Secretary of Education shuts down Obama's kangaroo courts

A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American.

Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms.

The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. It will be a significant advance for due process, which is almost as out of style on campus as free speech.

In one of its least defensible actions, the Obama administration used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education.

The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect. And the substance was worse. If the letter reads as if it was written by inflamed activists who had no interest in balanced proceedings, that’s because it was.

It required colleges to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than a “clear and convincing” standard.

It more or less forbade colleges from allowing the cross-examination of accusers.

It adopted a remarkably broad definition of sexual harassment to include “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”

The administration also encouraged the use of a “single investigator-adjudicator system,” i.e., one person as investigator, judge and jury.

The Obama rules are medieval in the sense that they ignore central developments in Anglo-American justice that arose hundreds of years ago.

In their important book “The Campus Rape Frenzy,” KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the rules often played out: “Start with an alcohol-soaked set of facts that no state’s criminal law would consider sexual assault. Add an incomplete ‘investigation,’ unfair procedures, and a disciplinary panel uninterested in evidence of innocence. Stir in a de facto presumption of guilt based on misguided Obama administration dictates, ideological zeal, and fear of bad publicity.”

The result has, inevitably, been jaw-dropping miscarriages of justice. Everyone should want perpetrators of sexual assault to be punished — and in the criminal-justice system, not just by colleges — but elementary protections for the accused can’t be discarded in the process.

One reason the Obama rules were so lopsided is that they were crafted in an atmosphere of moral panic. It was assumed that there was a spiraling epidemic of sexual assault on campus. Taylor and Johnson note, to the contrary, that sexual assaults of female college students dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, and that young women in college are less likely to be assaulted than those who are not in college.

The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still taken seriously.

A US district court judge wrote in a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University: “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favor a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.”

This is the animating spirit behind the DeVos changes. They are still being formulated, but a New York Times report suggests that they will correct the worst excesses of the Obama rules and interject fairness into proceedings that were, shamefully, designed to lack it.

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Let's thank Betsy Devos: Betsy.Devos@ed.gov and let her know that what she is doing is fantastic and that we fully support it and her. The more of us they hear from the better so let's do it.

Canadian feminists denied entry to United States to protest Trump

Canadians traveling to Women's March denied US entry after sharing plans
After telling border agents their plans to march, group’s cars were searched and phones examined, and each person was fingerprinted and had their photo taken

Would-be protesters heading to the Women’s March on Washington have said they were denied entry to the United States after telling border agents at a land crossing in Quebec their plans to attend the march.

Montrealer Sasha Dyck was part of a group of eight who had arranged online to travel together to Washington. Divided into two cars, the group – six Canadians and two French nationals – arrived at the border crossing that connects St Bernard de Lacolle in Quebec with Champlain, New York, on Thursday.

The group was upfront about their plans with border agents, Dyck said. “We said we were going to the women’s march on Saturday and they said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to pull over’.”

What followed was a two-hour ordeal. Their cars were searched and their mobile phones examined. Each member of the group was fingerprinted and had their photo taken.

Border agents first told the two French citizens that they had been denied entry to the US and informed them that any future visit to the US would now require a visa.

“Then for the rest of us, they said, ‘You’re headed home today’,” Dyck said. The group was also warned that if they tried to cross the border again during the weekend, they would be arrested. “And that was it, they didn’t give a lot of justification.”

Dyck described it as a sharp contrast to 2009, when the research nurse made the same journey to attend Barack Obama’s inauguration. “I couldn’t even get in for this one, whereas at the other one, the guy at the border literally gave me a high five when I came in and everybody was just like, ‘welcome’. The whole city was partying; nobody was there to protest Obama the first time.”

UK national Joe Kroese said he, a Canadian and two Americans were held at the same border crossing for three hours on Thursday.

The group had travelled from Montreal, where 23-year-old Kroese is studying, and had explained to border agents that they were considering attending the Women’s March but had yet to finalise their plans.

