#ian rowe

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Robot World (2015)?

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[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The Privilege Hiding in Plain Sight | National Review

The Two-Parent Privilege makes an overwhelming case that marriage and stable two-parent families matter monumentally to the life prospects o

By: Ian Rowe

Published: Sep 14, 2023

Imagine you are twelve years old and your public-school teacher asks you and your seventh-grade classmates to stand side by side in a line. The instructor lists a series of personal attributes and says that you must take an action based on your alignment with a particular attribute, to demonstrate either your privilege or your disenfranchisement:

“If you are white, take two steps forward. If you’re a person of color with dark skin, take two steps back. If you’re black, take two steps back.”

This exercise, part of what is called a Colorism Privilege Walk, actually occurred at public schools in Evanston, Ill., and at many other schools across the country. According to the lesson plan, the goal was for white students to “learn more about white privilege, internalized dominance, microaggressions and how to act as an ally for students of color.” In other words, the point was to reveal the real sources of a person’s privilege: the unearned benefit of being white over the intrinsic victimhood of being nonwhite.

Because of these student Privilege Walks, and since the district had also conducted professional-development sessions that divided teachers by race, an Evanston teacher and the Southeastern Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit accusing Evanston School District 65 of violating the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause and Title VI’s prohibition on discrimination at federally funded educational institutions.

In all likelihood, these racially divisive practices in Evanston will be found legally impermissible — especially given the Supreme Court’s decision deeming race-based affirmative action unconstitutional in college admissions. Yet across a country now transfixed by the pursuit of equity, there is an obsession with determining what factors drive economic inequality and whether a person is inherently privileged or inherently oppressed based on a single characteristic, most notably race.

Against this backdrop, enter economist Melissa Kearney, who has done America a great service by publishing The Two-Parent Privilege. Kearney unequivocally states: “Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children. There is simply not currently a robust, widespread alternative to marriage in US society.” In terms of benefits to children, not all family configurations are the same. Throughout the book, Kearney posits the necessary caveat that no person should remain in an unhealthy or violent marriage, but she makes plain the case that a married, two-parent household is generally superior to alternative arrangements such as cohabitation and single parenthood.

Rather than resort to making a moral or religious argument for marriage, Kearney, an MIT-trained economist, is determined to “bring the social science evidence on family structure from the obscurity of academic journals into the public conversation.”

Kearney simply sticks to the facts and makes an overwhelming data-based case that marriage and stable two-parent families matter monumentally to the life prospects of children — far more than the usually invoked suspects of race and gender. According to Kearney, in 2019, “77% of white children and 88% of Asian children lived with married parents. The share among Hispanic children was 62%. Only 38% of black children live with married parents — a historically low share that reflects a downward trend over four decades.” With such huge differences in family structure by race, how can one not fairly conclude that family-structure disparity is the greatest driving force behind racial disparities in education, crime, and virtually every area of concern for kids growing into young adulthood?

Indeed, Kearney surgically lays out the new dividing line in America’s quest for upward mobility:

There has been a massive widening of the family gap, such that a two-parent family has become yet another advantage in life enjoyed disproportionately by the college-educated class. The decline in the two-parent family among parents without a four-year college degree is a demographic trend that should concern anyone who cares about the well-being of children and about widespread economic opportunity, inequality, and social mobility in America.

One can only hope that during this election season presidential contenders emphasize how crucial healthy marriages and two-parent households are as the foundation for achieving virtually every social or economic policy objective. They would be wise to follow several of the policy recommendations in Kearney’s book, including, most notably, improving the economic position of non-college-educated men so that they are more reliable marriage partners and fathers. But Kearney recognizes that policy alone will not solve the problem. She strongly argues for a cultural shift that fosters a norm of two-parent homes, in part by simply being open and “honest about the benefits that a two-parent family home confers” on children.

In reviewing Kearney’s prescription, my only wish is that she had spent more time in two areas: (1) advocating that marriage and family structure become a standard data category through which child outcomes are analyzed, especially in education; and (2) identifying strategies to engage the rising generation to think differently about their decisions when it comes to the timing of their own family formation.

In regard to the former, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (a.k.a. the Nation’s Report Card) reports reams of educational data disaggregated by race, gender, geography, and other usual-suspect categories. But family structure is not one of them, despite the paramount role that marriage plays in influencing achievement gaps.

