simply is, or is not, and if some groups of people have the deck stacked against them, it is not academia’s problem to fix, especially not at the level of its faculty.

I am thus most often complimented by my colleagues for my hair, my dress, my jewelry and my style rather than my intelligence, my latest article or my published book. My scholarship is rarely recognized in public forums while that of my white colleagues is showcased, celebrated, discussed over and over again.

My tenure dossier was examined three times before I was allowed to submit it, and I was warned that I made myself look too good at times and that I should downplay some of my achievements. I was sarcastically told that I mastered the art of “marketing myself” and even graduate students began whispering that my tenure case was probably guaranteed by the color of my skin. Micro-aggressions have come in the form of emails denigrating a speaker of color I invited to campus, or in evaluations that condescendingly praise my popularity with the undergraduate student body. My time and effort mentoring students of color is consistently overlooked in departmental reports, and no one credits my presence in the department as the source of greater diversity among our undergraduate majors and minors. In fact, the increased diversity of our undergraduate population is repeatedly attributed to a diversified choice of courses and structural changes to curriculum, while my courses consistently attract more students of color than those of my colleagues.

As most female academics of color, I have taken on every service-related task that was requested of me, changed my schedule and plans to suit those of my senior colleagues and even volunteered myself for the committees no one wants to sit on. I have even given countless hours of my time to mentoring the neglected graduate students of other faculty members. In many ways, I am the typical work-horse profile one reads about in every Chronicle of Higher Education article or Professor is In blogpost about the lower rungs of the professional academic hierarchy.

Except that I do all of this while navigating the turbulent waters of micro-attacks on my person, my intelligence and my academic worthiness on a regular basis. Over seven years, this has indeed taken its toll: I dread my office and our departmental meetings, fear passing by certain colleagues in the hallways, and when forced to confront them, silently await the daggers that they will invariably shoot at me before the day is done. And all this, so they can return to their beds at night smugly congratulating themselves for hiring a person of color despite their better judgement I presume, for the sake of the diversity of their department and university. Suffice to say, since my hiring, there have been no other persons of color hires in my department. I am thus the proud token minority candidate that adds color to our webpages.

When I first sought help from a senior female academic of color, looking for the support group I would never find, I discovered a most sympathetic ear — and a beaten-down, worn-out scholar who shared incredible stories of discrimination and blatant racism that were far worse than any that I could recount. She had experienced everything I had, and then so much more. She had even spoken out at one point only to be shut down by those above her. Today, she pours her energies into rectifying the racial disparity that affects our undergraduates applying to graduate school. “That is where I invest my time and energy,” she assured me, “so that hopefully when they become professors, they will be part of something different.”

Tenure as a female academic of color in a mostly white institution in the South thus comes with a renewed mandate for me, to dig my heels in and work towards changing a system from the ground up. What is certain is that no amount of diversity training will improve my daily slalom avoiding micro-aggressions, but my presence in my department and my institution ensures that there will be a constant encounter with diversity, whether certain of my colleagues like it or not. Tenure bestows upon me and my work something that can no longer be taken away or threatened by those around me. As I begin to travel the country and the world giving talks and sharing my work, I feel my self-worth returning for the first time since I was a graduate student.

Though the physical and emotional exhaustion of navigating a daily ritual of racist and prejudicial comments may not cease, I am committed to the hard work ahead of me to be a locus of change in a departmental and institutional culture of explicit bias and implicit discrimination. I have long fantasized about a time when I will no longer greet the prejudicial comments of my colleagues with a hurt smile, or bowed head, tearing up behind closed doors or in a bathroom stall. I have dreamed of lashing out in anger, putting people in their place, responding with sarcasm and personal affronts. And then I remember, the history of the Deep South, the struggles of so many black female thinkers before me, and the wisdom that only oppression can put into words.

This is a first effort to articulate those experiences, thoughtfully, eloquently I hope, with no fingers pointed, in hopes that I can be part of something new for all academics of color and especially the young women to come.

Source: http://theprofessorisin.com/2018/08/17/tales-of-a-tenured-academic-woman-of-color-in-the-deep-south-guest-post/

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Kids struggle to read when schools leave phonics out

Teachers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, use a curriculum that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

This story was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

It was 2015 and Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a problem: Only 56 percent of third-graders in his district had scored proficient on the state reading test.

Reading scores had been low for a while, but for most of the five years that Silva had been chief academic officer, he and other school leaders had been consumed with a severe budget crisis. By 2015, the district had turned the corner financially, and Silva was wondering why the reading scores were so terrible. “It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Which four in 10 students don’t deserve to learn to read?'” he said.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty. There is plenty of poverty in Bethlehem, a small city in eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town. But there are fancy homes here, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many kids at the wealthier schools weren’t reading very well either. This was not just poverty. In fact, by some estimates, one-third of America’s struggling readers are from college-educated families.

Silva didn’t know anything about how children learn to read or how they should be taught, so he started searching online. As he soon discovered, virtually all kids can learn to read — if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren’t doing that.

“We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never.”

Related: How to help struggling young readers

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn’t come naturally. The human brain isn’t wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

“There are thousands of studies,” said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. “This is the most studied aspect of human learning.”

But this research hasn’t made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

Related: One reason so many kids in Mississippi fail reading tests?

Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don’t know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.

