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Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's membership in a Harvard University student group that once invited a controversial anti-Semitic speaker to campus has surfaced ahead of her confirmation hearings later this month. In 1992, Jackson was a member of the Harvard Black Students Association when they invited Leonard Jeffries, a professor known for making anti-Semitic remarks, to speak at the university, Fox News reports. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Jeffries first gained public attention in 1991, “when the New York Post published an account of a vitriolic anti-Semitic and racist speech he made on July 20 at the Empire...

Your children may learn that Muslims discovered AmericaApril 16th, 2004 A Native American tribe has forced distributors of an Arab studies guide for American teachers to remove an inaccurate and absurd passage that Muslim explorers preceded Columbus to North America, and eventually became Algonquin chiefs named Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik! The Middle East Policy Council, a Washington advocacy group that promotes this curriculum to school districts in 155 U.S. cities have apparently been somewhat unresponsive and dismissive of complaints. Ridiculous as this example is, it is illustrative of a far more disturbing development: the placement of propaganda in our schools by...

September 16, 2003, 10:30 a.m.On PatrolDiane Ravitch goes inside a protection racket.A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez iane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, is author, most recently, of The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Ravitch recently talked to NRO about the Language Police. Kathryn Jean Lopez: Who are "the language police"?Diane Ravitch: Read the book and you will see. It is now a process of "bias and sensitivity review" for weeding out anything controversial or offensive. It is self-censorship, which publishers think is high-minded and necessary. It is the result of...

In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions and functions. In the 1998 book, the index listed families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in...

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the "new, new math"...

In 1970s a publishing house approached author Ray Bradbury asking to reprint his short story, “A Fog Horn,” for a high-school textbook. Bradbury refused upon learning that the editor of the reader deleted two phrases from the story: “in the Presence” and “God-Light.” This particular incident prompted Bradbury to add a coda to his most well-known work, Fahrenheit 451, in which he wrote: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist,...

Sanitized Tests THE JOURNAL NEWS By FREDREKA SCHOUTEN AND MERYL HYMAN HARRIS In the world of standardized tests, Christmas never comes. No one celebrates Halloween or birthdays. Kids rarely encounter a french fry. And no one dies. Ever. The tests taken by millions of schoolchildren are scrubbed clean of topics that might reflect ethnic, cultural or regional biases. Yonkers students shouldn't be expected to have a vast knowledge of corn production, and Florida 10-year-olds shouldn't be expected to compose essays about blizzards. Subjects viewed as inappropriate or potentially upsetting to children, such as death, violence, drugs or sex, are out...

Diane Ravitch is a research professor, New York University; distinguished visiting fellow, Hoover Institution; and member, Hoover's Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the media have noted how easily the terrorists blended into our open society. They joined health clubs, rented cars, got pilot training, patronized neighborhood bars, obtained credit cards, and moved about freely, without anyone noticing that they were planning a heinous crime or that some were on the FBI's terrorism watch list. When they bought their one-way tickets to California, the hijackers identified themselves with ...

Before the words went into the pledge, Jefferson, Washington & Lincoln used them The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a legal challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance in a case that makes - unintentionally - a powerful point about the place of religion in our nation's history. At issue are the two words "under God," which were added to the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954. Michael Newdow - an attorney, physician and atheist - says these words turn the pledge into an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. In 2002, a federal appeals court in California agreed by a...

To judge by the magazines we read, the programs we watch or the music lyrics we hear, it would seem that almost anything goes, these days, when it comes to verbal expression. But that is not quite true. In my book "The Language Police," I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by "bias review committees" employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are "landlord," "cowboy," "brotherhood," "yacht," "cult" and "primitive." Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups —...

<p>The Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations-sponsored school program that aims to become a "universal curriculum" for teaching global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures.</p> <p>The goal is to devise a curriculum to teach "a set of culturally neutral universal values to which all people aspire," based on human rights, equality of the sexes and "open-mindedness to change and obligation to environmental protection and sustainable development."</p>

We are now making the Afghans and the Iraqis pay a terrible price for American political correctness, and the price is being exacted by our diplomats and misnamed "strategists." The fundamental error — enshrined, as the splendid Diane Ravitch has recently explained in her stellar work on American history textbooks — is the belief that American political and civic culture is just one among many, no better and quite likely considerably worse, than most. Hence we have no right to tell anyone, here or elsewhere, how they should behave. This leads inevitably to one of Jerry Bremer's favorite dicta, which...

How the Thought Police Rewrite Textbooks and America's History NewsMax.com Wires Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2003 MIAMI – Diane Ravitch hammers away and hammers away, and even a reader going into her book with a healthy dose of skepticism comes away with the conviction that the "language police" must be fired. It's hard to believe when she says guidelines by the Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley textbook publishers demand that people "over the age of 65 must be fully represented in text and illustrations; there must be a larger number of older women than older men, because 55 percent of older persons are...

Here's the rub: the same children complain incessantly that their textbooks are boring. Whereas they hunger to get a Harry Potter book of nearly 900 pages, they can barely tolerate the equally large books that are assigned in school. What does Harry Potter have that the textbooks don't? Today's textbooks represent a major achievement in visual design. They glitter with charts, photographs, drawings and pedagogical advice to the reader. But they are boring.

Dobbs: Schools Banning Words at 'Alarming Rate' Political correctness has so infected the government schools that classroom textbooks are now vetted for bad words and phrases that may upset people. Lou Dobbs reported Monday night on his CNN program that "the list of words and phrases now banned in American classrooms is rising at an alarming rate." "You may be surprised" to find out the innocent words and phrases now being deemed inadmissible in a classroom, Dobbs said. Dobbs' launch pad was author and education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."...

Political correctness has so infected the public schools that classroom textbooks are now vetted for bad words and phrases that may upset people. Lou Dobbs reported Monday night on his CNN program that "the list of words and phrases now banned in American classrooms is rising at an alarming rate." "You may be surprised" to find out the innocent words and phrases now being deemed inadmissible in a classroom, Dobbs said. Dobbs' launch pad was author and education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn." Here are some examples from Ravitch's...

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<p>Thought police in American schools and rotten history textbooks are as great a threat to American freedoms as al Qaeda terrorists, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer David McCullough said yesterday.</p> <p>"Something's eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual," Mr. McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of the United States' second president, John Adams, told The Washington Times. "I mean, it's really bad."</p>

WorldNetDaily Study: 'Language police' harming childrenActivists helping produce bored, cynical, 'dumbed down' students Posted: May 10, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Activist groups acting as "language police" are exerting increasing control over American schools, resulting in bored, cynical and "dumbed down" children, according to a three-year study of education policy. Diane Ravitch, author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," notes the classic children's story "The Little Engine That Could" has been banned in some U.S. jurisdictions because the train is male, the National Post reported. "The Little Engine that Could" barred because train is male....

Last summer, an enterprising Brooklyn mother of a New York City high school student did a little literary detective work and discovered that the state English exams contained numerous passages from famous authors that had been stripped of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity, and just about anything that would offend anyone anywhere on the planet. So an excerpt from the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer was altered to eliminate any references to Judaism — the essence of his writing. The language in a book by Hispanic writer Ernesto Galarza was cleansed...