Including family structure could create opportunities to implement different types of interventions that could improve life outcomes for the next generation. For example, at Vertex Partnership Academies, the virtues-based high school I launched in the Bronx in 2022, in a class called Pathways to Power we teach the data associated with the “success sequence.” This is research that shows that the vast majority of young adults who graduate from high school, get full-time jobs, and marry before having children reach the middle class by their early 30s. Young people deserve to know this information, especially when they live in environments where most neighboring families have not followed that sequence.

* * *

In May 2001, writing for National Journal, Jonathan Rauch noted that, “according to Census Bureau data, a two-parent black household is more likely to be poor than is a two-parent white household, but both are far less likely to be poor than is a mother-only household of either race. In other words, if you are a baby about to be born, your best odds are to choose married black parents over unmarried white ones.”

Rauch was highlighting then what Kearney so effectively illustrates now, that in economic terms a parent’s marital status has displaced race and class as a primary driver of child poverty and upward mobility.

And perhaps this message is finally getting through. For evidence, look no further than a four-minute video titled “If someone doesn’t understand privilege, show them this.” Across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and several media platforms, it has been viewed more than a staggering 125 million times. It captures another Privilege Walk, but in this case the personal attributes being presented are markedly different from those posed in Evanston.

The first two directives are: “Take two steps forward if both of your parents are still married. Take two steps forward if you grew up with a father figure in the home.”

In Kearney’s final chapter, she warns that “if millions of American children miss out on the benefits that come from a two-parent home and if the family gap continues to widen” then “children will suffer, inequality will continue to widen, and social mobility will erode.” It does not have to be this way. If we are brutally honest in accepting Kearney’s analysis of what truly privileges children, we know what the next steps forward should be.

[ Via: https://archive.md/F4YE8 ]

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[ Source: Wikipedia ]

[ Source: Mother Jones ]

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Stop blaming things on "systemic" -isms. There are often known or contributing factors at play, and refusing to acknowledge or address them is dishonest, not virtuous. It identifies nothing, solves nothing, and only serves to make people feel powerless, who are not actually powerless. Although, perhaps that's the point.

Where two-parent households are not possible, it should always default to joint/shared custody, rather than sole custody, with sole only as a last resort when unavoidable.

Joint custody should be the rule, not the exception

Children Likely to Be Better Adjusted in Joint vs Sole Custody Arrangements in Most Cases, According to Review of Research

The Consequences of Fatherlessness

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Opinion | California’s Weapons of Math Destruction

The state’s new teaching framework tries to ‘combat inequities’ and pushes ‘social justice work.’

By: Faith Bottum

Published: Aug 19, 2023

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

As written, the framework appears to violate the California Mathematics Placement Act of 2015, which requires proper courses for advanced students. A petition signed by roughly 6,000 parents and other concerned citizens may have spurred the drafters of the framework to add an amendment that reads, “Students may take Algebra 1 or Mathematics 1 in middle school.” But the completed document still pushes students not to take algebra in middle school. Instead, the framework recommends investigating whether the traditional five-year progression—Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Precalculus (including trigonometry) and Calculus—could be shortened so students would still be able to take calculus during senior year. As it stands now, students must either double up or enroll in a summer course to be able to take calculus—or go to a private school, which students from underprivileged backgrounds can’t afford to do.

A growing opposition from college professors should embarrass the Board of Education. More than 400 professors were incensed by a proposed data-science course as a math track that students might follow instead of Algebra II. “For students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges . . . learning Algebra II in high school is essential,” they wrote in an open letter. “This cannot be replaced with a high-school statistics or data-science course, due to the cumulative nature of mathematics.”

Brian Conrad, a mathematics professor at Stanford, has created a website to debunk the framework. He writes that the California framework “selectively cites research to make points it wants to make,” and that it “contains false or misleading descriptions of many citations from the literature in neuroscience, acceleration, de-tracking, assessments, and more.” He gets so worked up that he calls a version of chapters 6 and 7 (which respectively cover kindergarten through fifth grade and sixth through eighth grades) an “embarrassment to professionalism.”

The jargon- and acronym-laden California framework, Mr. Conrad says, “promotes a cartoon view” of how students acquire “reliable mathematical skills.” It is equivalent, he says, to supporting that children need not “learn how to spell because there are spell-checkers and spelling is not part of analytical thinking.” The five-member writing team, supervised by a 20-member oversight team, didn’t collaborate with any recognized STEM experts in industry about what training graduates will need in the workplace, Mr. Conrad says.

