Betsy Devos on falling test scores: 'This is appalling'
Former Education Secretary Betsy Devos on schools across America seeing a drop in test scores and calls out the efforts to push wokeness in classrooms
President Joe Biden kicked off his 2024 campaign imploring Americans to ask themselves whether they will have more freedom in the years ahead or less.
The question was rich, given his record of undermining individual initiative in favor of equity, making Americans less free to pursue opportunity based on merit.
Case in point was a rule issued only a week after his formal announcement that penalizes responsible home buyers. Under a new Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) directive, buyers who put 15 percent to 20 percent down on a mortgage and have good credit pay will pay higher fees and rates to subsidize costs for those with lower credit and small down payments.
President Obama’s own Federal Housing commissioner came out against the plan, saying that it will further stress a market in which home sales are declining because of high interest rates.
"And now we’re adding this second whammy to good credit, worthy homebuyers who are now going to have to pay for other people’s mortgages," he said to Fox News.
This is hardly the first time that progressives in the White House have done an end run around Congress to push America towards a socialist system.
WATCH: SAT SCORES LOWEST SINCE 2016
Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan rewards those who took on massive debt at the expense of those who didn’t or who already paid off their loans. Considering that only 38 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the "cancellation" of student debt would largely be shouldered by those without college degrees.
President Biden laid out the framework for both the mortgage and student loan policies on day one in office when he signed an executive order that charged the federal government with "imbedding "a focus on equity into the fabric of federal policymaking and service delivery" to "advance equity for all."
The message from the White House is this: personal responsibility, agency and merit no longer matter. Instead, institutions must step in to level the playing field to account for one’s gender, race, and sexual identity.
This ideology is a cancer spreading through the nation’s schools, from K-12 to higher education, and threatens to destroy the American experiment.
More than 80 percent of four-year colleges are dropping standardized tests for admissions this coming fall. SATs and ACTs aren’t producing the right racial outcomes, and with the Supreme Court potentially set to rule against affirmative-action, universities are trying to make their admissions processes opaque.
Yet removing standardized testing only propagates the false narrative that students born without a silver spoon don’t have the work ethic or intelligence to make it on their own merit.
Grade schools are getting into the act too, with a trend towards rethinking homework. Dozens of school districts have adopted "equitable grading," an approach that minimizes homework and holds students to less stringent standards.
In many schools, honors classes have been dropped altogether.
The coddling of the American mind as part of the equity arms race will have serious implications for the country’s future.
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For one, it threatens America’s ability on the world stage especially as China aggressively seeks to become the world’s superpower.
China is estimated to have more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year, compared to 40,000 in the United States, which will "undermine US long-term economic and national security," according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Meanwhile, only 26 percent of U.S. eighth graders are proficient in math. When students know more about preferred pronouns than how to do basic algebra, we need to reverse course.
For two, fostering a mindset that the country has victimized people, rather than encouraged them to be victors in their own lives is a defeatist and demoralizing approach that will derail the American dream.
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How can we do great things when we no longer expect small things, such as completing homework? And how can we expect the next generation to believe in the promise of America when it is no longer instilled in them?
To achieve true diversity, we must return to an opportunity society that rewards individual initiative and merit. To do anything less is to jeopardize the ethos that has made America a land of opportunity for all.
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