The problem in Bethlehem

Even though Silva had known little about how children learn to read or how reading should be taught, he’d long been aware that some older students were struggling too. He’d been a middle school and high school teacher for years, and he had students who came across words they’d never seen before and had no idea how to sound them out.

“We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never.”

Jack Silva, chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Kim Harper, the district’s supervisor of literacy, noticed the same thing. She’d been a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and said that a disturbing number of her students, even students in honors classes, weren’t very good readers. “They didn’t like to read,” she said. “They avoided reading. They would tell me it was too hard.”

She didn’t know what to do about it either, so she more or less shrugged it off. “I think it became easy to say, ‘Well that’s just the way it is. You know, we’re always going to have X percent of kids who it’s just going to be a struggle for,'” she said.

Even the school board president, Mike Faccinetto, said it was pretty much accepted that a lot of kids in the district would never be very good readers. “It was always, ‘Well, that’s not a reflection of Bethlehem,'” he said, referring to the reading scores. The kids who weren’t doing well, “‘Ah, well, you know those kids, their parents aren’t around, or maybe they don’t have two parents. And that’s the best they’re going to do.'”

Related: Can Common Core reading tests ever be fair?

Silva wanted to figure out what was going on. So in 2015, he assigned Harper to visit all of Bethlehem’s elementary schools and find out how children were being taught to read.

Roshunda Harris-Allen and Trashonda Dixon in LETRS training. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

Harper went to a professional development day at one of the district’s lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how kids should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word he didn’t know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess. The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word “horse” and said “house,” the teacher would say it’s wrong. But, Harper said, “if the kid said ‘pony,’ it’d be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.”

Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don’t mean the same thing. Second, the idea that you look at pictures and guess when you don’t know a word seemed odd to her. “I wouldn’t have been able to use that strategy at the secondary level,” she said. There were no pictures in the books her high school students read.

Related: Four tips from a high-poverty school where kindergarteners excel at reading

The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as balanced literacy. Harper didn’t quite know what that meant, but her colleague Jodi Frankelli had heard lots about balanced literacy. Frankelli was the district’s new supervisor of early learning. Though her teaching experience and training were in the upper grades, too, she’d been a principal at one of Bethlehem’s elementary schools. She said it hadn’t been completely clear to her what balanced literacy was. The main idea seemed to be: Give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers. “We never looked at brain research,” she said. “We had never, ever looked at it. Never.”

We are not born wired to read

The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the 1960s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology.

More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals. The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read.

“Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading. It succeeded in keeping the science at bay and it allowed things to continue as before.”

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That’s all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.

But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don’t know how to do it. That’s because human beings didn’t invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Related: Reading, writing and arguing: Can a summer of big questions push students to college?

Children don’t crack the code naturally. They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education.

Balanced literacy

Kindergartners in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

Debates about reading go back centuries. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He referred to letters of the alphabet as “bloodless, ghastly apparitions” and argued that children would be distracted from comprehending the meaning of what they were reading if they focused too much on letters. He believed children should be taught to read whole words.

On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics. That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words.

No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught. “It was more debates among people who had philosophies,” Moats said. By the 1980s, the debate was so intense that people began referring to it as “the reading war.” It was phonics versus what had come to be known as “whole language.”

Related: When reading a book means more than just looking at text on a page

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn’t necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

By the early 1990s, the idea that kids didn’t need phonics had taken hold in many schools and teacher preparation programs, and was even a guiding principle behind reading instruction across the entire state of California. But the phonics folks kept pushing back.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Kindergartners in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

After the National Reading Panel report, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics. But they didn’t give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process, and they didn’t give up the reading programs they were selling, either. Instead they advocated for doing both, a balance. So, whole language didn’t disappear; it just got repackaged as balanced literacy. And in balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal: a little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.

“Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading,” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before.”

He says the reading wars are over, and science lost.

Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. “The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn’t getting in her whole language classroom,” he said. “At the end of the school year the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress, and the parent said, ‘Well, why didn’t you teach phonics and other basic skills related to print in class?’ And the teacher said ‘Oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.'”

For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it’s not the same as teaching children to read.

Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won’t ever learn to read very well.

‘When we know better, we do better’

By the end of 2015, Silva and other district leaders in Bethlehem had figured out that balanced literacy didn’t line up with the science.

Now they had to figure out what to do about it. They decided the first step would be a series of training sessions over the course of a school year for all the principals at the district’s 16 elementary schools. The district leaders reasoned that the principals needed to be convinced of the science if they were going to convince their teachers to change the way they taught reading.

Principal Kathy Bast leads a discussion with her teachers on the reading science, March 2018. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

If there was one principal who was sure to resist, it was Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School. She was known as the district’s No. 1 balanced literacy champion. “Decoding was never part of anything I ever did,” Bast said. She happened to be out on medical leave when the training began, but her colleagues warned her she wouldn’t like it. “They said to me, ‘Kathy, we know you. You’re not going to take well to this training.'”

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence.

But Bast had a secret. Before becoming a principal, she’d been a reading specialist. It was her job to help struggling readers. In her training to become a reading specialist, she learned a lot about how to identify children with reading problems, but she learned nothing about how to help those children learn to read. “I didn’t know what to do, except just give them more books,” she said. “And it wasn’t working.”

With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Bast began poking around online and discovered the vast scientific literature on reading. It wasn’t being published in a lot of the journals and newsletters she got as a school principal, but as her boss, Silva, had discovered, all it takes is a Google search to find it. When Bast returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the training on reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say. And it kind of blew her mind. “Wow!” she thought. “OK, let’s go get at this.”