“Those who claim to be champions of equity should put more effort and resources into helping all students to achieve real success in learning mathematics,” Mr. Conrad says, “rather than using illegal artificial barriers, misrepresented data and citations, or fake validations to create false optics of success.” California should stop trying to turn math into a social-science course.

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Public Comments on the CMF

Background Introduction. High school students and parents deserve transparent, honest information about math skills required to earn degrees

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Considering California already underperforms compared to the nation - with an average that never approaches Proficient and barely skims over the top of Basic - the last thing it needs is more students who know more about identity politics and less about actual math.

[ Source: Nation's Report Card - Note: twelfth-grade results not available. ]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read

Emily Hanford reveals how America’s educators adopted a flawed system for teaching reading to kids—and, as a result, completely failed them.

By: The Free Press

Published: Feb 11, 2023

Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

Guest host Katie Herzog talks to Emily about her groundbreaking reporting to ask how it all went wrong—and what we can do to make things right.

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The people who can't teach kids to read are adamant that they need to teach intersectionality and Marxian power dynamics.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Ian Rowe: Musa, just very fascinating your nuance and understanding of these issues and as I think you know, Nique and I, when we first started this whole endeavor with The Invisible Men was partly to confront a lot of the narratives that we think a lot of young black kids and all kids are hearing about the "structural" realities of discrimination in this country. And we created this character Daryl, 16-year-old black kid who lives in Forgotten USA, this imaginary urban city. But Daryl is like so many other black kids who doesn't typically hear from folks like the three of us. And we like to ask each of our guests just what advice would you give to a Daryl about the prospects for his life, what his attitudes will be. What would you say to him?

Musa Al-Gharbi: I'd say if you look at a lot of macro data, you do see that there are these kinds of inequalities that track along the lines of race. But general social patterns don't determine your particular life circumstances. And one thing that's really important in life is to control the things that you can control. So, there's a lot of, you know-- we're all born into social conditions that were not of our design. We all have-- we all operate within constraints. But we all really do have agency and there are a lot of different ways that we can choose to live our lives and respond to our circumstances. And so, what's really important is to just control what you can control. And to do what you can.

You know, a lot of times people do all the right things, all the right things in the sense that they work hard and they stay focused and things like that, and things don't work out quite like they dreamed. But if you don't control the things that you can control, you can just guarantee yourself that things will definitely not work out as you liked.

And then finally I'll say, there is a lot of research that shows that if you basically do three things -- it's called the success sequence -- if you basically do three things: if you avoid a criminal record, if you delay having children until you're married, and if you graduate from high school, if you do those three things basically, if you look at the statistical level, even if you're someone who starts out poor, the chances that you'll stay poor if you follow those three steps are minuscule. Like 95% chance if you're born poor, you'll exit poverty. You might not be rich, you'll be middle class, you'll be comfortable, you'll be successful and so on. And this is an example, right, of controlling the kinds of things that you can control. So that would be my advice.

[ Full episode: Musa al-Gharbi: We Have Never Been Woke | INVISIBLE MEN ]

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[ Source: AEI ]

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Religious grifters - we call them "priests" - need you to believe that sin is perpetual and inescapable, that only their magic spells can give you any hope for your afterlife, so that you have to keep coming back and paying them and giving them authority.

In the same way, race grifters need you to believe that racism is "systemic," perpetual and inescapable, and that only their activism can help them, so that you have to keep coming back and paying them and giving them power.

This should be taught at schools rather than Kendi or DiAngelo. To all kids, regardless of skin color. The fact they don't and instead teach a hopeless nihilism seems, like the fraud of the religious, to be almost intentional.

[movs4up-blog]

Alien Outbreak

In a small rural community, local police officers Zoe and Patrick begin their shift as normal but soon, strange events unfold. Residents begin behaving erratically, and suicidal panic spreads amongst the township they are trying to protect. Zoe and Patrick realise alien machines are taking hold, cutting their small group of survivors off from the outside world. Can the determined humans band…

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[sungkist]

the boy

[newsandmediarepublic]

Robot World: Dartmoor was part of the success

Robot World: Dartmoor was part of the success

Robot World is a feature-length sci-fi that has been creating a buzz and bagged a cool distribution deal – you can pick it up in on your High Street as well as online! The film was made by husband and wife Neil and Amanda Rowe and Neil’s brother Ian. We got in touch to get down to the blood and guts of making a sci-fi in Devon on a budget

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