Woke medical education isn’t going away. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I first began writing about woke medical education in 2022, hoping it was a passing trend that would eventually go away. But today there is evidence it is getting worse.

In my last post on this subject, called Woke Medical Education Update, I wrote about Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Perelman was the first to call attention to this situation as early as 2019 in an Op-Ed published in The Wall Street Journal called “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns.” He wrote, “Concerns about social justice have taken over undergraduate education.” He warned about the “focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness.”

Grace-Marie Turner, writing for The Galen Institute, says many students say they are admitted to medical schools only if they give the “right” answers to a litany of woke questions. Students are being indoctrinated to see skin color as the most important thing about a patient.

Dr. Marilyn Singleton wrote in a recent Washington Post Op-ed that she “graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a black woman in a class of mostly white men. Since I became a physician, I have seen exactly one instance of racism in health care – and it was from a patient, not a fellow physician. As for my colleagues, I have been consistently impressed with the conscientious, individualized care they have provided to patients of every race and culture. When we all took our oath to ‘first, do no harm,’ we meant it, and we live it.”

The latest evidence of this awful trend is a new editorial from The Wall Street Journal called The New Segregation on Campus. The editors tell us “If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.”

They go on to explain: “The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts. This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”

Fortunately, there is an organization fighting back. Do No Harm is a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare.” They say this UCLA practice is illegal – that it violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first-year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.

Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.” In case students think they have a choice of which group to join, a letter from the school makes clear they should sort themselves by how they look to others.” Recognizing the imperfect and problematic nature of our socially constructed racial categories,” the school says, “we ask that you identify the group in which you feel you are most perceived as in clinical spaces.”

The day the civil-rights complaint was filed, UCLA abruptly informed students that the caucusing exercise was cancelled, which suggests that administrators know the practice is legally suspect. In accepting federal funds, schools must agree to abide by Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by race. It contains no exception for discriminating in pursuit of an antiracist agenda. As a public university, UCLA is also governed by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

When I went to medical school, we had more than enough to learn in the relatively short period of four years to complete our medical degrees. We didn’t have time for learning nonsense like this. Neither do the students in medical school today.

Most people complain about the price of prescription drugs in our country. That’s why politicians, like former President Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden, and presidential candidate Governor Ron DeSantis all agree on the idea of importing less-expensive drugs from Canada. It seems to make perfectly good sense.

But a closer look can be revealing. The issue is more complicated that these politicians will tell you. By importing prescription drugs from countries with socialized healthcare systems, you are also importing their government price controls.

Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved Florida Governor DeSantis’s request to import drugs from Canada. The Wall Street Journal editors tell us DeSantis pitched the idea in 2019 to lower drug prices, and the Trump Administration teed it up for FDA approval with enabling regulations. “We will finally allow the safe and legal importation of drugs from Canada,” Mr. Trump said in 2020.

With this approval, Governor DeSantis is taking a victory lap. “Canada has the same drugs. They’re like 25 cents on the dollar, and part of that is because of the way their government suppresses the price,” he said in Iowa. “Bottom line is that if I can get 25 cents on the dollar, I can save $100 million, $200 million in Florida.”

Full disclosure, I have been a Governor DeSantis fan ever since the Covid pandemic, when he governed Florida better than any other state in the union. That’s why Florida is the number one state for Americans who choose to move from one state to another. But the governor doesn’t seem to appreciate the downside of his position on importing drugs.

The WSJ editors explain: “Drug importation has gained support among Republicans who say Americans are subsidizing drugs for the rest of the world. There’s some truth in this. Drug prices in Canada are more than 50% lower than in the U.S. That’s largely because Canada’s government can compel manufacturers of patented drugs to reduce their prices. But Americans also get access to more innovative drugs, and sooner. Drugs were approved 468 days earlier in the U.S. than in Canada for the 218 medicines authorized in both countries between 2013 and 2019, according to the Fraser Institute.”