The training used a curriculum written by Moats called “Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling” or LETRS. The principals went through the training in the 2015-16 school year, the kindergarten teachers went through it the next year, and then first- and second-grade teachers did it, too.

For many teachers, the science of reading training was overwhelming at first. “I remember sitting there and my head was throbbing ’cause it was like, ‘How can I take all this in?'” said Adrienne Ibarra, a reading specialist at Bethlehem’s Lincoln Elementary School. She hadn’t learned much about phonics when she was in college studying to be a teacher. Neither had Michelle Bosak, an English as a second language teacher at Lincoln. “It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children’s literature class,” Bosak said. “But not actually teaching phonics.”

Candy Maldonado, a first-grade teacher at Lincoln, described the district’s old approach to reading instruction this way: “We did like a letter a week. So, if the letter was ‘A,’ we read books about ‘A,’ we ate things with ‘A,’ we found things with ‘A,'” she said. “All we did was learn ‘A’ said ‘ah.’ And then there’s apples, and we tasted apples.”

The teachers had no idea how kids actually learned to read. “It was just that they do,” Ibarra said.

“Almost like it’s automatic,” Maldonado added.

After learning about the reading science, these teachers were full of regret. “I feel horrible guilt,” said Ibarra, who’s been a teacher for 15 years.

“I thought, ‘All these years, all these students,'” said Bosak, who’s been teaching for 26 years.

To help assuage that guilt, the Bethlehem school district has adopted a motto: “When we know better, we do better.” And soon, they were doing much better.

‘My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves’

The Bethlehem schools now use a curriculum in the early elementary grades that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read. At first, some of the teachers recoiled a bit at the scripted nature of the lessons; the curriculum is explicit and systematic, with every teacher on the same page each day. If the curriculum says today’s the day for kindergarteners to learn words that begin with the sounds “wuh” and “guh,” you can walk into any kindergarten classroom in the district and see the teacher doing that lesson.

Lynn Venable, a kindergarten teacher at Calypso who has been teaching elementary school for 21 years, said she used to think reading would just kind of “fall together” for kids if they were exposed to enough print. Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better. She said her current class of kindergartners had progressed more quickly in reading than any class she’d ever had. “My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves,” she said. “I don’t have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, ‘I can’t do this.'”

When you don’t give kids insight into the code and don’t arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, ‘This is a mystery. I’m not sure I’m getting what these words really say.”

Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills. In 2015, before the science of reading training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the principals and kindergarten teachers were trained in the reading science, 84 percent of kindergarteners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.

Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He’s eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade. “We may have hit a home run in the first inning,” he said. “But there’s a lot of game left here.”

It’s impossible to know if the science of reading training is what led to the test score gains. Some of the schools in the district moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training began, so that could have been a factor. But Bast, the principal at Calypso, thinks if her teachers had continued with the old approach to reading instruction, she’d still have a lot of struggling readers in her school. “We’re actually teaching,” she said. “We’re doing our jobs.”

The teacher prep problem

You can find schools and school districts across the United States that are trying to change reading instruction the way Bethlehem has, but according to Moats, ill-informed, ineffective reading instruction is the norm. “The gap between science-based ideas and practices and those most often used in our classrooms remains very wide and persistent,” she wrote in a recent article.

A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. “Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition,” the authors wrote. “As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training.”

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reviewed the syllabi of teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading instruction.

Seidenberg says the scientific research has had relatively little impact on what happens in classrooms because the science isn’t very highly valued in schools of education. “Prospective teachers aren’t exposed to it or they’re led to believe that it’s only one of several perspectives,” he said. “In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they’re encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best.”

Antonio Fierro leads LETRS training for college faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, March 2018. Emily Hanford | APM Reports

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. “We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts.”

Kelly Butler has been trying to do just that for nearly two decades in Mississippi.

‘Is this your science or my science?’

Butler works for the Barksdale Reading Institute, an organization founded with a $100-million gift from the former CEO of Netscape to help Mississippi children improve their reading skills. Back in the early 2000s, after the panel convened by Congress released its report, Butler and her colleagues wanted to know: Were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi instructing teachers to teach reading in ways backed up by the science?

So they did a study of the teacher preparation programs at the state’s eight publicly funded universities. The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty. The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program. Kelly Butler was alarmed. She and her colleagues went to state education officials and pleaded with them to take action.

In 2003, in a rather extraordinary move, the state Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report. It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, only a handful of states have specific requirements about what prospective teachers learn about reading. Colleges and universities generally don’t like state officials telling them what to do. “Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best,” Butler said.

Related: As Mississippi delivers bad news to 5,600 third graders, stressed-out parents say there must be a better way

“I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we’re here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot.”

Angela Rutherford, who works with Butler and is a professor in the school of education at the University of Mississippi, put it more bluntly. “Faculty members close the door and do whatever the heck they want to,” she said.

Rutherford wasn’t sure the state mandate would make a big difference because many of her colleagues in teacher preparation didn’t know the science themselves or didn’t believe in it. She said many of them have long believed in whole language. “I had a colleague challenge me back in the fall,” she said. “And her question was, ‘What do you believe?’ I said, ‘I believe what I see in research.'”