After being questioned, fingerprinted and photographed, Kroese and his Canadian companion were refused entry because they were planning to attend what the border agent called a “potentially violent rally”, he said. The pair was advised not to travel to the United States for a few months, and Kroese was told he would now need a visa to enter the US.

After an attempted crossing late Thursday, Montreal resident Joseph Decunha said he was also turned away. He and the two Americans he was with told the border agent that they were planning to attend the inauguration and the women’s march.

The group was brought in for secondary processing, where the border agent asked about their political views, Decunha told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The first thing he asked us point blank is, ‘Are you anti- or pro-Trump?’”

After being fingerprinted and photographed he was told that his two friends could enter the US, but that he could not. “They told me I was being denied entry for administrative reasons. According to the agent, my travelling to the United States for the purpose of protesting didn’t constitute a valid reason to cross,” Decunha said.

He described the experience – particularly the questions he fielded about his political beliefs – as concerning. “It felt like, if we had been pro-Trump, we would have absolutely been allowed entry.”

US Customs and Border Protection said it could not discuss individual cases, citing privacy reasons. “We recognize that there is an important balance to strike between securing our borders while facilitating the high volume of legitimate trade and travel that crosses our borders every day, and we strive to achieve that balance and show the world that the United States is a welcoming nation,” it said in an email to the Guardian.

On a daily basis, more than 1 million individuals are admitted into the United States at its air, land and sea ports, the agency noted. An average of 600 people a day – less than a tenth of 1% of those admitted – are denied entry for a varied list of reasons that include prohibited activities or intent as well as national security concerns.

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I'll let the distinguished Nelson Muntz speak for me:

It's no accident that boys are lagging behind girls in education

FEMALE TEACHERS MARKING DOWN BOYS
by Hilary White

For decades we’ve listened to teachers and ‘academics’ shedding crocodile tears as they bemoan the terrible ‘failure’ of the boys in their classes falling behind girls.

Now a five year University study has shown why.

Those same teachers are just deliberately marking boys down – even when they do better in tests and exams than their female counterparts.

A five-year research project, funded by the Departments of Education and Justice in Northern Ireland, found “systemic flaws” in teaching techniques led to teachers discriminating overtly against male students.

The shocking survey blows the lid on how since the 1970s, when feminist critics complained that the school system favored “male thinking,” grades have been decided not by performance and knowledge, but on a teachers whim.

Feminists condemned intelligence and knowledge as ‘too masculine’. And they argued successfully that pupils should be marked on ‘emotional intelligence’ (a phrase which means nothing, and so is entirely subjective), and social skills (which means being nice).

Facts, dates, rote learning, and maths skills went out of the window and “fair” teaching styles were introduced in which no matter what a pupils test results, what the teacher thought of them held sway.

As a result mainly female teachers have been expressing low views of their boys students and favouring girls.

They discriminate against blacks and hispanics in the US, while in Ireland where the survey found boys from rough areas of Belfast were particularly looked down on, and so marked down.

Dr. Ken Harland and Sam McCready from the University of Ulster said that the problem of apparent boys underachievement at school has been clear for “several decades.”

But they said “it was extremely difficult for the research team to find specific strategies addressing boys’ underachievement.”

“Although teachers who were interviewed as part of this study recognised the predominance of boys with lower academic achievement, they generally did not take this into account in terms of learning styles or teaching approaches,” Dr Harland said.

The Belfast Telegraph quoted one pupil who told the researchers, “Teachers should understand better the way boys think and why they do some things. They’re out of touch.”

The problem of boys’ underachievement in primary and secondary school follows them into their later lives.

Research from 2006 has tracked the decline in male academic performance over the same period as the rise of feminist-dominated ideologies in academia and policymaking.

Radical feminism was first embraced as an actual political policy in the United States.

In the US the ratio of males to females graduating from a four-year college stood at 1.60 in 1960, fell to parity by 1980, and continued its decline until by 2003, there were 135 females for every 100 males who graduated from a four-year college.

Another study found that half of the current gender gap in college attendance can be linked to lower rates of high-school graduation among males, particularly for young black men.