In other words, there is a tradeoff, a price to be paid, for allowing price controls in the U.S. just like they have in socialized countries like Canada. The price is less availability of drugs, longer waiting times, and less new drug innovations. This can be extremely important in situations like the Covid pandemic when new, life-saving drugs are being developed and brought to the marketplace.

WSJ says Trump could have used trade negotiations to prevent Canada and other countries with drug price controls from extorting American drug makers and “free-riding” on Americans. Instead, his Administration issued regulation on how states could obtain FDA approval to import drugs from Canada. Biden then followed with an executive order directing FDA to work with states that have proposed importation programs. Florida is the first to gain approval, but Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico are hoping to join in soon. Florida says its plan could save $150 million annually.

But this depends on no changes in the current system. Drug makers say they’ll reduce sales to Canada if their products will be exported to the U.S. Furthermore, Canada has warned it would restrict drug exports to the U.S. to prevent shortages. In other words, the supply of drugs in the U.S. imported from Canada is likely to be limited.

All of this is an attempt to import foreign drug price controls that the U.S. Congress won’t accept. But trying to get around the system this way only undermines and erodes U.S. intellectual property protections of the pharmaceutical industry that are necessary to reward the great cost of innovation and investment in drug research.

The old saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” still applies.

For many years, it was widely believed that inner city black and brown students couldn’t compete with white students in school learning. Expectations were set low to give these students an excuse for underperforming in comparison to their white peers.

Then Eva Moskowitz, a former city council member, decided to challenge this conventional wisdom. She started a charter school in inner city Harlem New York where black and brown students had been failing for decades. Today, that charter school, and many others it spawned, is appropriately known as The Success Academy Charter School.

According to the New York Post, Success Academy had 17,700 applicants for 3,288 available seats, which resulted in a wait list of more than 14,000 families for the 2018–2019 school year.^[7]The shortage of seats can be at least partly attributed to New York state educational policy. Robert Pondiscio, author of How The Other Half Learns (2019), which chronicles the structure and achievement of the Success Academy, believes that Moskowitz would quickly expand the system to 100 schools if the charter sector was not “hard up against the charter school cap in the State of New York”.

Two documentary films, The Lottery and Waiting for “Superman” record the intense desire of parents to enroll their children in Success Academy and charter schools like Success Academy.  By 2019, according to The Washington Post, the Success Academy network of 47 schools serving 17,000 students, is the “highest-performing and most criticized educational institution in New York”, and perhaps in the United States. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the Harlem Success Academy was “the poster child for this country.” President Barack Obama also recognized charter schools as being crucial in reforming the education system.

The latest evidence of the success of this charter school is documented in The Wall Street Journal. The editorial board says students are so eager and prepared to take the upcoming Advanced Placement (AP) exams – 1,317 of them – that the school has had to rent space in New York’s Javits Center. That’s the venue where they have events like the international auto show, where Hillary Clinton planned to have her presidential post-election celebration (that didn’t happen!), and where plans were made for handling the anticipated (but not needed) extra space to care for sick patients at the height of the Covid pandemic.

AP subjects range from chemistry and art history to biology and calculus, and some Success Academy students will sit for as many as five exams. The WSJ editors say, “Implicit in the rejection of testing now popular even at elite universities such as Harvard and Princeton is the idea that low-income children of color can’t succeed. The Success Academy student body is overwhelmingly black and Latino. But whether it’s the AP exams or the SATs, its students welcome standardized tests as an opportunity to prove what they have learned. Success knows that black and Latino children often lag behind their white peers. But it believes the answer is to bring their achievement up—rather than dumbing down or eliminating tests, which leaves them unprepared for college work.”

Is it working?

It seems to be working: U.S. News & World Report ranked Success’s Manhattan high school tied for first in the nation for college readiness, because 100% of seniors had passed at least one AP exam over their four years of high school.

“With rampant grade inflation and inconsistent state educational standards, AP and SAT tests are a critical tool in identifying students who are prepared for the rigors of college,” says Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz. “This is especially true for low-income children of color. Attacking these tests does nothing except undermine the important work of helping disadvantaged students do better on these tests.”

Isn’t it great to read a good news story at least once in a while?