Butler says the resistance to the science among college faculty and administrators baffles her, but it runs deep. Once, when she was talking to an education school dean about the reading science, the dean said to her, “Is this your science or my science?”

It was not clear how much impact the state mandate to teach reading science was having. Then in 2015, the Mississippi legislature passed a law called the “Literacy-Based Promotion Act.” The law says that kids who aren’t reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot be promoted to fourth grade. The legislature appropriated millions of dollars to pay for training in the science of reading for all of the state’s elementary school teachers.

However, if new teachers coming out of teacher prep programs didn’t know reading science, the state would be spending money perpetually retraining teachers. At this point, no one really knew what prospective teachers were learning in those early literacy classes required by the state.

So in 2015, Butler and her colleagues decided to repeat the study they’d done in 2003. This time they looked at private colleges in Mississippi, too. They examined the early literacy courses at 15 teacher prep programs. They found, with one exception, that all the state’s teacher prep programs appeared to be teaching the components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel report. But when Butler interviewed deans and faculty, most of them admitted they’d never actually read the report. And when she asked them basic questions about the science of reading, most of them didn’t know the answers. The schools of education were complying with the letter of the law, but many faculty members didn’t really understand the science themselves.

The professors needed training.

Changing the way teachers are taught

Teachers in the K-12 education system are used to professional development. College professors are not.

A Mississippi governor’s task force decided the professors would benefit from the same training that the state’s elementary school teachers were getting. The teacher training used LETRS, the curriculum the teachers in Bethlehem went through. No one was going to require college instructors to do the training, but state legislators had passed a measure to encourage it. Since 2016, teacher candidates in Mississippi have been required to pass a test on reading science. If you don’t pass what’s known as the Foundations of Reading test, you don’t get licensed to teach elementary school in Mississippi. It’s now in the best interest of faculty to teach the science, because if they don’t, their students won’t get jobs.

In a session of LETRS training for faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2018, the trainer, Antonio Fierro, passed out a quiz. The first question was: “True or false? Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not.” The answer is “true,” but the question was being asked because it’s not a given that the 37 people in this training, a mix of mostly tenured faculty and adjuncts, would know that.

Roshunda Harris-Allen, a professor in the teacher preparation program at Tougaloo College, said she wasn’t taught reading science in college or as part of her doctorate. And she didn’t learn phonics as a kid. “We were just taught — here are your sight words, you need to memorize them,” she said. She said that she struggled with reading when she was a child.

Trashonda Dixon, a literacy instructor at Tougaloo, says she did get phonics instruction when she was young, but she never learned how to teach phonics. “I think we did have issues with a lack of knowledge initially,” Dixon said, referring to herself and her fellow faculty members in LETRS training. “But I think we’re making great strides here to correct that.”

The Mississippi faculty came together for training several times over the course of a year, and some even received mentoring as they were teaching reading science to their college students. Moats said she once did some LETRS workshops for college faculty in Colorado many years ago and one of her colleagues did abbreviated training for faculty in Maryland, but Mississippi is the only place she knows of where college faculty are going through an extended course.

“I feel blessed to be part of this change,” said Barbara Bowen, an instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi who went through the training. “I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we’re here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot.”

The whole language hold-outs

The faculty who most resist reading science weren’t in the LETRS training. Two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi agreed to be interviewed about why they didn’t want to attend.

“I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that’s going to teach every child how to learn to read,” said Stacy Reeves, an associate professor of literacy. “Phonics for me is not that answer.”

Reeves said she knows this from her own experience. In the early 1990s, before she started her Ph.D., she was an elementary school teacher. Her students did phonics worksheets and then got little books called decodable readers that contained words with the letter patterns they’d been practicing. She said the books were boring and repetitive. “But as soon as I sat down with my first-graders and read a book, like ‘Frog and Toad Are Friends,’ they were instantly engaged in the story,” she said.

“I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that’s going to teach every child how to learn to read. Phonics for me is not that answer.”

Stacy Reeves, associate professor of literacy.

She ditched the phonics workbooks and the decodable readers. “And once I started teaching in a more whole way, a more encompassing way of the whole child — What does this child need? What does that child need? Let’s read more real books,” she explained, “my teaching improved, the students learned more. I feel they came out the other side much better.” She admitted she had no evidence her students were learning more, but she said they seemed more engaged.

One of the central tenets of whole language is that teachers are best able to judge whether their students are learning, not standardized tests. Another key idea is that all children learn to read differently and need to be taught in different ways. But research has shown that’s not true.

Our brains are much more similar than they are different, and all children need to learn basically the same things to change their nonreading brains into reading brains. “Cultural, economic, and educational circumstances obviously affect children’s progress,” Seidenberg wrote in his book. “But what they need to learn does not change.” One of the most consistent findings in all of education research is that children become better readers when they get explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

Mary Ariail, former chair of the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education at the University of Southern Mississippi, remains opposed to explicit phonics instruction. She thinks it can be helpful to do some phonics with kids as they’re reading books, maybe prompt a child to sound something out or to notice a letter pattern in a word. But she believes kids will be distracted from understanding the meaning of what they’re reading if teachers focus too much on how words are made up of letters. “One of the ideas behind whole language is that when [reading] is meaningful, it’s easy,” she said. “And when it’s broken down into little parts, it makes it harder.”

Despite research to the contrary, Ariail and Reeves said they believe learning to read is a natural process.