The work of one American researcher may offer clues to the question of why and how.

Professor Christopher Cornwell at the University of Georgia has found that a heavily feminist-driven education paradigm systematically favours girls and disadvantages boys from their first days in school.

Examining student test scores and grades of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Cornwell found that boys in all racial categories are not being “commensurately graded by their teachers” in any subject “as their test scores would predict.”

The answer, Cornwell found, lies in the way teachers, who are statistically mostly women, evaluate students without reference to objective test scores.

Boys are regularly graded well below their actual academic performance.

The expert discovered that boys are falling significantly behind in grades, “despite performing as least as well as girls on math tests, and significantly better on science tests.”

After fifth grade it’s almost completely up to the teachers personal opinion whether a student passes or fails.

Cromwell says student assessment becomes a matter of “a teacher’s subjective assessment of the student’s performance,” and is further removed from the guidance of objective test results.

Teachers, he says, tend to assess students on non-cognitive, “socio-emotional skills.”

This has had a significant impact on boys’ later achievement because, while objective test scores are important, it is teacher-assigned grades that determine a child’s future with class placement, high school graduation and college admissibility.

It’s entirely to blame for the supposed ‘failure’ of boys, which teachers regularly speak of and bemoan, but never seem to want to do anything about.

Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found.

He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.

In science and general knowledge, as in math skills, the data showed that kindergarten and first grade white boys’ grades “are lower by 0.11 and 0.06 standard deviations, even though their test scores are higher.”

This disparity continues and grows through to the fifth grade, with white boys and girls being graded similarly, “but the disparity between their test performance and teacher assessment grows.”

The disparity between the sexes in school achievement also far outstrips the disparity between ethnicities.

Cornwell notes that “the girl-boy gap in reading grades is over 300 percent larger than the white-black reading gap,” and boy-girl gap is about 40 percent larger than the white-black grade gaps.

“From kindergarten to fifth grade,” he found, “the top half of the test-score distribution” among whites is increasingly populated by boys, “while the grade distribution provides no corresponding evidence that boys are out-performing girls”.

These disparities are “even sharper for black and Hispanic children” with the “misalignment of grades with test scores steadily increases as black and Hispanic students advance in school.”

The study, he said, shows that “teachers’ assessments are not aligned with test-score data, with greater gender disparities in appearing in grading than testing outcomes”. And the “gender disparity” always favours girls.

The American thinker Christina Hoff Sommers wrote that “the idea that schools and society grind girls down has given rise to an array of laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to redress the harm done to girls.”

Sommers wrote in The Atlantic,“These are things everyone is presumed to know. But they are not true.”

She notes an incident at New York’s tony Scarsdale High School in which, at a conference on student achievement, a male student presented evidence from the school’s own records showing that far from being pressed down, girls were far outstripping boys.

When the teachers checked the student’s data, “they found little or no difference in the grades of boys and girls in advanced-placement social-studies classes. But in standard classes the girls were doing a lot better.”

The revelations, she said, were not well received. Scarsdale is a school that has thoroughly accepted the received wisdom that that girls are systematically deprived, and this belief has led their gender-equity committee to offer a special senior elective on gender equity that continues to preach the message.

“Why has that belief persisted, enshrined in law, encoded in governmental and school policies, despite overwhelming evidence against it?”

Sommers traces it back to the work of one academic feminist, Carol Gilligan, a pioneer of “gender studies” at Harvard University.

Gilligan’s speculations launched a veritable industry of feminist writers, citing little or no reviewable data, lamenting the plight of girls “drowning or disappearing” in the “sea of Western culture”

“Most of Gilligan’s published research, however,” Sommers points out, “consists of anecdotes based on a small number of interviews.”

Sommers has identified the work of Gilligan and her followers as “politics dressed up as science” and points out that she has never released any of the data supporting her main theses.

Nevertheless, the idea that girls are lagging behind boys continues to lead the discussion at nearly every level of public policy on education, and not only in the U.S.

The global reach of American left-wing feminism has led to similar changes, and similar outcomes, in nearly every Western nation.

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