“I believe children learn to read as soon as they start learning to hear,” Reeves said. “Being surrounded by books, being read to often.”

“It’s like learning to talk,” Ariail said. “A lot of children come to school already reading because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born.”

It’s not clear how much they had read about reading science, but they said they do not agree with it. “One of the bones of contention is that the phonics-based approach is the scientific approach,” Ariail said. “It’s their science.”

Ariail left her job and returned to her home state of Georgia at the end of the 2018 academic year, in part because of her frustration with the effort to change reading instruction in Mississippi. She sees it as an example of lawmakers telling educators what to do, and she doesn’t like it.

Phonics isn’t enough

When you talk to whole language proponents, it’s clear pretty quickly that the distrust of phonics instruction is motivated by a fear that reading will be reduced to rote and boring phonics drills. One of the reasons whole language flourished in the 1970s and ’80s is that it rejected the idea that children should sit quietly in rows listening to a teacher direct a lesson. “In whole language, the battle was seen as, ‘Are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?'” Seidenberg said.

He said no one is advocating for rote and boring lessons. But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

“I didn’t know what to do, except just give them more books. And it wasn’t working.”

Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School.

What’s also clear in the research is that phonics isn’t enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they’re reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That’s why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that.

But, according to the research, kids who can’t decode will never be good readers. Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers.

The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there’s no science to back it up. It’s a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools. If you’re not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you may be out of luck.

There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

“It’s so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won’t accept it because it’s considered settled science,” Moats said.

According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start. “And they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle,” Moats said. “Whereas the converse is true. When you don’t give kids insight into the code and don’t arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, ‘This is a mystery. I’m not sure I’m getting what these words really say. Therefore, I’m uncomfortable. And therefore, I don’t really like it.'”

The students who suffer most when schools don’t give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. If you’re a child with dyslexia from an upper-income family, someone is probably going to notice that you’re struggling and pay for you to get the help you need. But kids from poor families often get left behind, and there’s evidence that a disproportionate number of them eventually end up in the criminal justice system. American prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families, and according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.

For Butler, the main problem at this point is ignorance. Too many teachers, school administrators and college professors don’t know the science. She’s betting that teaching them the science is the answer. “Part of my optimism about this is it’s not like we’re setting out to try to figure out how to teach reading so we can then teach everybody how to do it,” she said. “We know how to do it.”

Seidenberg is less optimistic. He makes a comparison to climate change research. “One thing that we’ve learned from climate change and the other issues over which we have polarization in this country is that facts aren’t the thing that change people’s beliefs,” he said. “In fact, confronted with data that contradict deeply held beliefs, instead of bringing people closer together, it can have the paradoxical effects of entrenching them further.”

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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Source: https://hechingerreport.org/kids-struggle-to-read-when-schools-leave-phonics-out/

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humorepoch9-blog · 5 years

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Ohio: Bill Phillis Reviews the Gulen Charter Schools, Part 5

This is the last of the series of posts by Bill Phillis, which I have posted daily at 11 am. Phillis is a former deputy secretary of education for the State of Ohio. He is passionate about equity and accountability. He has been seeking public records about the Gulen schools and has largely been stonewalled. Schools that take public money and refuse to be accountable or transparent are not public schools.

He writes:

Public Records and Charter Schools – Part Five: Notes About Records, Privately Operated Schools, and Public Trust

Even before the FBI conducted raids in 2014 on Gulen charter schools around the country and the three within Ohio, citizens have been anticipating word of increased scrutiny and accountability for these schools. These raids also occurred at a time of citizen action, with a rally on the Statehouse steps and a march to the Ohio Department of Education by those who wanted a complete investigation of these schools.

Of the hundreds of pages of reports and summaries that were read by individuals assisting the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding (Ohio E & A) in examining these records, one particular incident stands out. On July 15, 2014, this complaint was recorded in one of the reports. Details: Teachers had to assemble desks and chairs using Turkish instructions. The complaint was followed by this note. Sponsor’s Final Investigative Comment: This allegation does not show any violation of law.

Every public school in the nation has its own challenges, from parent complaints about expulsions, appropriate Individualized Education Program (IEP) placement, building and student safety, and other issues that cause concern. However, a teacher report about classroom furniture being purchased, apparently with public funds, delivered with assembly instructions written in the native language of the school administrator, should have raised a red flag with the sponsors. In particular, the Washington law firm in its 2017 letter to the state superintendent raised the issue of alleged self-dealing. The 2014 teacher complaint may provide some insight as to whether those and other charges were adequately investigated by the state board of education.

The amount of time spent in examining these records was helpful in framing the issues that still linger about a group of schools that have a practice of hiring persons bearing visas rather than staffing those schools with fully licensed, qualified and available American teachers. But that is only one issue with these schools. There are a plethora of concerns that arise from examining these public records, and this series was designed to bring them to the surface.

We can only hope that citizens will soon insist on addressing these concerns directly to the Ohio General Assembly, the State Board of Education and to the sponsors of the Gulen schools, viz, the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West (ESCLEW) and the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation (BCHF).

Here are the questions that all of these organizations need to address, and soon.

Why were these schools raided by the FBI? Has the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) and the sponsors shown any interest in encouraging a conclusion to this federal investigation? In 2014, the Akron Beacon Journal investigated the governance structure of these schools. “Some board members — unlike traditional public school board members who cannot be elected without being registered voters — aren’t U.S. citizens, let alone registered voters,” the newspaper reported. Why is state law allowing charter school boards to be populated by non-citizens? Why haven’t sponsors insisted to the management company, Concept Schools that the practice of having non-citizens on so-called “public” charter boards is a burning issue with critics of these schools and should be ended?

News reports have shown that Concept Schools, the management company that operates these schools in Ohio, has applied major political influence in the Ohio legislature through the Niagara Foundation, another organization with Turkish ties. Several years ago, former Ohio Speaker Cliff Rosenberger and others were supplied with all-expense paid trips to Turkey. Rosenberger resigned from the legislature and is currently under investigation for questionable dealings during his time as a lawmaker.

A 2018 investigative report from one sponsor makes this statement: “The ESCLEW has verified the physical address of all governing authority board members to ensure that geographical locations have not interfered with attendance to the school or to governing authority meetings.” The report submitted by the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation contains that identical sentence, along with this: “No current members live more than 75 miles from the school.” How can these entities be considered “local” “public” schools when board members serve on a minimum of four governing authorities and may live nearly 75 miles from the school? Who appointed these board members, many of whom may be non-citizens? Also, what about ODE’s concern that some of these boards appear to meet at the same time and location? Where is ODE with this issue now, as expressed in the February 5, 2018 email included in the records sent to Ohio E & A? What are the sponsors doing about this, as they are charged with operating in the public interest?

As referenced earlier, a July 13, 2009 corrective action plan contained a statement that “It is Concept Schools’ policy that if an employee’s working visa application is denied by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Concept Schools will refund the expense of the application.” A more important question might be this: why are any tax dollars being spent at all to cover the cost of a visa application or even travel costs for a foreign national to be placed on a “public” charter school staff? Has the Auditor of State or any state official issued an opinion as to the propriety of using funds derived from public sources to pay such expenses? Where is the state on this? What is the opinion of sponsors as to whether reimbursement of such expenses meets the test of a proper public purpose?

Why is state law so lax that it allows charter school heads with no background, experience, and licensure in school administration to be responsible for the education of hundreds of young people? How is the idea of citizenship and community passed on to students who are housed in a building with a board and staff who may not have deep roots in that community or even attained citizenship status? Why don’t charter school sponsors provide leadership about this issue and by doing so force changes in state law and regulation?

Why do reports submitted by two different sponsors appear to have similarity in content, language, style, and conclusions reached about an investigation requested by the Ohio Department of Education?

The records reveal that one sponsor, the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, sponsors nine of the Concept Schools while the other, the ESC of Lake Erie West, sponsors the other eight in the chain that operates in Ohio. BCHF is a non-profit organization, and its attorney advised Ohio E & A that it did not have to comply with its public records request seeking information about these controversial schools. On the other hand, ESCLEW is a public agency and had to comply. Why is it fair for one entity to collect state tax dollars – representing about half of its operating revenue – but not have to assume the responsibility that the other agency, a public entity, had to bear in the same request? Why should any state resident accept that situation, particularly when it fell to ODE to be responsible for revealing some of its dealings with BCHF? Can the public be confident in being informed about correspondence and records held by a non-profit organization that were not otherwise also held by ODE as records?

A comparison of compensation between a charter school sponsor and a public school district superintendent might provide reasons for additional scrutiny of non-profit charitable organizations. According to the IRS filing by the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation for 2015, the total revenue from all sources was approximately $20 million. The head of its school division had a compensation package totaling $277,703.

By comparison, one of Ohio’s largest school districts has total annual revenue of about $900,000,000 but according to data provided by the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, no current Ohio school district superintendent has a compensation package of $277,000. The compensation package of school district employees is often headlined in the media. In the charter world, employee compensation is hard to find but when found is often alarming.

This week, we have tried to inform Ohio residents about lingering questions that surround a chain of 17 charter schools in Ohio, part of a larger nationwide chain of 167 schools that have extensive international ties, mostly to Turkey. It is our purpose to raise questions and hope that some responsible agency of state government will provide the appropriate level of guidance and direction to deal with the issues we have raised.

If any of the information raised here is of enough concern, we recommend that you contact your representatives in the state legislature and start asking some of the same questions that have been raised in the series. In doing so, such questions will continue to raise doubts about the legitimacy, transparency, and accountability of these publicly-funded but privately-operated schools that should exist for a proper public purpose, not for the private agenda of privately-operated entities.

Additional periodic posts regarding the Gulen Movement charter school and business enterprise are forthcoming.

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | [email protected]| http://www.ohiocoalition.org

Source: https://dianeravitch.net/2018/10/06/ohio-bill-phillis-reviews-the-gulen-charter-schools-part-5/

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humorepoch9-blog · 5 years

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FEBE Study Tour Scholarship for International Students in Australia, 2019

The Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle is providing the FEBE Study Tour Scholarship for students to continue into research higher degree candidature.

The program is open to supporting international candidates who are commencing in a Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment (FEBE) program at the university.

Established in 1965, the University of Newcastle is a leader in university education. It is a research-intensive university and a leader in university education, with a reputation for high-quality teaching and learning and exciting, contemporary academic programs.

Why at the University of Newcastle– The university offers a flexible approach to education for candidates. It provides a unique opportunity to follow a specific interest in a particular area of your chosen course and opens up exciting new pathways for you to explore.

Brief Description

University or Organization: University of Newcastle

Department: Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment

Course Level: Research higher degree

Scholarship Award: $3000

Access Mode: Online

Numbers of Award: 25 scholarships are available for the candidates.

Nationality: International students

Scholarship can be taken in Australia

Application Deadline: March 31, 2019

Language: English

Eligibility for the Scholarship

Eligible Countries: Applications are accepted from around the world

Eligible Course or Subjects: The scholarships are open to pursuing research higher degree with the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment.

Eligibility Criteria: To be eligible for the scholarship applicant must be enrolled or enrolling in any year of a program with the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Callaghan Campus, University of Newcastle. Candidates must be an International full-fee paying student. Applicant must have completed an official Study Tour on Callaghan campus with a partner of the university within the 2 years before starting the current study.

How to Apply

How to apply: If you are going to apply for the Study Tour Scholarship, you must apply the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment. The eligible candidates can apply for the scholarship through the link: https://dotnet.newcastle.edu.au/scholarships/apply.aspx

Supporting Documents: To register you’ll need to: have a valid email address. use your full name as listed on your official documentation (i.e. Provide a certified copy (by Justice of the Peace or University Staff Member) of your personal documentation. As part of the scholarship, the candidate must submit a PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, or JPG files prior to completing the online application process.

Admission Requirements: Candidates can apply for the admission in their chosen course at the university with documents such as Identification documents, citizenship, and educational qualification.

Language Requirement: The University accepts a number of English language tests as proof of proficiency in English. IELTS is the most widely available.

Benefits: The scholarship provides $3000 to the successful scholar. It will be paid as a tuition fee waiver in the first term of study.

Source: https://scholarship-positions.com/febe-study-tour-scholarship-for-international-students-in-australia/2019/03/23/

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humorepoch9-blog · 5 years

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Learn About Several Great Updates to Kahoot! Just In Time For Back To School Season!

In this episode of EdTech in the Classroom, we welcome Asmund Furuseth from Kahoot! To share the launching of a brand new Kahoot! Certification program for educators worldwide. For more information about Kahoot!, please visit www.Kahoot.com

In this episode, we discuss:

New Kahoot! Certification Program

Launching on August 22, 2018

How to create “Game Based Learning” with Kahoot!

Formative Assessment

To Introduce new topics

To reinforce learning goals

Why is it important for students to be able to create Kahoot! games

Students can think about quality questions and answers

Students have a deeper understanding of the content when creating questions for their peers

New Integrations with Apple’s Schoolwork App

Amazing use cases of Kahoot! in the classroom

“Blind Kahoot” Where teachers use Kahoot to introduce a new topic

New In-App Quiz Creation

New user interface and spreadsheet importer for importing questions into Kahoot!

About Kahoot

Since its launch in 2012, Kahoot! has turned game-based learning into a pop culture phenomenon around the world. The game platform hosted over 70 million monthly active users and has a library with more than 50 million learning games, created and shared by fans in more than 200 countries. Kahoot! is on a mission to make learning awesome for learners in all contexts. The company is headquartered in Oslo, Norway with offices in London, Austin and Palo Alto. Let’s play!

About our Guests

Before meeting Kahoot! co-founders in 2013, Åsmund ran a wind turbine technology company called ChapDrive. He also advises and secures funding for various startups, where he holds Board Director roles. Åsmund has a Master of Science Degree in Physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

He owns a vintage sailboat and would like to spend more time sailing in the Oslo fjord (that he can see from our office window).

Links of Interest

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

Join our PLN

Are you enjoying the TeacherCast Network, please share your thoughts with the world by commenting on iTunes today? I enjoy reading and sharing your comments on the podcast each week.

Let’s Work Together

Check Out More TeacherCast Programming

View LIVE Professional Development from TeacherCast

Need a Presenter?

Jeff Bradbury (@TeacherCast) is available as a Keynote Speaker, Presenter, or to Broadcast your conference LIVE!

About the author, Jeffrey

Jeff Bradbury, creator of TeacherCast, and father of the famous @EduTriplets is the Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Westwood Regional School District. Thanks for checking out TeacherCast today. Please take a moment to find me on all of my Social Media channels!

Source: https://www.teachercast.net/kahoot-2018-podcast/

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humorepoch9-blog · 5 years

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What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

All Cultures Are Equally Good; Diversity Is Our Strength

Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.

The political manifestation of cultural relativism is multiculturalism, an incoherent concept that projects the integration of multiple incompatible cultures. Diversity is lauded as a virtue in itself. Imagine a country with fifty different languages, each derived from a different culture. That would not be a society, but a tower of babble. How would it work if there were multiple codes of law requiring and forbidding contrary behaviors: driving on the left and driving on the right; monogamy and polygamy; male dominance and gender equality; arranged marriage and individual choice? Your children will learn that our culture is nothing special and that other cultures are awesome.

The West Is Evil; The Rest Are Virtuous

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

Only the West Was Imperialist and Colonialist

This ahistorical approach of postcolonialism ignores the hundreds of empires and their colonies throughout history, as well as ignoring contemporary empires, such as the Arab Muslim Empire that conquered all of the central Middle East, North Africa, southern Europe, Persia, Central Asia, and northern India, and occupied them minimally for hundreds of years, but 1400 years in the central Middle East and North Africa, and occupy them today. China, once the Communists took power, invaded Inner Mongolia to the north, Chinese Turkestan to the west, and Tibet to the south. Once in control, the government flooded these colonies with Han Chinese, in effect ethnically cleansing them. Postcolonialists have nothing to say about any of this; they wish to condemn exclusively the West. Your children will learn to reject history and comparisons with other societies, lest the claimed unique sins of the West be challenged.

Western Imperialism Was a Racist Project

Postcolonialists like to stress the racial dimension of Western imperialism: as an illustration of racism. But postmodernists are not interested in Arab slave raiding in “black” Africa, or Ottoman slaving among the whites in the Balkans, or the North Africans slave raiding of whites in Europe, from Ireland through Italy and beyond. Your children will learn that only whites are racist.

Israeli Colonialists Are White Supremacists

A remarkable example of this line of thinking is the characterization of Israel as a settler colonialist, white supremacist, apartheid society Allegedly white Israelis are oppressing Palestinian people of color. The (non-postmodern) facts make this a difficult argument to sustain. As is well established by all evidence, Jewish tribes and kingdoms occupied Judea and Samaria for a thousand years before the Romans invaded and fought war after imperial war against the indigenous Jews, and then enslaved or exiled most of them, renaming the land “Palestine.” Then, five centuries later, the Arabs from Arabia invaded and conquered Palestine, going on to conquer half of the world. The Jews returned to “Palestine” after 1400 years; most were refugees or stateless, so not colonists from a metropolis. Almost half of Israelis are Jewish Arabs thrown out of Arab countries, not to mention the Ethiopian and Indian Jews. Furthermore, Arab Muslims and Christians make up 21% of Israeli citizens. So to characterize multicolored Israelis as “whites” oppressing “Palestinian people of color’ is an imaginary distinction.

Canadian? You Have No Right to Stolen Native Land

If indigenous Jews are deemed to have no claim to their ancient homeland, then Euro-Canadians, Asian Canadians, African Canadians, and Latin Canadians are colonialist settlers without even an excuse. You have stolen Native land. The only moral course, according to postcolonialism, is to give everything back. At the very least, in order for “decolonization” to be implemented, the First Nations must be ranked above the interloping settlers, must be given special preference in all benefits, the law must make special exceptions for them. First nations must receive ongoing grants, pay no taxes, be given special reserved places in universities and government offices, and they have a veto over any public policy and be ceremonially bowed to at every public event.

As we are guided by postcolonialism rather than by human rights, we can disregard the human right of equal treatment before the law. That is just a rule of foreign settlers anyway. And the cities and industries and institutions built by the settlers, so the decolonialization story goes, really should belong to the natives, even though they lived in simple settlements or were nomads, depending upon simple shelters, with limited hunting or cultivating subsistence economies. There was no civil peace among the many Native bands and tribes, with raiding, enslavement, torture, and slaughter common.

White Men Are Evil; Women of Color Are Virtuous

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

Individuals Are Not Important; Only Category Membership Is

Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category at equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.

Justice Is Equal Representation According to Percentages of the Population

As there is allegedly structural discrimination against all members of victim categories, in order for equality of result to prevail, representation according to percentages of populations must be mandated in all organizations, in all books assigned or references cited, in all awards and benefits. Ideas such as merit and excellence are dismissed as white-male supremacist dog whistles; they are to be replaced by “diversity” of gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, economic class, religion, and so on. (Note that “diversity” does not include “diversity of opinion”; for only social justice ideology is acceptable. Any criticism or opposition is regarded as “hate speech.”) Academic committees now twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain that “diversity is excellence.”

Members of Oppressor Categories Must Be Suppressed

Of course, the requirement of representation according to population applies only one way: to members of victim classes. If whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc. are underrepresented, that is fine; the fewer the better. For example, females now make up 60% of university graduates, although in the general age cohort males are 51%. There is no social justice clamoring for males to be fully represented. Members of disfavored oppressor categories are disparaged. The classics of Western civilization should be ignored because they are the work, almost exclusively, of “dead white men.” Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors should be considered virtuous. So too in political history. The American Constitution should be discarded because its writers were slaveholders.

Victims of The World Unite!

“intersectionality” is an idea invented by a feminist law professor. It argues that some individuals fall into several victim categories, for example, black, female lesbians have three points in the victim stakes, as opposed to male members of the First Nations who receive only one point. Further, on the action front, members of each victim category are urged to unite and ally with members of other victim categories, because sharing the victim designation is the most important status in the world. This leads to some anomalies. Black victims of racism are urged to unite with Arab victims of colonialism, even though Arabs have been and still are holders of black slaves.

Female victims of sexism are urged to support Palestinian victims of “white” colonialism, even though Palestinian women have always been and continue to be subordinated to men, and are subjected to a wide range of abuse. Your children will learn that to be accepted, they must assume victim status or become champions of victims, and ally with other victims.

Being Educated Is About Being on The Right Side

As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The objective of a university education today is to ensure that students chose “the right side” in changing the world. The idea that it probably makes sense to try to understand the world before attempting to change it, is rejected as outmoded, modernist empiricism and realism, now superseded by postmodernism and social justice. If there is no Truth, and whatever one feels or believes is one’s truth, then trying to gain an objective understanding of the world is futile. Anyway, Marxist social justice offers all the answers anyone needs, so no inquiry or serious research is required. Be confident that at university your children will learn “the right side” to be on, if little else.

Source: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/09/04/what-your-sons-and-daughters-will-learn-at-university/

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